Murder for the kiddies from Betty Crocker

I'm going to kind of cheat today because I want to do a Halloween post and I've already hit up my obvious Halloween choices in the cookbook department (and a lot of older cookbooks don't consider Halloween a proper food holiday at all-- those are Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter). Today we're dipping into Betty Crocker's Parties for Children (1964), which admittedly only has a few recipes in it.

Here's Betty's plan for a Halloween party:

I guess the girl is dressed as a witch, although only the mask and broom make me sure it's a witch. Her hat doesn't have the classic witch brim and her dress is pink, so this could easily pass as a princess costume with slightly different accessories. The black cat is quietly weighing its options and deciding it might want to spend Halloween night hunkered down under the porch rather than accompanying this sad witch.

I was briefly excited that the cat seemed to have a dragonfly friend, but then I realized the "dragonfly" was supposed to be a bit of grass. So much for the dragon. Even a stretch to make this slightly creepier turns up nothing.

The menu is pretty simple: Witches' Cauldron Soup (any old soup you want served from a kettle), Goblin Franks, Vegetable Relishes (because the kids need something to ignore), Ice Cream Jack-O'-Lanterns, Milk, and Halloween Cookies (because if any day calls for TWO desserts, it's Halloween. There may not be enough sugar in all the candy!).

What are Goblin Franks? I thought they might be similar to the crescent roll mummies so popular today, but not quite:

With a cornmeal/ flour crust, these are more baked corn dog than monster. I'm not sure what part of these is "goblin." At least throw some parsley in to make them green or something....

The last recipe is for Ice Cream Jack-O'-Lanterns:

These are pretty cute: scoops of ice cream (although I'd use orange sherbet to make them, you know, orange!) with chocolate chip and cherry faces. Nothing revolutionary, but certainly appropriate....

The real draw is the list of recommended party games. 

The first Halloween game is "Murder!"

The book even includes a picture of the murder-- not something I'd expect from Betty Crocker! Apparently this little girl picked the hammiest boy in class to kill.

And how would you play "Murder!" besides by making Donald dramatically clutch at his heart?

Well, the Murderer and Detectives are all drawn from a deck of cards. The detectives are exiled, the Murderer gets to pick a victim, and then the Detectives have to return to figure out whodunit.

My favorite bit of advice is that the suspects should be instructed to give out alibis like "I was swimming in the goldfish bowl" or "I was eating electric light bulbs." The trick is that "The Murderer's alibi should always be false." So apparently, the kids who weren't the Murderer should be permitted to swim freely in the goldfish bowl or eat the light bulbs so their alibis can be true. It's just the kid who got picked as the Murderer who has to boringly refrain...

The next Halloween game is "Under the Broom":

This is a pretty standard limbo, but there are a couple of things I like about it.

1. The game requires two piles of books, each about four feet high. I imagine that might be a challenge in a lot of households, but I could definitely stage this one with no problem! In fact, I could probably run five or six simultaneous rounds of "Under the Broom" if I had more brooms. (For me the cleaning products, not the books, are the limiting factors. That gives  you a pretty good insight into what my apartment looks like...)
2. I love that "Pony tails, sashes, and stiff petticoats do not count" if they touch the broom. Imagine stiff petticoats at a children's party!

The third game is "Ghost." 

The picture makes it look WAY scarier than it really is, as this is just a spelling game. It's one I would have hated, too. The object is to add a letter to a string of letters without completing an actual word. I'd hear the kids in front of me pick letters like "D" and "I" and I would think of something like "dinosaur," so I'd pick "N." Then I would have been out because "din" is actually a word, and I would have been pissed off because "din" wasn't MY word. My word was "dinosaur" and we would not have been even CLOSE to finishing that one. I would have sulked for the rest of the party that the cruel world just didn't understand me (while the other kids just got progressively more bored by having to sit around spelling words on what was supposed to be a day off from school).

Finally, Betty recommends a rousing game of "Fortunes."

The planner will hate this one, as it starts with a typewriter and carbon paper. Prepare for a kids' party by typing out enough fortune sheets for everyone in the class! How fun!

Then the children have to fill out the forms: names (of opposite-sex children who are not one's sibling), years, numbers, colors, etc. Later it is revealed that these details are their fortunes: the name is the name of one's spouse, the year is the year of the wedding, the number is the number of kids, etc.

A game like this would have WRECKED child-me because it reinforced all of the things I was afraid of about being a grown-up. I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to get married, but apparently grown-ups had to. I was positive I didn't want to have kids, but apparently grown-ups had to. Even though I would have realized the chances I would have 42 kids with purple eyes and green hair were pretty slim, the premise of the game alone would have been the scary thing-- way worse than the scare of sticking my hands into grape "eyeballs" would have been. Why didn't Betty recommend that instead?

All right-- I know I'm in too-long territory by this point, so have a spooky late-October weekend! Just don't listen to any fortune-tellers.

Recipes from Baker's Dot Chocolate (not bakers.chocolate)

With Halloween coming, my thoughts turn to candy. Candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy! That means I'm dragging out this pamphlet:

From 1950, it's a pamphlet for "9 easy recipes for delicious homemade candy" using Baker's Dot Chocolate!

A lot of these recipes are as straightforward as the sentence I've just written. (<-- That sentence! There!)

Melt chocolate. Mix stuff in. Drop and cool. Not too difficult. Still, if you make the peanut version, I am THERE. Peanuts and chocolate are awesome!

If you make the raisin version, I will retreat to a parallel universe where raisins don't exist.

If you make the Chocolate Ting-a-lings, I will stop by to laugh at the name. Maybe I'll try one and be secretly disappointed that it's got cornflakes instead of peanuts, or maybe I'll just look at them and imagine myself trying one and being disappointed that it's got cornflakes instead of peanuts. I'm so unpredictable.

I'm not sure how other recipes are supposed to be an improvement over just eating the chocolate by itself:

The chocolate is clearly already sweetened if it's ready to mix with peanuts, so adding another cup of sugar would make it cloyingly sweet and less chocolaty. Adding the egg just gives you a chance to get salmonella from candy. In short, I do not get the point of this recipe at all!

A candy I DO get-- and the real reason I picked this pamphlet-- is these babies:

Hallowe'en (with the apostrophe!) Cat Faces! They are easy and so cute! The Nut Bars recipe these are based on is not given, but it's basically a package of Baker's Dot Chocolate melted and poured into a loaf pan lined with waxed paper topped with a cup of nuts. Once the chocolate cools, it's pulled out and cut into bars-- or in this case, triangles that get candy corn eyes and nose and coconut whiskers (both of which are best removed before actually eating, but they make good garnishes).

Halloween is my favorite holiday, so these little guys made my day. I hope they make your late-October Wednesday just a little more magical.

Telephone sandwiches and the waffle of Monte Cristo

Now that we're burrowed deeply into the dead-leafy heart of fall like some foliage-decomposing worms, I'm celebrating the weekend with some toasty hot sandwich recipes from "Good Housekeeping's Book of Breads and Sandwiches" (from the 1958 collection Good Housekeeping's Cook Books).

I picked this one because I loved the title: Italian Telephones! So what should you expect in one of these? Marinated pigs' ears? Cow tongue? (A tongue phone before it could be a Nightmare on Elm Street reference! That would be exciting.)

No, though. The telephone theme is not from the ingredients themselves, but because of "their resemblance to Italian telephone receivers." Apparently Italian telephones looked like French bread slices stacked with melty cheese and anchovy fillets. (I was trying to think of a food product that would resemble a phone now, and the closest I could come was a Hershey bar still in the foil.... Maybe I'll start calling those "American telephones" and see how long it takes for people to start avoiding me.) (That's a joke because the smart ones already do...)

One thing I love about this recipe is that it tells what to substitute for mozzarella cheese if it's not available. Try imagining a time when it was easier to find Munster than mozzarella! Pizza was not a staple back then.

Here's another recipe that seems pretty dated:

What makes "Texas Frankwiches" Texan, exactly? They're kidney beans, chopped-up hot dogs, various relishes, sauerkraut, and cheese on hot dog buns.

Given Texans' love of meat and hatred of beans in their chili, it seems unlikely they'd be too excited about a recipe that spreads a half cup of hot dogs (not even beef!) amongst six sandwiches and fills it out with kidney beans. Plus sauerkraut? That seems more like a Pennsylvania or Indiana ingredient than a Texas one. Serving the mess on little hot dog buns also doesn't square with the bigger-is-better Texas mentality in things like Texas toast, so I really can't see this being passed off as a "Texas" sandwich today.

I did find one hot sandwich fitting a trend that is still with us: breakfast for dinner!

Of course, I'm not convinced I'd want Wafflewiches for breakfast, dinner, or anything in between. They're frozen waffles stuffed with ground ham and mustard, then dipped in an egg batter and fried like a Monte Cristo.

Fried frozen waffles? I think I'll pass...

Happy October weekend! Spend it with a toasty sandwich (just maybe not one from this book).

Resistible Urges

I like shopping at Aldi. It's got cheap staples next to a changing series of specials that makes the whole trip feel like a treasure hunt. (Will the smoked pepperjack I bought once and never saw again make a return appearance? Will there be a bargain wine with an owl or some other cute critter on the bottle? Will they have veggie burgers this week? I am so boring that I think these are exciting mysteries...)

Aldi recently sold pressure cookers as a weekly special, and I had to dig out another old pressure cooker cookbook to remind myself that no, I do not need a pressure cooker. This time, the "Deluxe Mirro-Matic Pressure Pan" (1958) booklet did the honors.

Mostly, it reminded me that I'd have to make a hell of a lot of dried beans to break even on the cost of a pressure cooker, and I like canned beans-- which take even less effort than pressure cooked ones-- just fine.

The booklets always make it look as if pressure cookers are good for pretty much everything, though. They not only reduce cooking time on dried beans and dense vegetables, but they can do so much more! Did you know you could make fried chicken in one?

Well, fried chicken if your definition of fried chicken is pretty loose. The recipe shows you just brown the chicken in a little fat first, then basically steam it on a rack in the pressure cooker for 18-25 minutes. Then reduce the pressure, wait, and broil the chicken "to crisp" (because it must come out pretty soggy after all that steam).... Or you could just, you know, fry the chicken. It probably wouldn't even take as long since you wouldn't have to fire up the broiler to crisp it up when you were done. That method wouldn't require a pressure cooker, though, so it is right out!

Since I've been a bit obsessed lately, I noticed that this booklet has a recipe for pigs in a blanket too, and it's again, not like any of the others I've found so far:

Here, the "pigs" are slices of round steak and the "blankets" are bacon and onion. I'm starting to think the term "pigs in a blanket" has no meaning at all! The FDA should write some standards of identity for these things. (The cooking time of 25-30 minutes, plus cooling, does not strike me as being particularly short, either....)

My favorite recipe, though, might be this one:

How did this get named "hot tamales"? The ingredients are heated up, sure, but there is nothing else hot about them, unless people somehow thought green peppers, Worcestershire sauce, or pepper were "hot."

There's no tamale about these, either-- no masa, no corn husks. The tomato soup-y glop is supposed to be served on split buns. Might as well call this what it really is: slightly-less-sweet-than-usual sloppy joes, which you can make in about 20 minutes in a pressure cooker, or in about 20 minutes in a skillet.

In short, a lot of the time-saving bluster looks like it's bullshit. The number of times a pressure cooker will really come to the rescue is too short to fill out even a smallish booklet that comes with the pan.

In short, I triumphed over my impulse to buy a pressure cooker once again. Thanks Mirro-Matic!

Puff, the magic fungus

Know what this is? Hint: Once in a while when I'm taking a fall walk in the woods, I come across one of them.

I leave them alone, but some of them edible.

Gertrude Park's Going Wild in the Kitchen (1965) has a few ideas for this little guy, though:

It's a puffball! They are a type of mushroom and apparently, they taste like it since the recommended recipes would work for more common mushrooms-- saute in butter, cook in cream, or add raw to a salad.

This is one odd delicacy that I have actually consumed, though I barely remember it since I was maybe five or six at the time. Someone found a puffball in my grandparents' woods and they decided to cook it. 

I really wonder if I'm misremembering the details, though, because the way I think my grandma cooked it would totally NOT make sense for a mushroom. I think she sliced it up, dipped the pieces in flour, sauteed them, and then served them with maple syrup since the the flat, round slices resembled pancakes.

I love mushrooms, and I loved the maple syrup grandpa cooked down every spring from their own maple trees, but I can't really imagine mushrooms and maple as the best of friends.

That little memory, probably at least a bit faulty, pops up along with the puffballs this time of year. I'm glad to see it, even if it is more than a little confusing. Have a memorable fall weekend!

Fly killer, medical advice, more pigs in blankets, and cocoa sandwiches

Because I can't resist, here is another creature from the haunted antique shop grab bag:

It's "F. W. McNess' Cook Book" (undated; I've seen estimates from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s). There are various versions of this booklet, but I have the one with a woman practically standing on top of a man while he tries to choose a biscuit from the giant carby pyramid she has constructed. They are also apparently having water in wine goblets and something so unappetizing-looking that she has hidden it in a covered tureen. Looks like an exciting dinner!

So who was F. W. McNess?

Apparently, McNess was a company that sold items door-to-door:

I would love to buy peppermint extract, grape nectar, and ginger from someone who also sells fly killer, sewing machine oil, and insect powder in remarkably similar containers! It makes grabbing for an ingredient without looking at it carefully so much more interesting....

The company didn't just sell various food products and household items, though. They also gave out advice:

Yep! Free medical advice AND veterinary advice, from the same company that sells "Vanilla, Vanillin and Coumarin" (a name for their naturally and artificially flavored extract). That does not sound at all shady. 

The booklet is not all ads, though. There are some actual recipes. Since I was recently discussing what properly constitutes a "Pigs in Blankets" recipe, here is another take: 

Here, it's bacon fried around oysters, then served on toast-- which is nothing like either of the two versions I discussed earlier! I'm not sure bacon would be a much better blanket than a cabbage leaf. (And why should it be the blanket when it's clearly from a pig? How are oysters the pigs?)

Since I love looking for vegetarian stuff, I was excited to find this:

Nut Roast is probably not all that exciting, with its "nut meats" and bread crumbs held together by eggs and milk, seasoned with a bit of sage. At least there's a tomato sauce to go with it.

Some recipes do suggest the age of this booklet:

It's winter ice cream for cooks who don't have freezers. I hate winter, but if it were the only time I could ever get ice cream-- well-- the promise of dessert could move winter to just-this-side-of-bearable. 

The recipe title that made me the most curious, though, proved to be pretty disappointing:

What is a cocoa sandwich? Is it bread with some kind of a cocoa-and-cream-cheese-based spread? Is it bread with peanut butter, banana, and cocoa? Is it some kind of a sandwich cookie? Maybe an ice cream sandwich?

Whatever it is, it's printed on the sheet of recipes on the McNess cocoa package, and they're not telling unless you buy the cocoa. I tried to find out, but while I could find some images of the cocoa containers and a full scan of the entire booklet (that is in much better shape than mine, if you're interested in seeing the whole thing), I couldn't find the cocoa sandwich recipe. 

In the meantime, feel free to make up your own! Happy Wednesday!

Pommes de terror

After some (mostly bland and kind of sad) apple sweets, this week we're going scary with savory apples.

Okay, maybe more sweet-and-savory first.

Remember the psychology class lesson about how the sense of smell is a huge component of what we consider taste? The teacher would blindfold some poor unlucky sap, tell them to plug their nose, and then make them eat bites of apple and onion to prove that the two are indistinguishable without one's sense of smell. Well, the Junior League of Indianapolis (in The Midwestern Junior League Cookbook, 1978) got the wrong lesson from that experiment:

The experiment is not an invitation to add onions to apples and brown sugar! At least, that's not what I understood as the takeaway, which is that you should never volunteer as a subject for a psychology class demonstration. Some people totally miss the point.

Okay, for honest-to-god savory apple recipes, we're returning to Thomas Mario's The Playboy Gourmet. Maybe he saw the typical apple-and-pork chop pairing as too pedestrian, so he fixated on another apple-and-meat pairing:

Apples and fish! Because who hasn't wanted to add apples and halibut to a potato salad?

If halibut doesn't seem sufficiently fishy to compete with the apples, though, there is always this alternative:

Potato salad with diced canned beets, apples, and herring tidbits! Hooray!

Maybe Opus from Bloom County has enough of a herring addiction to be excited, so I will leave this to him. 

Happy Saturday! And try to enjoy your apples onion-and-herring-free!