A sticky-sweet Christmas

 For my last new-to-this-blog book post before Christmas, I decided to go with The New Way to Cook Is with Karo! (Best Foods, 1963) because I associate Karo syrup with cracking out the candy-making supplies in the pre-Christmas rush. (Incidentally, I have a nearly-full container of Karo syrup I bought maybe half-a-dozen years ago when I had the misplaced optimism to think that I had the time and ambition to make my childhood holiday favorite-- peanut butter balls!-- and discovered that I was wrong.)

So just for the holidays, here's a Karo-centric holiday menu that I'm not even going to begin to pretend I'd make.

Since ham is a popular main dish, we'll go with a sticky-sweet Pineapple Baked Ham.

Okay, I also partially picked it because this book has the best pictures. I simply could not resist a recipe accompanied by a pig driving around in a pineapple-wheeled car.

Look at the tiny driving hat! And the pineapple hood ornament! No reasonable human could resist such charms. (And yes, I plan to post an entire entry about the pictures in this booklet in the future. The pineapple-car-pig is barely enough to represent the military-grade whimsy in this booklet.) (And also yes, I chose the phrase "military-grade whimsy" because it made me laugh. I know it doesn't really make sense.)

Of course, we'll need a veggie side. Even if it's a holiday meal, we need vitamins. And more carbs from corn syrup. 

I am not at all thrilled by the thought of picking up a shiny whitish chunk of Swiss Potatoes Lucerne and trying to guess whether it will be potato, onion, or apple before popping it into my mouth, but your mileage may vary.

For dessert, how about something fruitcake-adjacent?

The great thing about the Frosted Fruit Cookies is that they need to be stored "in tightly covered container to mellow," so that means you can make them ahead of time instead of having to fuss around with dessert while also trying to cook the ham and potatoes. (It also means that if you make them far enough ahead of time to completely forget about them, no one will be saddened by their absence.)

And, to tie everything together, how about a nice Karo-centric centerpiece? Behold, the Peppermint Popcorn Tree!

Complete with gumdrops, plastic flowers, birthday candles, and a dove on top to shit over the whole majestic scene!

If the bounty of syrup at dinner is not enough to beat your taste buds into submission, then you have an extra dessert on hand, too! Just don't eat the plastic flotsam in the rush for that sweet, sweet syrup. There's no fun time to try to pass a plastic dove, but the post-holiday blues will make it even worse.

Holiday dessert or salad? edition

Now it's time for a holiday edition of the long-running "Dessert or salad?" debate. Three Y's Mice on Cooking (Young Women's Christian Association, Bristol Tennessee-Virginia, ca. mid-1970s) weighs in with this carefully named "Festive Pink Holiday Treat."

It's not labeled as a salad OR as a dessert because Mrs. Leona Teagarden agrees with Alice Lonabarger (even though Ms. Lonabarger was not so careful with the recipe name): Serve on a lettuce leaf for salad or just on a plate by itself for dessert. This recipe does not require any changes in sugar levels (either down or up) to make it into a dessert. That makes this the second vote for the lettuce-leaf-is-the-only-difference school of thought, which is nice to know when the holidays are involved and one might be more tempted than ever to consider a sugary treat to be a salad so there's more room for Christmas cookies and yule log cake at dessert time. 

If you pay attention, the recipes don't even specify that anyone has to actually eat the lettuce leaf for the sugary gelatin to be a salad-- it should just be served on one. If you hate lettuce in your strawberry Jell-O, you can still call it salad and get off on a technicality if you leave the lettuce leaf on the plate. The holidays are a magical time.

Saving Money with Old Friends

In the name of saving money during the expensive mid-December season, let's look at a budget cookbook.
Admittedly, Money-Saving Main Dishes (U.S. Department of Agriculture Home and Garden Bulletin No. 43, slightly revised September 1974) is not very flashy. Most of the recipes are for pretty basic dishes like broiled fish and stewed chicken. I got the booklet in large part just because I love the stylized soup bowl, emblazoned with flowers and wafting a delicate ribbon of steam toward the ceiling, on the cover.

Some of the book's recommendations amused me too. For example, I never realized how similar the recipes for spaghetti and Spanish rice tended to be until I saw this:

Just swap out the spaghetti cooked separately for rice cooked with everything else, maybe add a smidge of chili powder if you feel crazy, and leave off the grated cheese topping, and ta-da! Spaghetti with meat sauce is Spanish rice.

In case you love pictures of spaghetti dished out to resemble a target, here's the accompanying photo.

Another common and generally cheap dish gets a bit of an upgrade a few pages later:

Turn those appetizer deviled eggs into a main dish by stuffing them full of chicken. (Plus, dad can make lame "chicken or the egg" jokes at lunch, so your entertainment is covered too.)

And if you need a salad to go with your spaghetti, Spanish rice, or chicken-stuffed eggs, well, you can always throw some canned grapefruit and cottage cheese together on a bed of greens.

Maybe the maraschino cherry and peanut dressing will somehow make it more edible? (Don't hold your breath on that one.)

And finally for nostalgia's sake, I was excited to see that the book also had a version of a childhood favorite cheapie.

I know, this is NOT an exciting recipe. It's just exciting to me because my S.O. thinks it's weird that my family never really had hot dog buns when I was a kid. It was just cheaper to use slices of bread that we already had on hand anyway, so here's PROOF that we were not all that unusual. And since I generally hate condiments, I always garnished my hot dog with a slice of cheese stuffed in the middle. Granted, I never actually broiled those hot-dog-and-cheese-on-bread creations, but at least someone else thought it sounded like a good combination! And that super-simple "recipe" somehow made it into an actual cookbook. It's like randomly running into a friend I hadn't seen in 20 years.

I was so excited, I even took a picture:

I'm not sure why good old Cheese-Frank has taken to hanging out with a bad influence like mustard, but I was still glad to see him again. He still looks good otherwise!

Hawaiian Fruitcakes

It's fruitcake season! If you're sick of normal fruitcake (and even people who have never had fruitcake can already be sick of it), then Still More of Our Favorite Recipes (Maui Extension Homemakers' Council, 1967) offers some Hawaiian twists that can simultaneously banish the early-winter blahs AND switch up the old fruitcake routine.

If you want a more traditional fruitcake, Hawaiian Fruit Cake (The extra space makes it extra fancy!) offers up the usual mix of raisins, candied fruit, and warming spices, plus coconut, macadamia nuts, and guava jelly for an island-y experience.

If you want to go a little less traditional (and more in the tradition of vegetable-based dessert cakes), there's Avocado Cake.

It still has the raisins, nuts, and fall spices, along with a good dose of mashed avocado for healthy fat to counterbalance the shortening in this recipe and sticks of butter you're likely consuming in the form of mashed potatoes and Christmas cookies! You can make it in the name of Christmas cheer and health.

Or not. I'm just going to enjoy some extra "Pistachio Salad" from our Christmas spread and skip the fruitcake entirely when the holiday comes.

Maui favorites for a change

When I picked up Still More of Our Favorite Recipes (Maui Extension Homemakers' Council, 1967), I expected it to be a slightly more tropical variation of the 1960s and '70s fundraiser-style regional cookbooks I tend to pick up. It might still primarily feature recipes that dump a bunch of prepackaged ingredients together, shove them in the oven and/or fridge for a few hours, and then be ready to serve everybody at the church potluck. Maybe they'd just feature fresh pineapple instead of canned and macadamia nuts instead of walnuts or pecans.

I wasn't entirely wrong-- the book certainly has some of these recipes, and I'll feature a few in a separate post. I was, however, mostly wrong. This book definitely feels much more distinctive than a lot of my other cookbooks-- certainly in part because I'm completely unfamiliar with a lot of the ingredients that weren't/ aren't common in the midwest, and in part because the recipes seem to rely a lot less on mixes, cans, and boxes than the cookbooks I'm accustomed to.

Yes, there's the familiar ritual of preserving extra fruit by turning it into butters and jams, but the fruits being preserved are not the apples and berries we see in the midwest.

Instead of apples, the cherry-like acerolas get turned into butter and seasoned with ginger.

And I am so unfamiliar with this next fruit that I had to spend a few minutes fruitlessly (ha!) digging through information about rice to find the right poha-- more commonly known as groundcherries or Cape gooseberries.

The book is also interesting because it has so many recipes for cultures that tend not to be heavily represented in my midwestern cookbooks. There are Filipino recipes, like this Bibingca (internet searches suggest Bibingka is a more common spelling)-- a chewy cake made with rice flour and coconut milk.

There are Chinese recipes, like this Lobster with Dau See. 

There's a whole chapter titled "Japanese Special Foods" that features recipes like Ogo Tempura and Zenzai.

I'm sure tempura is a familiar term to most Americans now, but the glossary at the end of the book specifies that Ogo is a type of seaweed for those who might not have known in those pre-internet days when it wasn't easy to just look something up. 

The Zenzai is a sweet bean soup with mochi dumplings.

It's definitely not the chicken and dumplings of midwestern dinner tables that I'm used to seeing.

And of course, there are some traditionally Hawaiian dishes too (apparently-- I'm definitely not the best judge of this!), like Pipi Kaula (which seems to be commonly written as one word now), a variety of jerky.

This book is a refreshing treat. If you're used to midwestern cuisine, there's a lot that's likely to be unfamiliar. If you're interested in Asian/ Pacific Islander recipes from the 1960s, this shows how some families cooked and suggests that they resisted the prepackaged shortcut recipes that were mainstays in a lot of the mainland. And now that a lot of specialty ingredients are available on the internet (and even in bigger grocery stores), midwesterners now would be waaaay more likely to be able to try these than any who got this book as a gift in the late 1960s. I'm just glad to have a little taste of the tropics as the cold weather is setting in for the season.

How to Stay on Your Diet between Thanksgiving and Christmas

 Afraid of gaining extra pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but reluctant to give up the party atmosphere? Here's some help from Appetizing and Slenderizing Recipes (Patrick J. Conway and Mary Ellenwood Pittenger, 1974).

Start the day with Egg Nog and Melba Toasties. Trying to pretend an egg mixed with powdered milk (and maybe orange juice!) is eggnog should be enough to make you want to swear the stuff off for a while, and trying to figure out what super-thin, super-dry slices of toast have to do with anything will sap your energy to make anything better. Happy holidays!

Eggs Everywhere-- from Hell to Wreaths!

It's December, time to say goodbye to our companion for the year, The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957).

Now that it's cold out, the Chamberlains suggest going to hell.

Eggs in Hell should get you off to a nice and toasty start! Plus, the picture implies that cowboys would approve, so if you're hungry for cowboy approval along with your eggs, veggies, and "meat extract," then you're all set.

If Eggs in Hell sounds a little too blasphemous for Christmastime, the book also offers Christmas Wreath Cookies.

The fun thing about these orange-scented sugar cookies is that once they're cut with a doughnut cutter, they're topped with meringue, green sugar, and cinnamon candies. When they come out of the oven, they'll look like wreaths with holly-- no additional decorating required! Note too that this has instructions for making your own green sugar. Decorators' sugar must not have been widely available in the '50s, so it was strictly do-it-yourself.

As I say goodbye to The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking, I thank it for reminding me how lucky I am that my red, green, and yellow sugars are patiently waiting for me to get them out of storage for my annual baking spree. I even like that the book took me to hell, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I was led to believe. Now I just have to pick a lucky contender for my monthly cookbook next year...