It's late summer! Better get ready for Christmas...

I know I'm a little late for Christmas in July, but I didn't want to hang onto this giftable Louisiana Peach Brandy recipe from River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana;  January 1977 fourth printing) for almost another year.

I love that this "brandy" is just gin flavored with peaches and sugar-- an easy way to use/ preserve a bumper crop of peaches. Plus, the peaches are to be used as an ice cream topping after they've offered up their flavor into the gin. It all seems so straightforward and practical!

The July start allows for the straining in November or December so the drink can be given as a Christmas gift. In fact, posting this in August might make more sense for someone in the midwest, as the peaches at my childhood home weren't ready to eat until mid-to-late August. Since the recipe allows for bottling as early as November, that means there might still be time for non-southerners to make midwestern peach brandy if they start now and bottle it right before Christmas.... Not that I would, though. I don't have access to home-grown peaches anymore, and the ones at the supermarket are expensive even though they're usually mealy and flavorless. Even with those limitations, though, I have to say the brandy sounds better than the more popular start-ahead Christmas food gift: the fruitcake.

Some Louisiana recipes that may or may not tempt you to eat up your weight in groceries

I love that the title of today's cookbook sounds like it should be a movie sequel title: River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the back of the title page says this is from the January 1976 fourth printing, but considering the first printing was in September 1976, I suspect this is from January 1977). I can almost picture a movie full of improbable car chases involving plots like Miss Luella trying to get her jambalaya to the church potluck before Miss Charlotte or Miss Blanche can serve those abominations that they brought last time.

I was of course also curious about what cooking in 1970s Louisiana looked like. Would it be full of Creole and Cajun flavors we traditionally associate with Louisiana, or would it be full of gelatin and endless canned foodstuff (usually including at least one can of cream-of-something soup) like seemingly every other regional cookbook from the 1970s?

The answer, as I of course should have anticipated, was "Yes."

There is a Crawfish Pie...

...loaded with the holy trinity of onion, bell pepper, and celery, the crawfish of course, red pepper, fresh parsley, and a can of cream of celery soup!

Often, the book offers multiple options for preparing a dish. For those who want to use fresh ingredients when they can, there's a Hot Sausage and Shrimp Jambalaya.

It uses fresh onions and parsley, but offers choices for other ingredients: fresh garlic or garlic powder, fresh or frozen shrimp, canned tomatoes or additional water for the no-tomatoes-in-jambalaya crowd. 

Or there is the Quick and Delicious Jambalaya, for those in a hurry...

...featuring ground beef, shrimp, the holy trinity, Tabasco, and TWO cans of soup (cream of chicken and onion).

There's plenty of gelatin, but a lot has seafood in it.

At least Florence Culpepper's Molded Shrimp Salad starts with unflavored gelatin-- not lemon! The shrimp have to mingle with canned tomato soup, cream cheese, and mayonnaise, though... Plus the holy trinity, pickles, olives, Worcestershire, and Tabasco, so it seems hard to escape canned soup, in any case.

Also of interest, I found a recipe cut from some old newspaper (from a time when you could buy a bedspread for $5.66 on sale, according to the ad on the back) tucked into this book. I was a bit surprised a Louisiana cook would really save a Creole recipe from Hunt's, but there it was:

It seems pretty plain compared to a lot of the other recipes, but maybe the simplicity was part of its appeal? (Or maybe it was the cost of "only 62¢ per serving"?)

And there are at least a few recipes that feel almost midwestern, like Seafood Macaroni Casserole. Maybe this book just has room for everything.

From the macaroni and cheese dinner to the cream of chicken soup and canned seafood, this seems more like something I'd find in a regional cookbook from Nebraska or Illinois than Louisiana... but I guess the midwestern version would have been more likely to use canned tuna than canned shrimp.

In any case, this is an interesting look at how Louisiana cooks were adapting older recipes and cooking styles to newer ingredients (and to families where nobody's primary job was cooking). Now I kind of wonder whether the conflict in the movie version of River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping would stem from Miss Luella's disapproval of the other cooks using canned condensed soups and/or other convenience foods in their recipes, or whether she'd just be upset that they were using the wrong brands of convenience foods. It's hard to tell...

Funny Name: Noooo! Not Puffball Edition

When I came across this recipe in Culinary High Notes (Toledo Opera Guild, 1978), I was kind of worried that the practical-minded 1970s diners hunted down and slaughtered those cute little fuzzy beasts us kids in the '80s turned into ersatz pets.

Luckily, my fears were unfounded. Hopple-Popple is just a crustless quiche-adjacent thingy.

Microwaving down on the farm

Are you ready for another early-days-of-the-microwave cookbook? This one with grandma dressed up in her Sunday best on the cover? Well, you're in luck!

Microwave Magic (edited by Annette Gohlke, 1977) was produced by the staff of Farm Wife News, so you might expect it to be a relatively down-to-earth cookbook. I guess, in some ways, it was. For instance, if you wanted a very quick and easy recipe to make dressing for your fruit salad, well...

Why not just microwave vanilla ice cream and then stir in an equal amount of mayonnaise? (I mean, besides the obvious end point where you end up with a bowl mayonnaise-y melted ice cream or vanilla-ice-creamy mayonnaise, depending on your perspective, with which to wreck a perfectly acceptable fruit salad.)

The book also offers both an easy way to cook cauliflower and TWO ways to dress it up.

Both mayo-based, of course. The curry sauce mixes in a lot of mustard, some curry powder, and a lot of shredded cheddar. The zippy sauce has no discernible reason to be called "zippy," though, as it is basically a half-recipe of the curry sauce with minced onion subbed in for the curry powder and waaay less mustard.

There's also a recipe for homemade noodles-- something I imagine farm wives generally avoided making when it was so much easier to just buy a bag of noodles, though they might make an exception once or twice a year for a special meal or contribution to a fundraiser. In any case, it's not something I'd imagine would involve a microwave in any way.

And I still don't really understand how the microwave is necessary. Can't you just roll the dough thin and cut it? Why microwave between steps? It also took me forever to figure out what the recipe meant by 650° oven, as microwaves do not have temperature controls. I finally realized that this is probably supposed to be the timing for a 650-watt oven! But in any case, you should "Adjust timing to suit your degree of oven." I also LOVE the specification that "Yolks are left from baking an angel food cake." There's the farm wife practicality I was looking for, even if it seems absent elsewhere...

The Brunch Bonbons also offer some egg-related practicality.

These muffin-like morsels are portioned out in candy-size paper liners and then microwave "baked" using a "styrofoam egg carton as a tin." I don't think I've ever heard of this method before, and the thought of putting styrofoam in the microwave makes me nervous, but there's a candy liner between the muffin and the egg carton, so I guess that's okay? When the farm gals are indulging in brunch, I guess it's best to just go with it and not ask too many questions.

Still, plenty of recipes called for a bit more of what my farm-wife grandma would have called "fussing" than she would have been likely to do, like this Vegetable Meat Puff.

Looking at the recipe, I realized the first step (well, after browning bread crumbs in the microwave) is basically making a choux pastry (with the unusual addition of baking powder, maybe because leavening with only steam doesn't work as well in the microwave as in a conventional oven?). Then it's mixed with various bits of meat and veg (maybe leftover), baked in the microwave, and served under a sauce of slightly-thinned canned cheese soup. I have a feeling this recipe is part of the reason why so many Europeans look down on American cooking.... I just have to wonder why go to the trouble of making a choux pastry if you're just going to microwave the thing anyway? It won't brown. I can't imagine it as being any texture other than foam rubber. So much work for a book emphasizing quick and easy!

But then again, the grandma on the cover seems to be showing off a vessel that would barely have fit into most microwaves from the time, anyway. I guess the cover was a warning that the book might be more about attempting to show off in impractical ways than providing quick, easy, practical recipes for the farm wife lucky enough to own a microwave.

Funny Name: The Fake Mustache Ain't Fooling Anybody Edition

What do you do if you want to serve something your guests claim not to like? Frederica Fare (Parents Association of Frederica Academy, St. Simons Island, Georgia, 1977) has already made it clear that changing your plans and serving something the guests actually like is just coddling them. A good host just serves the disliked item anyway and insists that the guests will like this version. 

Maybe that sneakiness contributed to the name of this recipe, which is presumably for people who don't like sardines.

Of course, if you tell people it's a Sardine Disguise Dip, the sardines aren't much of a secret.... But failing to tell guests of the fish's presence leaves the possibility that they won't know what's in the dip and will fail to grasp your utter contempt for their personal preferences. Don't want to miss out on that!

"Main Dish" salads that leave you wanting more.... (but not necessarily more of the salad)

I picked up McCall's Salads & Salad Dressings (McCall's, 1965) because it had a big, beautiful molded salad on the cover.

And I fully expected to write about all the wild molded salads inside. But, as I read through it, I kept getting distracted by its ideas about what constitutes a main course. This started to feel like it was really just a diet book marketed as a salad book. 

My first inkling that this book seriously underestimated main dishes was in the first chapter-- about fruit salads-- when I spotted Gold-and-White Summer Salad.

Check out the note at the bottom: "Makes 4 main-dish servings, or 8 salad servings." Would anyone really count a quarter of a cantaloupe with a half-cup of cottage cheese as a main dish (unless they had an eating disorder)? I know American portion sizes have grown over the years, but I can't imagine this seemed like a substantial main course even in 1965.

And then I got to the Main-Dish Salads chapter. The picture of the Chef's Salad-Stuffed Tomatoes looked pretty generous...

...but then I realized that this plate is meant to serve four people.

Yep-- one medium tomato stuffed with a few slivers each of Swiss cheese, boiled ham, and sweet pickles constitutes the main portion of a meal. 

I also sometimes struggled to figure out how some of these dishes even counted as salads, much less dinner. The Cottage-Cheese and Cold-Cut Platter is just that...

...a platter of cottage cheese and cold cuts. What makes this a salad? Maybe it's the vegetable flecks mixed in with the cottage cheese? And if you think this platter is at least generous enough to give each diner a full ounce each of bologna, olive-and-pimiento loaf, and cheddar cheese, note that the recipe serves six. The only thing anybody gets much of is the cottage cheese.

The Watermelon-and-Chicken Salad probably comes closest to offering a main-dish-sized serving of something.

But that's assuming anyone wants to eat chicken, celery, toasted almonds, and watermelon in mayonnaise that has likely turned into pinkish-white melon-y soup.

Maybe these recipes were meant for ladies' luncheons, where the goal seems to have been to serve not much for the main course, but go heavy on the desserts? If you only eat a couple slivers of lunch meat, a bit of cottage cheese, and/ or a few stray raw fruits and veggies, that just means more room for sherbet and cookies!

Party wildly when you have the chance in August

Happy Late Summer! The season starts, per The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), on August 2 and lasts through the autumn equinox. Summer generally means cooling salads, and this section offers a few fairly traditional ones, so I thought I would go with something less expected: soup!

The Bloodroot Collective was serious about using local and seasonal ingredients before it was cool, so the Beach Plum or Elderberry Soup showcases these values. (The introduction says, "Feminist food is seasonal. We use what's close at hand, what is most fresh and local, and therefore the least expensive and least 'preserved.'")

My favorite part of the recipe is the lecture about using wild fruit in step 1: "First find your wild fruit. This soup recipe is insipid made with cultivated fruits." If you can't find nearly a quart of wild beach plums or elderberries (or rose hips or chokecherries), you're out of luck. Then there's simmering, sieving, sweetening, thickening, and checking for an excess of "foxy" flavor, whatever that might be. The nice thing is that this can be served chilled on a hot summer day.

This section also includes one of the rare seafood-based dishes: Champagne Shrimp Bisque.

The champagne is not in the title simply to signify that it is superlative; there's actually leftover champagne in the soup itself. I guess this silky soup is supposed to be a way not to feel too let down the day after a special celebration (though I'll admit that I'd rather just drink the leftover champagne and call it a day).

These waning days of summer can start to feel like an extended Sunday night, a creeping feeling that busier schedules and cold weather are just around the corner, so I appreciate the desire to go all out-- Pick the wild fruit! Enjoy champagne in multiple ways! Before you know it, you'll be spending 14 hours a day lecturing, planning lessons, commenting on essay after essay after essay.... (Okay, maybe that's just me. But summer is running away from all of us.)