No Pattern Required

Welcome to the first Mid-Century Menu of the year! I know you all have eagerly awaiting this moment, as Tom and I both have, to see if this will be a good meal or a bad one.  See, I kinda figure this is like Groundhog’s Day for the Menu, if this Menu sees its shadow, it means that….well…this analogy sounded a lot better in my head than it does written down.  Let’s just put it this way;  if this first meal sucks, it doesn’t bode well for this year.

And in that vein, I give you Carnation’s Family Favorites, published in 1956. It is a short and really cute cookbook.  The illustrations really put it over the top and make it super adorable, probably to  distract you from the fact that all the recipes in this book may not be on the up and up.  Not that I have anything against Carnation, they have cranked out some great recipes over the years (pumpkin pie? No Fail Fudge? Total winners.), but some of the recipes in this book were a little…scary.

Take, for example, the one we chose for the Menu this week.

See what I mean about the illustrations?  It’s diabolical!  That adorable pig does nothing to make me think, “Hey, maybe this recipe doesn’t contain the proper nutrition for my family” or  “Hey, does anyone else think combining cheese corn and breakfast sausage is INSANE?” Nope.  I look at that little pig who’s super excited to be eaten, and I think, “Yeah.  This is the recipe for me. Just look at that pig!”

And so it begins.

I felt bad for Tom, because he hates processed cheese, so I tried to pick the highest quailty processed cheese I could find.  I don’t think there is such a thing, so I just went with something that looked like real cheese. Mostly.

The drained canned corn, crackers and grated onions in the casserole.  So far, I am feeling pretty good about this. 

All mixed up.  Like the pink spoon?  I found a bunch at a garage sale this summer for 50 cents. Score.

The evaporated milk, Worcestershire sauce, mustard powder, salt cooking on low heat, trying valiantly not to boil.

Wow.  Look at all the sausages.  This can’t be good for Tom’s heart.

The cheese sauce, complete with all cheese melted.  It was pretty runny at this point, and I cooked it longer than the recipe recommended trying to get it to thicken.  It never really did.

Pouring the sauce over the casserole. I love action shots, thanks Tom!

All mixed up.  At this point it looked like…cheesy corn soup.  I hoped it would thicken in the oven.

The sausages, drowning in the cheese sauce.  Swim, guys! Swim!

The finished casserole.  It looked slightly thicker, so I crossed my fingers.

The first bite.  Tom didn’t even take his jacket off after his run, and it reflected the flash.  I tried to retake the picture, but you can’t retake a first bite!!!

He chewed for awhile. 

“So?”

“I don’t know what to say.”

I took a bite.  I didn’t know what to say, either. The sauce was still runny, and tasted like canned corn and something chaulky.  I am not sure if that was the fault of the processed cheese or the evaporated milk.  The sausages DID NOT go with the sauce taste-wise or texture wise. 

Tom kept looking around the table.  Finally I said, “What are you looking for?”

“Isn’t there anything else with this?”

“Nope, this is it.”

“There should be something else, like rice or potatoes or something.  This is like gravy.”

I made some broccoli and cauliflower to go with it, so that was a little better with the sauce.  But I still think Tom wasn’t satisfied.

Luckily, I had also make a pineapple upside-down cake from the cookbook for dessert.  In the tradition of good Carnation recipes, it was excellent.  They know their desserts. 

The Verdict:

Corn and Sausage Casserole: Edible, but not good.  In no way is this a complete meal.  If you changed the cheese to cheddar and added three eggs you would have a reasonable brunch item, but this did not play well for dinner.

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake:  Really Good. Will make again!

Yum!!

Welcome to another week of the Mid-Century Menu!  Honestly, I am surprised this feature has gone one as long as it has.  I thought for sure that it would become too disgusting for us to continue, but Tom and I have persevered through all the stinky, nasty dishes and even found a few good ones.  One of these days I need to make a Best and Worst list of the Mid-Century Menu.  Sigh.  So many things to do.

In any case, this week’s menu comes out of Betty Crocker’s Bisquick Cook Book, published in 1956.  I love this cookbook, not just because of some of the crazy recipes, but for all the great pictures as well.  I think this is one of the better photographed cookbooks, just for the fact that they take a lot of pictures of the finished dishes.  With most of these older cookbooks you just have to use your imagination when it comes to picturing the end result of the recipe.  And that has put me off more than a few recipes, let me tell you.  I can imagine some pretty horrible stuff.

Of course, the pictures also have drawbacks.

What in God’s name is oozing out of that waffle sandwich on the right?  What?!?!?  It looks like someone on the photo shoot was so nauseated that they threw up on a waffle.

“Awww, someone bring me another waffle, Bill just yaked on this one.”

“Should we clean-up the plate and reset everything?”

“Nah, the cream on the shortcake will run. Just throw it on top of the other one and we’ll pretend its filling.”

 Gah.

Another thing, has anyone else noticed that the picture of Betty Crocker has yellow eyes?  Yellow eyes, I swear to God, yellow eyes!  Just like Scut Farkas.

Anyway, all kidding aside, here is the dish I picked for this week.

Really?  Really?!?!?  On what planet is a hot dog, cheese and ketchup considered pizza???  Even if you used chili sauce, it would be closer to chili than pizza.  Not even the dumbest 1950′s kid would be fooled by this. 

Pizza. Bah.

In any case, I was off!

I got chicken hot dogs because they were less fat.  I didn’t think it would make that much of an impact in whether or not the boats actually tasted like pizza.

Milk, melted butter and Bisquick.

The dough, all stirred together.

Here it is on the floured board after it kneading it 8 times.

Here it is after being rolled out and divided.  I didn’t bother trimming the dough to make it even!

The hot dog halves, all in place. 

And no, it isn’t pizza yet.

Putting the cheese strips in place.  I thought they would be safer under the hot dog than on top of it.

Nope, not pizza yet!

Ketchup on top of the hot dogs.

Still not pizza!

Here they are, all boated up and ready for the oven.  You know, at first I thought this was going to be an easy recipe, but from the last picture until this picture took…me…forever!  They were so fussy!  Oh well, I suppose I shouldn’t complain.  At least they look semi-appetizing, which is a good thing after all that work.

And no, Sara, they aren’t pizza yet.

Here they are, straight from the oven.  They don’t look like pizza, but you never know. I didn’t put pudding or even milk into the dessert and it came out with pudding on the bottom.  I was really confused, and I wondered if Bisquick was some kind of miracle ingredient.

The first bite. 

“So, is it pizza?”

“Nope,”  Tom said, “It’s not pizza, but these things are really good.”

I took a bite.  They were really good. Sickeningly good, actually.

But they didn’t taste like pizza. Nuts. I guess Bisquick isn’t magic after all.

The Verdict:

Pizza Boats:  Good, but not a bit like pizza. The biscuit is very rich and is a little sickening after the second one, but is still pretty tasty.  Would be a good party snack if cut into smaller pieces.

Hot Fudge Pudding Cake:  Really good.  How the mystery layer of pudding came about I have no idea, but it was really good. Tom ate himself sick on it, and didn’t care about the mystery.

Sorry this is going to be a short post, but I am finishing packing up a great set of Housewife Cupcake Toppers and then I have to get these babies off to the post office!  This order was huge, 80 of them!  At the time I spoke to the client I must not of been thinking because when she asked me if that was too many, I said, “Heck no, it will be fun!”

Well, it was almost too much “fun” all at once!

But I had a good time making them, and I also got to trot out a few new designs I have been working on.  You can see some of these on the left, which I think are especially cool.

I think they turned out pretty well, and I am excited to get some pictures back from the client. And now, I am off to finish my order! 

Welcome to this week’s Mid-Century Menu, the “fun” feature on the blog in which I get to pick a recipe from my collection of vintage cookbooks, make it, and then feed it to my husband for dinner.  Poor Tom!

And this week it really is poor Tom, because I am cooking out of a Spry cookbook.  This particular Spry book was published in 1949, and I think is one of their earlier cookbooks. Now, I am not sure if you guys are familar with Spry cookbooks, but Spry was a vegtable shortening product, similar to Crisco, and the spokeswoman for Spry was “Aunt Jenny“, the universal older aunt who looked like your grandma and had never had any children of her own, so she could spend time baking you 15 kinds of cookies and cakes.  I had one of those aunts. Everyone has one of those aunts, which makes Aunt Jenny believable and comforting. 

To a point.

Now, Aunt Jenny hosted a radio show and had her own line of cookbooks promoting Spry to housewives everywhere, and was a memorable and successful spokeswoman.  She is also incredibly scary. She is really excited about Spry, and not afraid to show it.  Even if we are afraid to look.  She also is famous for lines like, “With Spry, we can afford to have cake oftener!” and “Start enjoying fried foods today!”

For example, here is Aunt Jenny showing “Bride” (who apparently doesn’t deserve a name, even though her husband gets one) the secret to “Cake Success” using the Spry method.

Scary, isn’t it?  At least Jack’s boss is impressed with Nameless-Wife’s cake.  Whew. What a relief.

Aaaanyway, there are also other recipes in the Spry book that aren’t cake but still have a ton of Spry in them. Fried chicken seems to be #1 in the cookbook, but didn’t seem crazy enough for the Menu.  Then I stumbled upon this little beauty:

It looks like a version of tuna noodle casserole, except instead of noodles you just use potato chips.

What? What!?!?! 

And did you know that three cups of crushed potato chips is almost an entire large bag of chips?

You had better believe I found a winner!

Oh, and I also made one of those crazy Spry cakes to round out the menu. I mean, I had to, right?

The assembled ingredients. Check out the bowl of crushed chips. Yipe!

Four tablespoons of vegetable shortening, melting in the pan.  I have never made a white sauce with shortening before, and I had no idea how it was going to taste.

The flour, added to the pan.  As a side note, the flour immediately started frying as soon as I added it. Yum.

Adding the milk/mushroom liquid mixture.  As a side note, this is the second time I have used the liquid from canned mushrooms in the Mid-Century Menu, which is strange because before that, I don’t think I had EVER used it!

Here is the nice, smooth white sauce without a single lump. Huzzah! Also, the parsley and grated onion.

Now, the layering begins. A cup of crushed potato chips is spread on the bottom of a dish. So many, many chips.

The tuna and the canned mushrooms go down.  Yes, there are some fresh mushrooms in there.  I had them in the fridge and I wanted to use them up, so I thought I would throw them in there.

Pouring white sauce over the whole thing. Oh Lord.

The casserole, all layered ending with the potato chips.  I tried to get a shot of the layered look, but I don’t think it was distinct enough for the camera to capture it.

And here it is!  Fresh from its 35 minute stay in the oven.  I took the cover off for the last 5 minutes so the chips on top could brown a little. I am not sure if it made a difference, but I tried!

Here is the table, ready for dining. Tuna-Mushroom Scallop, fresh beans, rolls, milk and a Chocolate-Mallow Cake!

Taking the first bite…and….

It’s good!!!

“Really?” I asked, “Is it really good?”

“Well, it tastes like a pile of potato chips with tuna on it.  I love potato chips!”

I took a bite.  Ugh. It was so, so, so salty.  He was right, it tasted like potato chips with tuna on it.  The white sauce made everything kinda gooey, and didn’t really add much flavor.  It mostly tasted like canned mushrooms.

But when we were almost done, I noticed a change in how Tom was eating.

“I can’t eat any more of this.  Blah.”

The chips had finally gotten to him. Finally.

The verdict:

Tuna-Mushroom Scallop: Strangely good, but not by any means healthy.  Like eating a giant pile of potato chips with sauce slathered over them.

Mallow-Nut Fudge Cake:  A little dry, but still pretty good.  The fudge frosting was interesting, but just ended up tasting like fudge. The cake could have used some real icing. The whole thing was very, very sweet!

Welcome to this week’s Mid-Century Menu!  I have to confess to a bit of poor planning on my part.  I didn’t put two and two together on this one, and I planned Menu night for the same night that we were suppose to go to a ballgame and eat hot dogs for dinner!  Ah well, when you have a problem, you think up a compromise, right?

So, instead of doing an entire menu, I decided that it would be a neat idea to make some crazy dessert I had my eye on, and then we could eat it when we came home from the ballgame.

And, with that in mind, I started to dig through my cookbooks with an eye out for a showstopping dessert. I found it in the Wonderful World of Welch’s cookbook.

This book was publish in 1968, and I picked it up at a church rummage sale with a ton of late 60′s – early 70′s cooking pamphlets for about 10 cents each.  I adored this book from the very beginning, because the pictures on the front of this thing are just classic. Oh, and the introduction in the beginning of the book, which reads:

“Dear Homemaker:

Greetings.

It gives me great pleasure to endorse ‘The Wonderful World of Welch’s.’

We hope you will enjoy using the unusual and interesting recipes that feature Welch’s products.”

Unusual? Interesting? Unusual AND interesting?  There can’t be any two words more tantalizing for me.  I feel like this was written for me!  Well, for the Mid-Century Menu anyway. And as I paged through the book, I found a ton of possibilities for terror; Saucy Liver (with Welchade), Lobster Catonese (with Fruit Punch), Turkey Glazed with Grape Juice, Spicy Grape Loaf (you don’t even want to know what is in that), and that was only from the Entree section!

But there, right on the front cover, I found my victim.

Welch’s Grapelade Cake. 

That’s right.  A cake made with grape jam, cloves and cinnamon, and then topped with grape juice tinted coconut. Make that a lot of cloves. That has to be a typo.

Anyway, you had better believe I am ready to go!

All of the assembled ingredients.  Notice the prominent placement of the Welch’s products.  Yes, I did actually get the proper products!

Getting ready to sift together the dry ingredients.  Except for the jam, this pretty much looked like a standard spice cake recipe to me!

Creaming the shortening. No butter in this recipe!

The sugar and shortening creaming.  And there is a LOT of sugar in this recipe.

Oh, and here’s more sugar!  Over a cup of grape jam. Wow.

Mixing in the grape jam and eggs. Notice the pretty purple color.

Now here is where it gets fun, kind of like a science experiment.  As I started adding the buttermilk and dry ingredients, the batter started changing color.

Still a little purple, but not much anymore.

Adding the final buttermilk.

The batter mixed up and ready for the pans.  It is now only slightly purple.

Three pans full of batter, ready for the oven.  It is going to be a big cake!

The cakes, fresh from the oven.  I love my little wall oven because it keeps its temp really well, but I hate having to shuffle pans around while they are baking.  All three of my cakes fell! Rrrrr….thank goodness for frosting!

Assembling cake. I decided to use a cream cheese frosting instead of a butter or boiled icing like the recipe recommended. I thought it would taste good with the grape flavor of the cake, and make umm…..the cake taste good if it really didn’t.

Here is another small change I made to the recipe.  I normally don’t make changes, but I figured using the rest of the grape jam as filling for the cake would be allowable.

Popping the lid on the cake.

Adding the cream cheese icing. 

Mixing up the “Lavender coconut”, adding grape juice concentrate.  I also decided to change a bit here, instead of mixing it in a bowl like the directions recommended, I tossed it in a plastic bag like I was breading chicken. It was a lot less mess!

Applying the coconut to the cake.  By this point, everything was really, really sticky!

The coconut applied to the sides of the cake. I didn’t bother smoothing out the cream cheese icing when I applied it since I knew that the coconut was going to be smashed on there anyway.  And it is a good thing I didn’t, because it was so humid and sticky out that without the rough spots the coconut would have rolled right off!

The finished cake, with coconut on the sides and top!

I actually really like how it looks at this point. My grandma would have loved this for a birthday cake, she always loved purple so much!

Ok, so, the cake is finished with no major problems. It smells pretty good, it looks pretty, and Tom is chomping at the bit to get a piece of it. So, I pick up the knife, cut into it, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand…..

It’s green inside.

“Holy cow!”  I dropped the knife.  “Look at it!  How did that happen??!?!”

Tom leaned over it, poked it and sniffed it. “Yep, it’s green all right.”

Look at this!  It almost matches the plate!

Maybe it was the mixture of cloves and grape jam.  Maybe it was the heat from the oven.  Maybe it was the other purples of the cake that made the cake itself LESS purple. Either way, that sucker was GREEN!

But Tom is undetered by the color change.  He dug in with excitement.  Probably even more excitement then if we would have cut it and it would have been purple.

Mmmmm…it’s green.

“So,” I asked, “how is it?”

He chewed for a while.  “It tastes like cream cheese, ” he said. “And it is really sweet.”  He took a couple more bites. “And there is something else.”

I took a bite, and chewed. “That would be the cloves,” I said.

“There is a lot of cloves, aren’t there?”

I couldn’t reply.  My mouth was stuck closed with grape jam and cream cheese icing.

The Verdict:  Good. Tasted like cloves, sugar and cream cheese.  Not sure what it would be like without the cream cheese icing.  I never really got a mouthful where I said, “That tastes like grape.” And then there was the disturbing green color.

My unfinished piece.  But don’t worry, Tom took care of the leftovers.

Welcome to this week’s Mid-Century Menu!  Normally, this is where I cook a terrifiying recipe from the 1950s or 1960s and serve it to my poor husband for dinner, but if you have been reading my blog this week you know that I am visiting my parents in Wisconsin.  So, my post for this week is going to be the Washington Cream Pie that I made to go with the Frankfurter Pie I made two weeks ago.  Hooray for a post that contains something edible!

This recipe comes from another cookbook inherited from my grandmother.  The recipe for Washington Cream Pie isn’t exactly in this book, but it is in spirit. But first things first.

What the heck is Washington Cream Pie, anyway??

Well, according to some frenzied internet searching, Washington Cream Pie very similar to Boston Cream Pie, in that it is a spongecake, not a pie, has cream filling, and it is named after a city. 

The major differences are that there is no chocolate in Washington Cream Pie (bummer) and while Boston Cream Pie has two layers, Washington Cream Pie has four.  In later versions it is served with a can of cherry pie filling on top, but the original is only supposed to be dusted with powdered sugar.

So, here is the spongecake recipe I used, which was the one that was used in the cake book for Boston Cream Pie.

Here are the ingredients, all prepped and waiting their turns.

I had only small eggs, so I used three. In retrospect, it was a mistake, but now I know, right?

Here are the cakes ready for the oven.

The batter was incredibly light, which I was happy about.

While the cake baked, I made the cream filling. Here is the recipe for the filling, which is from the same book as the cake recipe.

I had never made cream filling before, and this stuff was GOOOOOOOD. It was hard not to eat spoonfuls of it out of the pan while it cooled.

The pros of using cream filling – you don’t have to wait for the cake to cool completely before you fill it.

Yum! 

The texture of the finished cake wasn’t everything I had hoped for, but I think that it was good for my first attempt at a spongecake.  The filling was amazing, and I will definitely be maked that in the future to be eaten in other cakes and pasteries.

The verdict: Good

Hubs and I agreed that the cake was too eggy, but since I had stupidly added extra egg, I couldn’t blame the recipe for that.  It was blissfully edible, too, and we both ate a huge piece for dessert after the Frankfurter Pie.

As a side note, this is the first cake I have ever made since living with Hubs that he didn’t eat the whole thing before it went south.  At the end of the week I had to throw part of it away, which was sad. No worries, though. I was happy to have made a good mid-century recipe for once.

Sorry this one isn’t as nasty as some of the previous ones, but even Hubs needs a break once in a while!