I’ve been wanting to cook with chicken more in general, and as part of that goal I bought two whole friers recently at the farmers’ market. Trouble is, I am not really an expert at cooking a whole chicken. I know you can roast it, and I know you can turn it into soup — method is a little more fuzzy. So I was certainly interested in trying this recipe for Brown Chicken Fricassée when I stumbled across it. What exactly is it supposed to be, I wasn’t sure.

It certainly is brown, though, isn’t it…

There’s a pretty big difference between macaroni & cheese made from scratch, and made from a box — most notably, perhaps, the brilliant orange color you get from packaged cheese powder. I think it’s the same thing they use to paint construction barrels.

Kraft began selling boxed macaroni & cheese under the name “Kraft Dinner” in 1937. (While it’s now “Kraft Macaroni & Cheese” in the US, it’s still “Kraft Dinner” in Canada.) It was a popular product, presumably because of the low price and easy, quick preparation.

Kraft apparently decided they wanted to make it even more usable than it already was by introducing a short pamphlet of recipes (You can serve Square Meals… Speedy Meals… with Kraft Dinner) — such as Kraft Dinner with Creamed Succotash, Kraft Dinner with Creamed Chicken and Carrots, or Kraft Dinner with Cucumber Sauce. Apparently the traditional preparation from my own childhood, “Kraft Dinner with Hot Dogs” on the side, just wasn’t fancy enough. (This pamphlet isn’t dated, but is estimated to be from some time in the 50′s — certainly before the product name was updated to “Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner” in 1958.)

Kraft Dinner with Cucumber Sauce

1 cup diced cucumber
2 cups cooked tomatoes
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika
Dash of pepper
2 teaspoons chopped parsley
1 pkg. Kraft Dinner

Combine the cucumber, tomatoes, onion, salt, paprika and pepper. Cook until the mixture is slightly thickened. Add the parsley. Prepare the Kraft Dinner as directed on the package. Place in five greased custard cups. Unmold on a large shallow chop plate and surround with the cucumber sauce.

I grew up understanding “eggnog” to be a mysterious migratory product that only showed up in the dairy section of the grocery store for a few months of the year. Store-bought eggnog, though, has neither alcohol nor (usually) egg — and while I liked it, it always reminded me of melted ice cream. Then, I met Buzz, and one winter he made his grandfather’s eggnog for my family. It was a delicious revelation.

Eggnog (or egg nog, or egg nogg) has almost as many recipes as it does spellings — rather to be expected given its venerable history. Generally, the traditional eggnog recipe involves raw egg, dairy (milk and/or heavy cream), sugar, and alcohol, with a light sprinkling of nutmeg on top. The alcohol of choice doesn’t matter much, although if you’re getting a retro recipe from a booze advertisement, it’s going to call for a particular brand. (Not just rum — Myers Jamaica Rum! Bacardi! Gold label Puerto Rican rum!) To give the egg-dairy mixture additional body, it is gently mixed with either stiffly-beaten egg whites, or (more rarely) whipped cream. Alternatively, go with the modern convenience method of just adding alcohol to commercial eggnog.

But every now and then, there’s a crazy variation that makes us squint and wonder what crazed cook decided this recipe was worth sharing with the world…

ETHAN ALLEN EGG NOG

2 qts. ready-made chilled eggnog
1/2 cup orange juice, chilled
1 pt. (2 cups) rum
2 cups whipped cream
1 orange rind, grated

Mix eggnog with orange juice and rind in punch bowl. Fold in whipped cream and keep chilled. Add rum. Add a slice of orange for decoration and serve immediately.

Happy First Night of Hanukkah! (however you prefer to transliterate it.)

Since this holiday is all about celebrating amazing oil that lasted for eight days rather than the expected one (the original energy-efficiency holiday, if you think about it), it’s generally traditional to serve something fried. I’m still working with the oil for this retro recipe attempt, but in a slightly different form…

Pie Crust. I have met very few people who say, “Oh, pie crust is really easy to make,” or “my homemade pie crust tastes amazing.” The general rule of thumb is that pie crust actually isn’t all that bad, but it does require some attention — in particular, you have to keep your fat of choice (butter, lard, and/or shortening) very cold while cutting it in, or utter disaster will result. I’ve also run into problems with overmixing or overworking the dough, resulting in a very dense, chewy, unappealing crust. And if your crust is mediocre, you need to have an absolutely amazing filling to save that pie.

I was pretty intrigued, therefore, by this advertisement I stumbled across which used oil, rather than very cold chunks of some sort of fat. It didn’t sound like it could possibly match the quality of “standard” crust methods, but the simplicity of just “stir and roll” really appealed to me — we had to try this.

Of all the recipes-with-products advertisements I’ve come across, I think I like the Wrigley’s gum ones the most. They make no attempt to actually integrate gum into recipes (thank goodness, right?) so it seems more likely their food would be about flavor, not innovative uses of ingredients. Oddly, though, I don’t think I’ve made a Wrigley’s vintage recipe before — maybe it doesn’t feel risky enough. I guess I need an adrenaline rush with my weird recipe attempts.

For the holiday season, I wanted to try a few different variations of fruitcake. I love my grandmother’s recipe the best, but there are so many ways of making fruitcakes, and a lot of retro advertising came up with some intriguing (and frightening) variations, promising simplicity and deliciousness.

Yet this one still stands out, because I have absolutely no clue what makes it a “Hong Kong” Fruitcake.

HONG KONG FRUITCAKE

1 — Prepare 1 pkg. marble cake mix as directed on package. Add 2 Tbs. chopped candied ginger (crystalized preferred), 1 tsp. almond extract. Spoon batter into wax paper lined tube pan (alternating white with chocolate; with knife cut through batter several times.

2 — Bake 40 min. at temp given on pkg.

3 — Cool, then frost with powdered sugar icing. (Blend 2-1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar, 1 Tbs. butter. Add 2 Tbs. milk, 1 tsp. almond extract.) Stud with currants, pieces of candied cherries and ginger, citron, 2 kinds of nuts.

I don’t know, what Hong Kong stereotype would this recipe conjure up in the 60′s? Maybe it’s the ginger. At least there isn’t some bad caricature to go with it.

(Google is absolutely no help, since the only mention of “Hong Kong Fruitcake” I can find is the Wrigley’s ad. Soon, I’ll be the second most prevalent online source for Hong Kong Fruitcake. Don’t worry, I’ll still remember all you loyal readers when I’m rich and famous.)

We like to make pumpkin puree from scratch — cut up and bake a pumpkin, puree the flesh, and freeze it for year-round use. It doesn’t necessarily have the convenience of dumping out a can of puree, but it does mean you can have “fresh” pumpkin on hand in March when it’s less easy to find cans of pumpkin in the store.

On the other hand, it means we have a lot of pumpkin hanging out in our freezer sometimes. In an attempt to use up the last of the 2010 batch, we are still making pumpkin-based food although Thanksgiving is well past. (Frankly, the South Carolina climate is so bizarre to my northern sensibilities that it still seems like early fall to me, despite December holidays rapidly approaching. It was 60°F here today and it’s going to be warmer the rest of the week. I just don’t understand this.)

Just a quick disclaimer before you read any further — that does not mean “balls of porcupine meat,” it means “meatballs that look like porcupines.” I’m not cooking a porcupine this week.

Now that’s cleared up, let’s take a look at what we’re trying to make and eat this week…

This is one that has been up for consideration a number of times, actually, but we’ve always either settled on something better or worse. While these meat balls are pretty weird looking, they aren’t quite as outlandish as some things we’ve made — they fall into that middle ground of odd, but not horrifyingly bizarre. I am actually not so much freaked out by the “porcupine” rice bits, as I am by the weird glossy coating the meatballs seem to have. Food just isn’t supposed to glisten like that.

This was one of the weirdest ways to choose a recipe that we’ve tried yet.

One lazy weekend morning, Buzz and I decided it was a great day to try a retro recipe. He wanted something with meat in it, with meat as the star, and suggested ground lamb. None of my bookmarks called for lamb — lots of hamburger, but that’s not really the same, and I didn’t want to waste lamb on a dubious concoction from decades ago. So we started looking for pork chops, steak, really anything substantially “meaty” — and came across this.

The subsequent exchange went something like this:

“That’s not a recipe, we can’t make that.”

“Sure it is, meat tenderizer and mediocre steak! That’s a recipe.”

“No, it isn’t!”

“Oh come on, please!”

I stood my ground, though; “steak” and “meat tenderizer” is not a recipe, especially not if there aren’t any proportions, or instructions beyond “use.” After flipping through a few more images, though, we found…

That’s right: a bull hugging a matador, while the matador sprinkles him with meat tenderizer. And, since that image is just way too good to pass up, we really did have to make steak.

“Eat a Cranberry Day” is coming up on Wednesday, November 23, and in honor of that, we started a little bit early with cranberries this year. They’re one of my favorite fruits, and you just can’t get them outside of November — unless you settle for canned jelly or cranberry juice, which isn’t the same at all. (There’s a store here called Earth Fare that sets up a little tabletop “bog” with fresh cranberries floating in water, and you scoop them out and put them in bags and buy however much you want. I am exactly the sort of person they hoped to attract with such a display, because I absolutely love going in there and scooping my own cranberries for some reason.)

In addition to bringing from-scratch cranberry jelly and relishes to this year’s family Thanksgiving assembly, we decided to make a couple of retro cranberry recipes. That means you get a bonus double batch this week, two retro recipes for the price of one! (Sorry, you can’t put them on layaway…)

First up, Buzz wanted to try Cranberry Maple Pie. Just because it’s CRANBERRY TIME!

CRANBERRY MAPLE PIE

1 tablespoon flour
1 cup maple syrup
2 cups Eatmor Cranberries
Pie pastry

Line an 8-inch pie plate with pastry. Sprinkle flour over bottom crust and add maple syrup. Top with whole raw cranberries. Cover with pastry, press edges together and brush top of crust with milk. Bake in hot oven, 400°F. about 40 minutes. It’s sweet, juicy, good!

This looked fairly promising, until I read through the instructions more closely. “Wait, it’s just cranberries, sitting on maple syrup?” [Skeptical face!]

So, I sprinkled flour.

I poured in maple syrup.

I added cranberries. And then the proportions actually started to make sense; the maple syrup did manage to mostly cover the cranberries, so maybe this would turn out OK after all.

After baking, it looked wonderful. (I had to get out the little turkey-shaped cookie cutter and make some turkey pie crust shapes for the top. HAD to.)

Slices of the pie didn’t really stand up well, which was probably the fault of both a fairly liquid filling, and not very strong crust.

I don’t really know what I expected from the pie, although “good” wasn’t high on the list. However, the maple syrup really did a decent job of holding together (especially once the filling had cooled). The biggest downfall was my homemade pie crust, something I’m still working on perfecting. (It generally tastes fine, but its structural integrity leaves something to be desired, a rather ironic shortfall for a mechanical engineer.) I had never tasted maple syrup with cranberries before, and the combination is pleasantly fall-like.

And moving on!

Canned cranberry jelly, while not something I personally see the appeal of, is the favorite of some people. Maybe I’ll like it better when you add stuff to it and serve it in pretty glasses, instead of just slicing it on a plate. With that theory in hand, we’re attempting Cranberry Noel Dessert.

Cranberry Noel Dessert

Beat together 1 lb. can Ocean Spray Jellied Cranberry Sauce and 2 tblsps. sugar. Fold in 1/2 pt. heavy cream, whipped, and 1/2 tsp. almond extract.

This was also very easy to whip up. I even forgot an ingredient shot, it’s so easy.

Can-shaped jelly and sugar!

Mushed together!

And folded with whipped cream!

To make it look that much more awesome, a little cranberry and mint-leaf garnish.

The Cranberry Noel Dessert (which we rapidly started calling “cranberry fluff” just to save time) was also good, much better than plain old sauce-from-a-can. I don’t know if it necessarily needed the extra two tablespoons of sugar, since canned jellied cranberry sauce tends to be quite sweet. (Perhaps it was more tart, back in the day?) Regardless, it melded together nicely with whipped cream. I could even see turning this into a freezer pie, potentially…

Whatever form your cranberries take this week, we hope you have a fun and delicious Thanksgiving holiday!

Cranberry Maple Pie is from an advertisement December, 1939, in Woman’s Day magazine. Cranberry Noel Dessert is also from a Woman’s Day magazine advert, but later — December, 1954. Both were found via the TJS Labs Gallery of Graphic Design.

Our final recipe to use up leftover evaporated milk is the other half of last week’s retro recipe attempt (Carrot Rice Pudding). And yes, that finally does mean I’m a week ahead again! Let’s see if we can keep this up through the holidays.

WHITE HOUSE SPINACH DE LUXE

1 pound spinach
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup spinach water
1/2 cup White House [evaporated milk]
1 cup grated cheese
4 slices bacon

Wash spinach carefully. Add salt. Cook spinach with only the water clinging to leaves. Drain. Measure liquid, add water to make 1/2 cup. Combine with White House Milk. Place alternate layers of spinach, cheese, and milk mixture in shallow greased casserole. Top with bacon slices. Bake in moderate oven, 375 F., for 35 minutes or until bacon is crisp. 4 servings.

Spinach De Luxe is one of those dishes that visually scare me. My mother, despite good intentions, was pretty bad at cooking. She also worked. So a lot of her standard main and side dishes were from the freezer. The worst was fried clams that tasted like breaded rubber bands. A close runner-up was “spinach soufflé,” which took the worst characteristics of both soufflés and spinach and combined them into one sad, unappealing green blob. I still can’t look at any cooked spinach without mentally cringing, even when I know it’s going to taste infinitely better than my memories.

Although, I’ll admit — I don’t know how this is going to turn out. Maybe my fear of green sludge will be justified.