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.

The sauce ingredients, after some opening of cans and chopping. I don’t understand how this is going to be a “cucumber sauce” (which makes me think of tzatziki) since there are twice as many tomatoes… we’ll see?

I decided to somewhat puree the tomatoes so they were more of a thick sauce consistency than just chunks — this won’t affect the flavor, and might let the cucumber chunks stand out more.

I let it boil about the same time as the macaroni takes to cook — 8 to 10 minutes.

You’re not getting any photographs of the macaroni cooking process. (You’ve probably seen it before, anyway. Boil macaroni, add milk to cheese powder, combine, done.)

I was pretty worried that these weren’t going to unmold — or, rather, that they would unmold into formless blobs rather than neat little mounds. Fingers crossed…

Woohoo, they stayed together!

I added the chopped parsley to the sauce.

And then spooned sauce all over the macaroni mountains.

This was actually prepared almost entirely without Buzz in the kitchen; he was there in the prep phase to help with the onions (which I can’t stop chopping) and parsley, but left before the assembly process. So when I brought this to the dinner table, he was quite shocked. The kids thought it looked very interesting.

Serving sort of damaged the integrity of the macaroni mounds. I tried to neatly transfer them with a spatula, but they tended to slop apart when landing on the new plates. So everybody just got a blob of macaroni next to a blob of cucumber sauce. (And then they had to eat it.)

While it looks fancy enough, the taste doesn’t measure up. It was a half-hearted attempt to dress up some cheap macaroni, with very little thought given to how this would actually taste once it landed on a plate… weird. Orange-cheese sauce doesn’t go well with tomatoes. (The only possibility I could think of was that maybe we weren’t supposed to mix in the cheese sauce — but that is part of the “dinner” in the box, and it doesn’t say to leave it out.) Cucumbers taste ok with tomato sauce, but then a little of the cheese would ooze and mix in with the tomato and it would get weird. And then there were bites with too much parsley which tasted pretty bad. None of the flavors really came together, and you were left feeling confused and disappointed. Which leaves me with just one question — who dreamed this crap up?

Vintage Kraft Dinner box and various historical tidbits come from idsgn.org; the recipe scan was shared by RabbitRaiments on Flickr.

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.

PORCUPINE MEAT BALLS

*00 g (1 lb.) fine hamburger mince
*50 g (8 oz.) sausage meat
*50 (1 cup) long grain rice, uncooked
1 onion, grated or finely chopped
1 carrot, grated
1 teaspoon mixed herbs
1 tablespoon chutney, chopped
1 egg, beaten
Oil for frying
1 can tomato soup
250 ml (1 cup) water
Finely grated rind and juice of 1 lemon
Parsley sprigs for garnish

Place hamburger mince, sausage meat, rice, onion, carrot, mixed herbs, chutney, and egg in a mixing bowl and mix together.

Shape mixture into balls, approximately 4 cm (1-1/2 in.) in diameter, with clean, cool, wet hands.

Heat 1 cm (1/2 in.) oil in a large heavy frying pan and fry meat balls until browned on all sides, turning frequently. Drain well on kitchen paper towels.

Place fried meatballs in a casserole or ovenproof dish.

Mix soup with water, lemon rind and juice and pour over meatballs.

Bake, without a lid, in a moderate oven at 180 deg. C (350 deg. F) for 45 minutes or until tender.

Serve hot garnished with parsley sprigs accompanied by creamed potatoes and glazed carrots. Serves 6.

So upon a closer reading, it’s not the rice that’s going to be the oddball ingredient here — it’s chutney. Now, I don’t really know much about chutney. It is an Indian condiment, and it can be wet or dry, spicy or mild, made with fruits or vegetables. I’ve often seen it with takeout or at restaurants, but never really eaten it. So for this, I settled for a moderately inexpensive “Major Grey Chutney,” which is a mildly spiced mango chutney. It tastes like somewhat vinegary jam, or maybe mincemeat.

In other random news, I got exactly 1.00 pounds of ground chuck at the meat counter. Maybe I should go play the lottery.

This isn’t a very inspiring assortment of ingredients in the bowl. (And I even forgot to add the blob of chutney at this point, it had to be mixed in later when I remembered.)

I started mixing the meat and stuff with a wooden spoon, but quickly gave in and switch to hand-mixing — it wasn’t going to come together otherwise.

Besides, I had to shape the meatballs by hand, so I ended up with meat-coated hands anyway.

While it might be “nourishing and economical,” it isn’t low-fat. And while I don’t try to entirely eliminate fat from my diet, I do try to use a little bit less than THIS much.

The meatballs smelled very good when finished frying. I kept having to remind myself they were still raw on the inside and I really shouldn’t try eating them yet. (Plus all that rice must still be crunchy…)

They almost fit in one layer in the casserole dish — hopefully a few sticking out of the sauce won’t be a problem. Speaking of which, the sauce tastes like very watery tomato soup. The lemon probably helps it somewhat, but it’s awfully diluted.

And finally, a nice helping with a side of mashed potatoes. (I didn’t get around to making any glazed carrots. Sorry.)

These were so close to being delicious that I was really disappointed. The chutney and Italian herb mix gave the meatballs a really good flavor; you couldn’t tell there was onion and carrot in there at all. The sauce, after cooking, had a wonderful citrus freshness that brightened up the tomato flavor and accentuated the meatballs nicely.

So what went wrong, you might well ask? The rice, while not completely raw, was still very al dente. It really ruined the texture, and it was hard to get past the crunch and enjoy the rest of the meatball. If the rice had been half-cooked to start, it could have worked (or possibly leave the rice out altogether, although that might make the texture odd in other ways). While those little spines definitely did remind us of a porcupine, I doubt it’s what the recipe creator really intended. (Who would do that to food on purpose?)

But I did learn that chutney helps make some darn good meatballs!

Advertisement from 1976 in “New Idea” preserved online in the Flickr stream of glen.h

What better way to use up random leftovers than with a fun little retro recipe?

Given a choice between carrot rice pudding and spinach de luxe, I’m a lot more interested in carrot rice pudding. Any excuse to put vegetables into a dessert.

WHITE HOUSE CARROT RICE PUDDING

1/2 cup rice, uncooked
1/2 cup White House Milk
3/4 cup water
1-1/2 cups cooked carrots, mashed
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cloves

Wash rice. Cook in 1/2 cup White House Milk and 3/4 cup water in covered saucepan until tender. Mash cooked carrots. Combine rice, carrots and remaining ingredients. Bake in greased 1-1/2 quart casserole in moderate oven, 375°F., for 1 hour. 6 servings.

In measuring the milk, we realized we had twice as much as we remembered — 1 cup, in fact, enough to make both the carrot rice pudding and the spinach de luxe. So, sneak preview — next week is spinach!

Cook!

Mash!

Combine!

Bake!

Realize you forgot to grease the pan!

In addition to sticking to the dish (whoops!), this came out of the oven looking awfully dry — more like a cake than a typical rice pudding. It tasted like carrot cake, too — so much so that I started rummaging in the fridge to see if we had any cream cheese frosting sitting around (we didn’t) — with the odd textural addition of cooked rice as a binder instead of flour. It wasn’t bad at all, but it couldn’t quite decide what it was supposed to be.

Overall, though, it didn’t taste all that bad. Daughter even wanted to take some leftovers for lunch. (And that, folks, is why I sneak vegetables into desserts…)

Adorable milk-hawking infant brought to you by White House Milk, and preserved online in bluwmongoose’s Flickr stream.

ICE CREAM MUFFINS

by Mr. Albert F. Hinshaw, Orangevale, California

1-1/2 cups Pillsbury’s Best Self-Rising Flour*
2 cups very soft vanilla ice cream

Oven 425°

Measure flour and ice cream into mixing bowl. Mix only until all dry particles are moistened. Fill well-greased muffin cups three-fourths full. Bake at 425° for 20 to 25 minutes until golden brown.

* For use with Pillsbury’s Best Flour (Regular or Instant Blending), add 1 tablespoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt.

Tip: If a richer muffin is desired, add 1 egg and 2 tablespoons cooking oil.

Variations: Stir 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate pieces or 1/2 cup chopped Diamond Walnuts into batter. Or, sprinkle muffins with sugar or cinnamon and sugar before baking.

This recipe makes sense, sort of. Ice cream already has milk and sugar, so all you “need” is flour for structure and baking powder for rising. Whether this basic theory is actually able to provide the correct proportions for baking remains to be seen! We decided to attempt both the regular and “rich” muffins listed in the recipe, to get a good idea of just how well the “two ingredient” approach would really work.

You could probably get some interesting variations with the wide array of ice cream flavors that are available nowadays — even fruity flavors like blueberry or strawberry could be a neat base. Of course, wanting to experiment with variations will require Ice Cream Muffins to be a tasty basic muffin, and we don’t know if they are yet — so vanilla it is!

Unfortunately, when ice cream melts, it loses some of the air that was churned in during the freezing process. The recipe isn’t clear on whether “2 cups” is before or after this air goes out. (Hopefully they mean before, because I used up all the ice cream…)

Once thoroughly softened (ok, melted), the ice cream was poured into the flour mixture.

The Rich Ice Cream Muffin Batch got an additional dose of egg and oil.

After stirring only until the dry ingredients were moistened, it looked quite lumpy — even for a muffin batter.

According to the Spoon Assistant (you know, that small child who hangs around the kitchen and offers to lick all your spoons for you, often while you’re still using them) the batter tasted pretty good. On the whole, this is an extremely kid-friendly recipe — not much to measure, not much to pour, and no worries if they don’t stir enough since you want it kinda lumpy.

Half of each batch got a light sprinkling of demerara sugar for a bit of extra sweetness and crunch.

After baking, there is not really a visible difference between the Rich (left) and Regular (right) Ice Cream Muffins, externally or internally.

The Rich Muffin (left) has a slightly higher rise, but only slightly.

Opinions were somewhat divided. Everyone agreed the Rich were better than the Regular, though only one family member declared the Regular Ice Cream Muffin to be inedible. I can’t quite put my finger on why this didn’t taste like a muffin. Neither version really tasted like ice cream, but there just wasn’t a whole lot of flavor — and what flavor it did have was slightly odd. (They’re also fairly tough.) A sprinkling of sugar couldn’t do much to help the unimpressiveness of the muffin.

I guess if you absolutely have to make muffins, and have nothing in the house but a pint of ice cream and some self-rising flour, this would be acceptable. Kind of a waste of the ice cream, though!

The vast majority of bacon “recipes” in Life Magazine went something like, “Yay, bacon! And here are things that can go next to bacon on a plate!” This was one of the most interesting.

BACON BAKE HAWAIIAN

(A Martha Logan recipe!)

Arrange bacon on a rack in a shallow pan. Bake in a moderately hot oven (425°F.) until browned, 10-12 minutes. No turning is necessary. Dip well-drained pineapple slices in juice from maraschino cherries and place on a greased baking sheet. Beat 1 egg, 2 tbsps. brown sugar and 1/4 tsp. salt into 2 cups mashed sweet potatoes, and heap on pineapple. Brush with melted butter and place a half cherry in the center of each pile. Brown in oven with bacon.

All it takes is pineapple to make food Hawaiian, apparently.

The first step was baking the potatoes for an hour.

Meanwhile, we soaked pineapple slices in cherry juice and dropped them in a baking dish, ready to be potato-topped.

Two tablespoons of brown sugar is a little on the sweet side for two sweet potatoes, but not painfully so. I also typically use butter (or margarine) rather than an egg, but no big deal since this will be cooked further.

Partially to make the topping pretty, and partially as an excuse to break out my piping bag, I squirted the mashed sweet potato onto the pineapples using a piping bag. Ironically, I got best results when squirting quickly and sloppily, rather than slowly and carefully.

And a cute little maraschino cherry on top. Awwwww.

The hardest part of the entire process was figuring out exactly how brown the bacon and potatoes were supposed to be, since there isn’t a whole lot of specific information at the last “brown in oven” stage. On the plus side, we’re talking about bacon and sweet potatoes, not a delicate soufflé — there’s some room for error.

And, you get a chance to make faces with your food!

There wasn’t much that could have gone wrong with this recipe. Bacon, sweet potatoes, and pineapples are all yummy enough, and a salty-sweet contrast ends up being a good combination. Two tablespoons of brown sugar ended up making it ultra-sweet, not really an excellent choice for a dinner side (although it might be nice for breakfast). Interesting, tasty, but not likely to become a permanent fixture on the table.

Of course, we’re the RETRO recipe blog, so hard-working “parents” becomes hard-working “moms,” who are more likely to be portrayed as mopping the kitchen than negotiating major business transactions. I’d like to briefly counteract that retro-ness with one of my favorite Sesame Street songs…

So whether she’s busy because she’s a surgeon, lion tamer, astronaut, office clerk, soda jerk, pilots, policewoman, clown, cook, bus driver, author, fisherwoman, dog trainer, mountain climber, lumberjack, housewife, mother, or some combination — I really don’t care. She’s busy, so she needs a quick recipe, and Minute Rice is eager to oblige.

(Of course, microwave meals are a lot more convenient than even Minute Rice, but the microwave wasn’t invented until the 1970′s. Also, an entire prepackaged meal is generally a much more expensive than something partially or completely from scratch; many pre-70′s ads concentrated on the economical value of ingredients, rather than fast prep time.)

Apparently the “surprise” (SPOILER ALERT) is that the drumsticks are made with ground beef and parsley. If this turns out to be super-delicious, it’ll be Thrifty Drumstick Double Surprise.

Just 20 minutes with Minute Rice!

THRIFTY DRUMSTICK SURPRISE

Glamorize the hamburger with Minute Rice! Prepare 1-1/3 cups Minute-Rice as directed on package, adding 1 teaspoon chili powder. Combine 1 pound ground beef, 2 tablespoons chopped onion, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon sage. Shape into 8 drumsticks; brown in fat. Place toothpick with parsley in small end of each drumstick. Serve with rice and sauce made by heating can of mushroom soup with 1/2 cup milk. Minute Rice takes on the color and flavor of the chili powder deliciously — gives you a dish to make the family sit up and cheer!

That’s right, just 20 minutes! That does sound like a huge benefit for the busy home cook. Is it plausible, though? To answer that question, this week we’re going be attempting our first-ever retro recipe time trial.

I didn’t start the timer until I had all the ingredients on the counter. (It takes about 20 minutes just to run to the store, after all!) I didn’t pre-chop or measure anything, which I usually like to do when cooking (retro or modeern) — most people don’t keep chopped onion sitting around, so ingredient prep is an integral part of cooking time.

I significantly altered this recipe in one respect — I used real rice. I don’t really like the taste or consistency of Minute Rice, and we eat enough rice that I just buy it in bulk, so I’ve got plenty. So maybe this will take longer than 20 minutes…

Ready? GO!

Measured rice, water, and chili powder into pot. Put it on the stove. Time: 1:45

I needed to chop up the sage and onion before mixing with the meat, which took a couple of minutes. The onion alone took two and a half minutes.

Meanwhile, the rice has started boiling. Time: 7:30

Mixed onion, beef, and spices. Time: 9:00

This is surprisingly hard. Remind me why I’m making meat cones again? Time: 10:50

I finished shaping the meat at 11:50 but didn’t put the meat in the pan until 14:01. The interim two minutes were spent trying to clean beef fat off my hands.

Poured milk and soup into pot to start the sauce. Time: 14:43

Turned drumsticks for the first time. Time: 15:31

Turned drumsticks again. Time: 17:37

Cut drumstick open to see if it was done. EWWW, nope! Time: 21:10 (Yup, we’ve already missed the goal.)

Meanwhile, the rice had finished a while ago. I turned off the burner when I noticed the water was all absorbed (approximately 10 minutes of boiling) and let it stand. By 23:02 it was being served onto the plate.

(Technically this platter is from the 70′s, not the 50′s, so it’s the thought that counts.)

At 23:50 I tasted it and said, “Wow, this is really bland!” (Did vintage Minute Rice include salt in the package, or in the cooking instructions? Seriously, white rice has no flavor!)

The sauce was warm so I took it off and poured it on the rice (leaving little pockets where they drumsticks would sit). Time: 25:50

THE MEAT IS FINALLY DONE. Time: 28:20

Wait, now I have to add parsley “bones” to these things?!?

Dish is finished and served. Time: 33:36 (phew!)

And that excess time is not because I failed to use Minute Rice! I only would have gotten this to the table in 20 minutes flat if I served E. coli drumsticks (triple surprise?) — I’m not aware of any good way to cook ground beef faster, especially since it got nicely scorched on the outside as it is. If the beef had gone on the stove within 1 minute of being mixed with onion and seasonings, this could be done in 20 minutes.

Aside from being way over on required time, this tasted really mediocre. The rice and sauce needed some salt (rather ironic, since canned soup is very high in sodium) on their own. Together with a bite of well-seasoned “drumstick,” it tasted ok — but that required crumbling the meatballs into bite-size pieces, which makes me wonder why I wasted all that time shaping them in the first place. Meatballs = good, rice = bad, meatballs plus rice = meh.

It’s not a meal that’s tasty enough that I’d want to make sure I had ingredients on hand (ground beef, chopped onion, etc.) and prepped to ensure I could get it from fridge to table in 20 minutes. If I’m that rushed for time, we’ll probably just end up with peanut butter sandwiches.

Advertisement from Life Magazine, May 12, 1952, online at Google Books.

I was actually one of four finalists for the Worst Tuna Dish, and in addition to the dubious honor of knowing I have lots of dubious food bookmarked in my recipe folder, I won a cool vintage cookbook! Yay! (More dubious food!)

365 Ways to Cook Hamburger: Easy, economical, and excitingly different recipes for 1 to 100 people.

The author preparing appetizing meat balls in his San Fernando Valley kitchen.

According to the book jacket, “DOYNE NICKERSON has been an actor, a hydroponic gardener, an advertising writer, a printer, and — during the Depression — a young man who ate hamburger tree times a day and learned to prepare it in dozens of different ways. He has taken an active interest in cooking since he was ten and for years has made a hobby of collecting hamburger recipes and testing them. Now owner-manager of Silk Screen and Lithography, Inc. in Los Angeles, Mr. Nickerson cooks hamburgers for his wife and young son.” According to his obituary, Doyne Nickerson was born in 1916 and passed away in 1980, so his hamburger recipe collection ranges widely from traditional early-century to slightly more intriguing mid-century concoctions.

Buzz took charge of choosing and cooking the first recipe from this fun new treasure trove of hamburgery goodness, and he decided “Hamburger and Wheat Germ Peppers” sounded super.

HAMBURGER AND WHEAT GERM PEPPERS

In 1/4 cup bacon drippings, sauté
1 lb hamburger
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup chopped celery

Combine with
1-1/2 cups drained cooked tomatoes
1/2 cup wheat germ
1 cup bread crumbs
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1 tsp chili powder

Slice 3 large green peppers in half lengthwise. Parboil for 5 minutes, drain, and fill with meat mixture. Bake in greased baking dish at 400° for 30 minutes. Serves 6.

Did you know that wheat germ is really, really good for you? I didn’t.

Wheat germ is a concentrated source of several essential nutrients including Vitamin E, folate (folic acid), phosphorus, thiamin, zinc and magnesium, as well as essential fatty acids and fatty alcohols. It is a good source of fiber. [Wikipedia]

Of course, all those healthy, essential nutrients and fatty acids are probably counteracted by the 1/4 cup of bacon drippings.  (We get most of our pork products from a local hog farmer, who raises traditional breeds.  His sausage is delicious, the bacon less so.  The rashers are about 85% lard, which is fine for a recipe like this but not very appetizing at breakfast.  Moreover, the little bits of muscle that do lie along the edge are surprisingly dry when they’ve been cooked up.  It’s actually a testament to modern breeding techniques that conventional bacon has such a well-balanced meat-to-fat ratio.)

The onions and celery sizzled up nicely.  It’s impressive how much rendered fat some vegetables will absorb in a frying pan.  Once the onions were soft, the ground beef went in.  The beef was grass-fed, and hence not particularly high in fat itself, but with all that bacon grease, using the cheap, 30% fat hamburger that the cookbook may have intended would probably have been lipid overkill.

Atop the fried meat (which included the diced remains of the meaty part of the bacon, to keep those bits from going to waste) went crushed tomatoes, bread crumbs, wheat germ, salt, and spices.  It made kind of a pretty mosaic,  and a dynamic one, since the warming tomatoes slowly turned the salt orange.

Meanwhile, the peppers were split.

Our four-year-old, who was very anxious to help, took on the job of dropping the pepper halves into boiling water.  Over the last few months, he’s decided that helping Mommy and Daddy cook is one of his absolute favorite activities.

After five minutes, the peppers came out, blanched and slightly floppy.  They seemed a lot less appetizing like this than when they were raw, although the pieces ultimately turned out to just about the perfect texture.

There was a lot of filling, of which only so much could actually be crammed into the pepper halves.  The rest just ended up mounded on top.  The texture of the filling seemed to be completely dominated by the bread crumbs and wheat germ.  It was a thick paste, made red by the tomatoes, with bits of meat and vegetable embedded in it.

Into the oven they went (for a surprisingly long time—thirty minutes when all the ingredients were already cooked and hot).  Aside for a tiny bit of drying and darkening, the didn’t seemed to have changed much when they came out.

The taste was good but not great. It’s basically a big meatball in a vegetable cup, and the two together provide a good flavor and texture contrast. Seasoning only with chili powder ends up giving it a kick, but it’s very one dimensional.  We definitely felt we could have devised a better seasoning scheme ourselves. The wheat germ and breadcrumbs end up giving it a sort of sticky-chewy texture, which gets weird about halfway through the big meatblob.  Without the textural variety provided by the pepper, it could have been difficult to finish.

I also would have named it something more appealing!

Two-Tone Frozen Pie

1/2 cup butter or margarine
1/3 cup sugar
4 cups corn flakes, crushed
2 pints ice cream (2 flavors)
1/2 cup whipping cream

Melt shortening and add sugar. Combine with corn flakes. Press firmly into 9-inch pie-pan. Chill in refrigerator. For the filling we have used raspberry sherbet and chocolate ice cream, but any combination may be used. After filling, put pie in freezer to harden the ice cream. Whipped cream topping may be added and frozen before pie is wrapped, or topping may be put on just before serving. Wrap the pie if you plan to store it longer than 24 hours. Serves 6 to 8.

Here are the ingredients.  Before I went shopping for ingredients, I probably hadn’t had corn flakes in my domicile since high school.  I actually like them a fair amount, but I just don’t eat much breakfast cereal any more.  For the filling, I bought whichever brand of premium ice cream was on sale at two for one, selecting peach and black raspberry chip.  (The jar has sugar in it, but it’s almost empty, so you can’t see it.)

Here are the corn flakes, before I crushed them.

After I broke them up, I was ready to mix in the sugar and melted margarine to make the crust.

Mixing it was pretty much like mixing up a graham cracker crust.

The texture was a bit lighter when I tasted the mixture though.

Crumb crusts like this, usually graham cracker, are typically baked briefly before being cooled.  This hardens it slightly, forming a sorta-solid crust.  Our two-tone frozen pie crust, however, is only cooled.  (FORESHADOWING!)

It was trickier than I expected, filling the pie with ice cream.  I left the ice cream out for a few minutes so that it might soften a bit.  Having softer filling helped a bit, but it was still a challenge to cram the ice cream into the bottom corners of the pan.

(Incidentally, there was no indication on the page with the recipe of what pattern the ice cream was supposed to make, so I decided on concentric rings.  I later discovered there was an image of the pie in the background of another page image—as shown above.)

The peach ice cream went inside the black raspberry.  Then I smoothed out the top, in preparation for being frozen overnight covered in foil.

Here it is the next day, ready to be served.  The raspberry ice cream settled a bit overnight, into the corner around the outer rim.

And with a little whipped cream, it was ready to eat.

For something that was little more than ice cream, whipped cream and a crust, it did have a significant weakness:  the crust.  The texture was unusual, yet very familiar.  It  was exactly what you’d expect from corn flakes left a bit too long in a moist environment:  a little mushy and not intensely flavorful.  (Later on, bits of the crust proved to be rather difficult to get off the plates as well, just like breakfast cereal that’s sat too long in a tiny bit of remaining milk.)

While it is very straightforward, and makes a nice make-ahead dessert to enjoy on a hot summer night (such as we’ve all been having recently), stick with a graham cracker crumb crust that has more structure and flavor. Try to pick flavors of ice cream that will complement one another, and of course flavors you enjoy — which was a great success in this dish!

Even crazier, I decided an excellent introduction to sardines would be through a retro recipe.

(I have clearly learned absolutely nothing over the last couple of years.)

SARDINES AND SCALLOPED POTATOES

Costs 40 cents (November 1952)
4 servings    Woman’s Day Kitchen

1 15-ounce can sardines
6 cups diced, cooked potato
1 can cream-of-celery soup
1/2 cup diluted evaporated milk
Buttered crumbs
Paprika

Drain sardines; reserve liquid. Put potato in greased, shallow, 2-quart casserole. Combine celery soup, milk, and sardine liquid; heat, stirring constantly, until smooth. Pour over potato. Sprinkle with crumbs and paprika. Bake in moderate oven, 350°F., 20 minutes. Top with sardines; bake 10 minutes longer.

This doesn’t actually look all that bad. Well, unless you’re me. I don’t like much seafood, and I’ve never been able to bring myself to actually open a can of sardines to see what’s inside. (If Buzz orders the occasional anchovy pizza, I make him eat it in another room, or preferably outside. Poor guy.)

This was my damn idea, so I braced myself and opened up the sardine can, and promptly fell to pieces. One sardine had a length of spine sticking out of its neck, left over from the decapitation process presumably. As I fled the kitchen, I begged Buzz to debone them for me, and I’d be back in a minute.

A few deep breaths and I returned to start working on some non-fish thing.

I took one look at the results of Buzz’s deboning efforts and had to leave the kitchen again.

Moving on to something I can actually stand to look at, here are some lovely buttered breadcrumbs browning in a pan. Mmmmm.

(Actually, they were pretty bland. But at least they’re not vertebrae!)

Cream of celery soup isn’t all that bad, but mixed with sardine juice, you get fishy cream of celery soup. This is a bad flavor combination.

Adding a heavy dose of paprika helps the breadcrumbs pick up some flavor. No doubt this level of spice would horrify the 1950′s housewife.

Buzz laid the fish on top, since I still was completely unable to touch them.

I did request at least half the casserole be covered with sardine flakes, rather than whole fish. Given my reaction just to the visuals, I knew I wouldn’t be able to actually put my fork into an unbroken sardine.

And then, unfortunately, after an all-too-short baking process, it was time to eat this.

Heaven help me.

What utterly shocked me about this was who enjoyed it. The kids and I had the sardine flakes, while Buzz had a serving from the whole-fish section of the casserole. My son took one look and declared he hated it. (He does this for everything that isn’t cheese, though.) My daughter took one look and eagerly cried, “Is that TUNA FISH?”

“Um… Yes, yes, it’s tuna fish.” And she starting stuffing her face. This kid never stuffs her face, she’s dainty and picky. She thought the fish tasted amazing, the potatoes were pretty good, and she even asked for an extra fish. Meanwhile, Buzz, the fan of sardines, was slowly taking bites while trying to ignore the flavor.

So this is pretty hit-or-miss. Don’t make it if you hate sardines, don’t mix the fish juice into the potatoes, and consider a small batch rather than a whole casserole. It may be an affordable family meal, but it’s expensive dog food!

This and other terrifying sardine recipes are originally from Woman’s Day 1952, and have been preserved online by Curly Wurly. Thanks?

Because of Father’s Day, I gave Buzz the privilege of picking out this week’s retro recipe. (Doesn’t that sound so much nicer than, “I didn’t want to take the blame if it tasted nasty”?) For some reason he decided to go with… prune salad.

We’d picked this on Friday, and then on Saturday afternoon, Rosemary (of Romantoes) commented on another post:

BTW, saw this recipe on the “Awful Library Books” blog and thought of you: http://awfullibrarybooks.net/?p=11728

Spooky — she was on exactly the right wavelength. (Plus I now have another hilarious blog to follow.) That 1960 Home Ec textbook has the same recipe the Del Monte proudly advertised.

Stuffed prunes were clearly not a passing fad — they could even be holiday festive!

With such a surfeit of stuffed prunes, how could I possibly choose which to make? It’s Father’s Day — let’s just splurge and have them all!

Each recipe is built on the same basic platform: something in stewed prunes. The simple first step, therefore, is to stew some prunes.

A bit of hot water, and 25 minutes later we have some soft, stewed prunes. Time to get started on the different fillings…

4 servings prune salad

Stuff cooked Del Monte Brand Prunes with cottage cheese, nuts, sliced celery (at right). Easy eating — because Del Monte’s “Natural Flavor” process protects both flavor and delicate fruit tissues while it “plumps” the prunes with moist, sterile heat.

(Side note: I worry when something like natural flavor is in “sarcastic quotes.”)

It was actually a little hard to put nuts and celery on top of the cottage cheese; prunes aren’t that big, so there isn’t much filling, and not much room to add toppings. It looks a little elegant, though.

Next up is the Home Ec recipe — the only one that gives any sort of measurement of information.

Stuffed Prune Salad

12 large dried prunes cooked to avoid breaking the skin
3/4 c. creamed cottage cheese or 1 3-ounce package cream cheese
Salad dressing

1. Wash prunes. Cook as directed on page 77 or steam in the top of a double boiler. Cool. Then slit the prunes to remove stones.

2. If cream cheese is used, mix with enough salad dressing to moisten. Stuff prunes with cheese mixture. Sprinkle with paprika. Arrange on a bed of salad greens. Serve with your favorite salad dressing.

We only made six, and also chose to use cottage cheese rather than cream cheese — we couldn’t decide which salad dressing would really work well, and just avoided the question.

The most difficult part of this was sprinkling paprika on top. It’s easy to spill, although we had no idea whether a light or heavy sprinkle of paprika would be better.

Finally, from the “sugarplums” assortment…

Spice the filling! Add ginger to cream cheese for stuffing pitted SUNSWEET Prunes. Place on fresh orange slices with salad greens. Result: Oriental Prune Salad!

These seemed the most promising, since cream cheese (about 3 tablespoons) mixed with ginger (about 1 teaspoon) made a really interesting spicy mixture.

They also look the prettiest, with the nice contrasting colors of the mandarin orange slices underneath.

When it came time for dinner, we plated one of each prune type alongside the main dish (barbecue wings).

I was discussing the assortment with my daughter, and explained I wasn’t going to make her eat a lot of them, but she did need to at least try one of them. “One of each?” she said, a rather horrified expression creeping onto her face. I said she could pick one — which frankly just concerned her more, as she tried to decide which sounded least horrible.

But I’m proud to say, she tasted every single one! We made a game of it — everyone put one flavor on their fork, and ate it all together. And all went “Ewyeargh!” together, too.

Everyone agreed: the celery-walnut stuffed prunes were worst (celery just added a weird texture), the paprika stuffed prunes were underwhelming (you tasted cottage cheese, not paprika or prune), and the ginger-orange stuffed prunes were pretty adequate. The orange and cream cheese really made the difference.

So if you have to eat stewed prunes and can’t stand them plain, toss in some mandarin oranges and a bit of ginger cream cheese. It might not be worth it to slit and stuff the prunes, but it makes the presentation prettier!