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.

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.

This reminded me of Hong Kong Fruitcake, in that I have very little idea how this is possibly related to Ethan Allen. While eggnog certainly dates back to the Revolutionary War, and Mr. Allen presumably enjoyed a mug or two in his day, I don’t think they had much commercial eggnog — and I have honestly never heard of adding citrus to eggnog. Frankly, I’m afraid this will just curdle.

Since we weren’t throwing a huge party, and were worried this would be undrinkable, we made a quarter recipe: 2 cups eggnog, 1/8 cup orange juice, 1/2 cup rum, 1/2 cup whipped cream, and less grated rind. I also skipped the decorative orange slice. (Lazy!)

The worst moment was adding the orange juice. Just not right.

Folding in whipped cream helped it look relatively normal — but there wasn’t really enough whipped cream to help give it much structure, and it only slightly thickened the eggnog.

And adding the rum didn’t look interesting at all, so I didn’t even take a picture of that step.

In a desperate attempt to salvage the recipe, we served it in gold-chased martini glasses. (We got these as a wedding present, as well as a selection of martini recipes. I think they’ve actually been used all of four times, and only once for a martini.) So if nothing else, this looks pretty impressive and dignified. That effect is probably ruined by my foregoing explanation of what is in the glass.

I was hoping that, somehow, it would miraculously come together, but it completely failed to do so. It tasted how I expected — bad! Imagine store-bought eggnog, with a terrible aftertaste of orange juice and rum. The bits of rind, while cheerful and decorative, add an additional taste of weirdness. Buzz dislikes store-bought eggnog and was expecting to loathe it, but just found it “ordinary bad.”

Hey, at least it didn’t curdle. And I guess it has the health benefit of warding off scurvy while you’re getting drunk and guzzling heavy cream? (Yeah, that’s a stretch.) Well, Happy New Year anyway. May your 2012 recipes be better than this!

Ethan Allen Egg Nog comes from Americana Punch Recipes, a 1977 pamphlet from Anchor Hocking — and was shared with the internet on the Flickr stream of Eudaemonius.

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!

This week (in celebration of both Pork Month and Cookie Month) we’ll be exploring the lard-tastic cookbook Queens of Cuisine with Swift’ning, “written by” Martha Logan. Why is “written by” in quotes? Because Martha Logan, despite being the renowned home economist who invented recipes and was regularly featured in advertisements for Swift & Company, was a completely fictional woman.

One of Swift’s products was Swift’ning. Technically, it wasn’t lard, but rather shortening, since it incorporated both animal and vegetable fats. (Swift did sell pure leaf lard for a while, but this wasn’t it.) Instead of Swift’ning, we’re going to be trying out our own homemade pastured-pork lard.

One whole cup of it.

ROLLED OAT GOODIES

Yield: 10 dozen

1 cup Swift’ning
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup ground raisins
2-1/4 cups sifted flour
2 teaspoons soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup chopped nut meats

Cream Swift’ning and brown sugar until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla and raisins. Sift flour, soda, and salt together. Add dry ingredients, rolled oats, and nut meats, blending well. Drop by teaspoonfuls (size of walnut) onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake. Store in loosely covered box to retain crispness of cookies. These cookies do not spread much in baking.

Baking Temperature: 375° F

Baking Time: 10 minutes.

This is sort of a test of whether I actually can cook with lard. You know how there are some foods that you just won’t consider eating? I’m not honestly sure if lard is like that for me, or if maybe I just need to get to know it better.

OK, so this looks like a fairly standard arrangement of cookie ingredients, right? Except… that’s not butter. That’s pale greasy stuff in a measuring cup. That’s lard.

Lard apparently creams more or less like butter. Except it’s lard. (Yeah, this is going REALLY WELL.)

This is also the point where I notice a distinct smell of lard in the air. Uh-oh. Nobody wants to eat a cookie that smells like an old pork chop…

Once the sugar is added, it needs to mix “until fluffy.” This is one of those stages of baking that I never entirely understood, because butter and sugar never looks “fluffy” to me even when thoroughly mixed. I generally just go by color, and wait until the yellow gets a little more pale. That strategy isn’t going to work with lard and brown sugar, so it’s time to just guess and hope.

The eggs, vanilla, and raisins went in.

With flour, nuts, and oats, the batter got real thick, real fast. The mixer started groaning and whining a little bit.

And it still smells a bit like lard.

Scooped out and ready for the oven. On the plus side, this is probably the least interested in eating (instead of baking) the cookie dough that I have ever been.

And after ten minutes, rolled oat goodies were piled on cooling racks!

These were a big hit — even with me, and I don’t typically like “crisp” cookies. The lard-y smell was gone after they baked, and they were a tasty oatmeal raisin cookie. Maybe Martha Logan knew what she was talking about…

Queens of Cuisine has been preserved for public viewing on The Internet Archive, apparently scanned from a copy that had been discarded in a dumpster.

No, come back, I swear it isn’t that bad.

Pretty much everything I’ve read about lard (rendering, cooking with, or both) includes a preface explaining the recent resurgence of lard popularity, the health advantages (and/or lack of health disadvantages), and the process of slowly transitioning from fear of lard to love of lard. And so, here is my obligatory version.

Lard has been on my mind for a while, both from retro recipes that call for it, and even from the occasional modern source extolling its virtues. Authentic flour tortillas, fried chicken, occasionally baked goods (instead of butter), but most commonly pie crusts.

Many of those modern chefs who sung praises of lard, however, simultaneously warned against lard you’d find in the grocery store, since it’s often hydrogenated, or not all “leaf lard,” and thus doesn’t have the right balance of “good” and “bad” fats. This warning didn’t necessarily matter, since I couldn’t find lard, hydrogenated or not, on grocery shelves around here. (I admit I didn’t scour Columbia looking for lard; it’s probably available somewhere, just none of the stores within a few miles of my house that I generally frequent. Lard just wasn’t an ingredient I considered making a special excursion for.)

My turning point came during a “Good Eats” episode where Alton Brown was explaining how he ensures the quality of his lard supply — by rendering his own. There’s even a FoodNetworkTV clip where he explains how, and also explains exactly why it’s a useful ingredient.

And suddenly it dawned on me where I could get some pig fat that hadn’t been hydrogenated or cheapened in any way — the local source of pastured pork products, Caw Caw Creek. (If you’re ever in Columbia, you absolutely must buy their bratwurst or chorizo, which are the BEST sausages I have ever tasted. If you’re not in Columbia, consider mail-ordering.) Sure enough, their catalog listed “Leaf Fat,” a quick Facebook question confirmed they sold it at the weekly farmers’ market, and a two-minute drive from the USC campus Wednesday afternoon made me the proud owner of four pounds of frozen leaf fat.

The cost is $3 per pound, which is actually a lot less than I pay for local/organic butter. A lot of bloggers who have rendered lard mention that you can often get it free from your local butcher; this I haven’t tried, mostly because I was also trying to support a local farmer. (Plus, I don’t expect to use vast quantities of lard — it’s most likely going to be used a few tablespoons at a time in pie crusts, so four pounds should last a looong time.)

The guy who sold it to me was extremely helpful with advice, particularly since Buzz was standing there saying, “Wait, what, you want to render your own lard?” (OK, yeah, I probably should have told him I was planning to buy lard in addition to more chorizo. Sorry, Buzz.) “We tried that and it didn’t work!” (I thought he was talking about his family, some time before he met me — it turns out he remembers attempting to render fatback when we lived in Indiana, although I don’t know when we would have been buying, let alone rendering, fatback, so we’re still trying to figure out exactly what he’s remembering.) He assured us it really was as simply as applying heat, not too much, over time, and it would turn out really great.

Buzz didn’t buy the “really easy” promise, but we did buy the lard.

When we got home, it suddenly looked a lot bigger. Four pounds of pig fat is a fair amount — imagine four boxes of butter and you’ll have a good idea of the size. Anyway, into a casserole dish!

It’s hard to see in the above picture, but the pile of fat chunks is about half again as tall as the casserole dish. At this point, I realized there was a distinct possibility that, once everything had melted, the liquid volume would be more than the dish could hold. The idea of overflowing lard starting a massive grease fire in my oven wasn’t very appealing.

So, we chopped it in two chunks and got out the second Pyrex casserole dish.

And yes, pre-chopped fat chunks do resemble brains.

After 30 minutes, a lot of liquid fat has started to run off the central mass.

After an hour, there started to be an apparent pig-fat smell in the kitchen. This was sort of like bacon, but without the salty meaty overtones you normally expect. Not terrible, but not delicious, either. (Luckily, South Carolina fall weather is slightly below 80°F during the day and as low as 60°F overnight. A good time to have the windows open anyway.)

The smaller mound of fat was completely melted and cheerfully sizzling, while the larger mound still had a ways to go.

I let the small batch cook for only a little while longer, and then took it out of the oven. Pulling a half-full casserole dish full of hot liquid fat out of an oven is a slightly nerve-wracking process. For this reason alone, I’d recommend a crock-pot or stove top method… however, there will still be a point where you have to move around a large container with lots of molten lard.

The large batch came out about fifteen minutes later.

You can see the cracklings (cracklin’?) floating in the rendered lard — those solid bits that look like bacon. I’d never tasted them, so I was intrigued, but ultimately rather disappointed. Wonderfully crunchy and (surprisingly) only slightly greasy, but there wasn’t much complexity of flavor. Of course, there’s no seasoning or smoke in leaf fat.

Oh well, I was really just interested in the lard anyway.

For storage, we ladled it into variously-sized jars. (I recommend a canning funnel for this step, because a plastic funnel will likely melt. They’re quite cheap, and are useful for a lot of situations besides canning or lard-pouring.)

Cheesecloth worked beautifully to keep bits of crackling (large and small) from ending up in the lard.

It needs to cool a long time, so we covered the jars with paper towel to prevent curious cats from either burning themselves, or spilling liquid lard all over the stove and counter. (If you’re wondering why the lard appears to be different colors in different jars, it’s just lighting and background effects. The darker the object behind the lard, the darker it looks. The jar on the left is probably most representative of the liquid lard color — pale gold-yellow.)

After cooling overnight, the lard solidified and turned white. That’s one quart, two pints, and about a cup — most is destined for the freezer (I don’t expect to use it THAT often!), and the half-pint will wait in the fridge.

I’m looking forward to using this in future retro recipes, and possibly even everyday cooking. We’ll see how it goes

A few online sources I browsed through while working up the nerve to melt pig fat in my oven:

National Pork Month tie-in inspired by Months of Edible Celebrations, and this month’s cookbook contest!

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.

THOR’S CABBAGE ROLLS

Serves 4

8 large cabbage leaves
1 pound ground beef
1 cup cooked rice
1 teaspoon onion flakes
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon salt
1 can (10-1/2 ounces) condensed tomato soup

Cook cabbage leaves in boiling salted water for a few minutes to soften, th
en drain onto paper towel. In bowl, combine beef, rice, onion flakes, egg, and salt. Add 4 tablespoons of soup. Lay out cabbage leaves and divide meat mixture onto each one. Roll leaves and secure with toothpicks. Place cabbage rolls in frying pan; pour remaining soup over all. Cover and cook over low heat for 40 minutes. Stir often, spooning soup over rolls.

We mostly knew of cabbage rolls as a traditionally Polish recipe; however, they seem to be a familiar dish in any country that had both cabbages and meat.

The short ingredient list is disturbingly bland. Onion flakes and tomato soup aren’t very strong spices.

The hardest part is carefully peeling off the largest leaves possible. Fresh cabbage leaves split and tear easily.

We didn’t have a large pot clean to boil the leaves, so they had to be done one at a time. This is tedious and boring, so save yourself some time by doing the dishes before cooking.

The filling ingredients (all but the rice) were put in a bowl and mushed together.

I added the rice last, because I timed things a little badly and it needed to cook a while longer.

A healthy scoop of meat filling goes into each cabbage leaf.

Cooked cabbage leaves are much more pliable than fresh ones, and roll around the filling easily. The toothpicks hold everything in place, but the rolls could probably be made without them.

All the uncooked cabbage rolls managed to fit in one skillet, somewhat tightly.

I was rather worried about the small amount of liquid in this step — I’m supposed to spoon the sauce over all the cabbage rolls, yet there is only about 2/3 of a can left after using some for the filling.

While the rolls steam, they lose enough water that the soup-sauce becomes thinner and can actually be spooned over everything.

The cabbage rolls look sturdy and pretty, although I’m still worried about that “sauce.” I’ve never had particularly good results from condensed tomato soup.

Using turkey instead of beef makes this a little bit dry, and there is no flavor in the tomato soup (or other ingredients) that can take up the slack. I don’t think it would have been vastly improved with ground beef instead, though. Thor’s cabbage rolls were bland and unfortunate, although they did inspire me to look around for better recipes. I’m a fan of any food which manages to neatly combine starch, protein, and vegetables, and makes my kids go “mmmmm!”

Aside from a bundt pan, I don’t have any nicely-shaped molds that help transform your molded salad from frightening, to frightening-but-aesthetically-pleasing. Luckily, the Frosted Lime-Walnut Salad just calls for a loaf pan.

FROSTED LIME-WALNUT SALAD

1 pkg. lime-flavored gelation
1 cup boiling water
1 #2 can crushed pineapple
1/2 cup finely sliced celery
1 tbsp. chopped pimiento
1/2 cup chopped Diamond Walnuts

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water; cool till syrupy. Stir in remaining ingredients. Turn into 8 x 4 x 4″ loaf pan rinsed in cold water; chill. When firm, unmold or leave in pan; frost top (recipe below) and decorate with golden Diamond Walnut halves.

Frosting: Blend and beat till smooth, 1 3-oz. pkg. cream cheese, 1 tbsp. mayonnaise, 1 tsp. lemon juice.

People still make this, or at least post the recipe online. It’s even in the Blue Ribbon Country Cookbook, the most recent edition of which was published in 2007.

All the ingredients are fairly mundane, but not the sort of thing you really want to see sitting next to each other. Especially since you know they’re going to be mixed together.

I tried to make myself feel better by making the ingredients feel better. (It didn’t work.)

It’s charmingly colorful when you pour everything together, but then when you mix it…

Urgh.

I found a handy website here, a University of Nebraska Food, Nutrition & Health page that correlates can sizes, such as #2, to useful measures, such as 20 oz. Alternatively, just buy whatever size can is standard nowadays, dump it into your mixture, and think retroactively “Gosh, that looks like an awful lot of pineapple.”

It looks like even more pineapple when you read the dire warning that Jell-O will fail if you add fresh or frozen pineapple. (I am honestly not sure whether canned qualifies as “fresh” or not. Guess we’ll find out?)

One of the things I found worst about this recipe was the way it glistened.

It doesn’t really come across in the photographs, but it was pretty creepy.

I was secretly hoping the pineapple would cause disastrous problems with the gelatin setting. But, it didn’t, everything unmolded quite easily. “Yay.”

The few ingredients needed for the frosting are a little more reasonable.

The frosting was rather thick, making me worry I’d damage the loaf. (Sadly, I didn’t damage the loaf.)

I went the extra foot — not the extra mile — and added pimento garnish with the walnuts; it would have benefited visually from a bed of lettuce or such to decorate around the base, but I didn’t feel like throwing away perfectly good leafy vegetables on this.

Slicing was kinda hard; the loaf wanted to squish rather than separate, and you can see the curds and pineapple still clinging to the knife.

This actually wasn’t quite as horrifying as I expected. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was unappealing. The more you ate, the less edible it became; my mouth just stopped letting me put more forkfuls in. But I think it was the lumpy texture more than the flavor that I really disliked. The sweetness of pineapple and lime jello really masked every other flavor, but there was nothing to hide the crunchy celery and walnuts in the gloppy fruit. (I didn’t even notice the cottage cheese.)

But it was bad enough that I threw most of it away, since it sat in the fridge for four days without being touched and I needed the shelf space. There’s nothing in this recipe, except perhaps pimentos, that wouldn’t be better off without all its loaf neighbors. Despite its widespread “appeal” (and I base that solely on how ridiculously easy it was for me to find it online — maybe it’s some sort of recipe meme, ALL YOUR LIME-WALNUT SALAD ARE BELONG TO US) this is not something that should be cooked, served, or eaten.

When he triumphantly discovered this in the list, I was baffled; I couldn’t remember ever seeing a retro recipe for scallops, especially scallops and bananas.

Learning that there weren’t any scallops didn’t really clarify anything.

Learning that this was supposed to be served as a “vegetable” was slightly unnerving.

Speaking of unnerving: is it just me, or is it awkward when your food cheerfully suggests itself as a main ingredient? This illustration is particularly bizarre, since there is a cheerful anthropomorphic banana offering itself for scalloping, but also dragging along a potato and carrot. If the banana’s intelligent enough to wear a hat, doesn’t that imply the root vegetables are also thinking, feeling creatures? (Does it count as cannibalism if a “vegetable” eats a vegetable?)

But hey, what’s a wacky food blog with no wacky food?

How to make BANANA SCALLOPS

Melted fat or salad oil
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1 egg, slightly beaten, or 1/4 cup evaporated milk
6 firm bananas
3/4 cup fine corn flake, bread or cracker crumbs or corn meal

USE ALL-YELLOW OR SLIGHTLY GREEN-TIPPED BANANAS

For deep-fat frying, have deep kettle 1/2 to 2/3 full of melted fat or salad oil.

For shallow frying, have 1 inch of melted fat or oil in frying pan.

Heat fat to 375°F., or until a 1-inch cube of bread will brown in about 40 seconds. Add salt to egg or undiluted evaporated milk. Peel bananas and slice crosswise into pieces 3/4 to 1 inch thick. Dip into egg or milk. Drain. Roll in crumbs or corn meal.

Deep-fat fry or shallow fry in the hot fat 1-1/2 to 2 minutes, or until brown and tender. Drain well. Serve very hot. Six servings.

The proposed menu really needs little commentary:

• Tomato Juice
• Hamburgers
• Banana Scallops
• Cauliflower
• Lettuce Salad
• Orange Sherbet
• Cookies
• Beverage

If this is company dinner, I feel bad for the everyday dinner.

We decided to go with the cornmeal option for our banana scallops, since we had some and it tends to just sit around being unused.

One advantage of recipes like this is that the kids get to help (on everything but the frying).

Even tiny hands can cut bananas, since they’re soft enough that a butter knife works fine!

Eggs are riskier, since Mini-Buzz tends to rapidly stir, sloshing things everywhere; he was fairly well-behaved today, though.

Coating the banana chunks in egg, flour, and cornmeal is quick and easy.

Frying is also pretty quick and easy. Normally when you fry things, they start to get brown and yucky as the cooking proceeds oil gets dirty; in this case, the first few were brown and yucky, and the rest were a lovely golden color. (Weird.)

They came out pretty nicely! You’ll recall that last week’s Rice and Cheese Balls had only moderate structural integrity, but the Banana Scallops held together very well. (Basically, this means that Buzz has accidentally convinced me that he’s in charge of frying things from now on. HA.)

Of course, that golden crispy exterior is purely visual, and the real important question is how does it taste…

Meh. If you like cornbread with warm bananas, then this is the dish for you! They might have been better with a finer cornmeal, since they had very crunchy outsides and very mushy insides. (Also, I think the banana pieces were somewhat too long; stick to 3/4 or 1-inch long, so you have single-bite chunks.)

DO NOT save leftovers, which will taste mushy, cold, and unpleasant.

Credit where credit is due: United Fruit Company created this recipe, and it was digitally shared with the world by bluwmongoose on Flickr. I mostly blame United Fruit Company.