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.

Did you know that meat tenderizer is made from enzymes found in papaya? Weird but true. So really, I could be using fresh papaya chunks here, instead of generic meat tenderizer. (But guess what I had in the kitchen cupboard…)

Buzz butterflied the entire hunk of meat, making two (fairly large!) steaks. Seasoning was pretty simple — salt and pepper, in addition to the meat tenderizer. (One steak also got prime rib rub, just to see if that significantly improved the flavor.)

And, he threw it under the broiler for a while.

I still insisted on finding a real recipe to go on the side, though. Surprisingly, I don’t have many vegetable recipes bookmarked, either, but we did manage to agree on Harvest Succotash.

HARVEST SUCCOTASH — Melt 3 tbsp. bacon fat; blend in 2 tbsp. flour, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/8 tsp. pepper. Stir in 1/2 c. liquid from No. 2 can Stokely’s Finest Cut Green Beans, or No. 303 can Golden Whole Kernel Corn. Boil and stir 2 min.; add 1/2 c. cream or evaporated milk. Add drained beans and corn, heat. 8 servings.

I will pause here for a moment and admit that I don’t really understand how this is succotash. As I understand it, succotash consists of corn and lima beans. There are versions with other beans like kidney, navy, etc. — almost any bean you can buy dried in a bag seems to be appropriate, if not entirely traditional. Green beans, however, despite being “beans,” are really completely different vegetables.

However, I don’t really like lima beans. This means a couple of things:

1. I am not an expert on succotash, since it generally is sitting there full of lima beans saying “you won’t enjoy this!”
2. I’m more than happy to follow Mrs. Irene L. Dout’s prize-winning succotash recipe, which calls for green rather than lima beans.

Easy enough, right?

Making a roux of bacon fat, flour, and canned vegetable juice is rather odd.

For one thing, it smells of canned vegetables.

And for some reason (probably the bacon fat) it took a while to get to the appropriate consistency. I cooked fat and flour and vegetable juice for a while and nothing happened — then suddenly, BAM, it looked like wallpaper paste.

Quick, add the cream!

It turned into a creamy sauce. (I first wrote “nice, creamy sauce” but realized that isn’t necessarily fair, since I haven’t tasted it yet.)

And then the vegetables got dumped on top. And at this point I realized that the photograph in the advertisement was pretty misleading — there’s no way the vegetables are going to stay that shiny and clean once this is mixed up.

I was right. Doesn’t look terrible, but doesn’t look like the picture.

This was a really, really tasty meal!

The tenderizer did an admirable job of tenderizing; you could tell which parts of the steak had gotten only a light dose, and were chewier as a result. Overall, though, it was a decent steak.

I was expecting the succotash to taste like glue-covered Veg-All (horrors!), but rather than bland glop, the sauce was a pleasant, creamy accent to the vegetables. It ended up tasting somewhat like creamed corn with green beans mixed in. Publix does a very good canned corn, and their canned green beans aren’t bad either; I think poor-quality vegetables could easily kill this succotash, though. (Well done, Mrs. Dout!)

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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!

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.

You wouldn’t expect this, though, would you? Found in the Flickr stream of Shelf Life Taste Test, “Delight Fantastic” is apparently a dubious marriage of cream cheese and mini marshmallows. Actually it’s a pretty busy dish, they’ve also included gelatin and lady fingers!

To be fair, I don’t know if I would have been able to come up with a more descriptive name. “Colored bits and marshmallows in lemony cream gelatin” doesn’t have the same zing. It really doesn’t call to mind elegant, easy, light, AND dazzling — you need a name like “Awesome Superness” or “Terrific Wonderful” or “Super Happy Fun Time.” I suppose “Delight Fantastic” has the dubious advantage of being a silly pun.

1. Dissolve 1 3-oz. pkg. lime-flavored gelatin and 1 3-oz. pkg. raspberry-flavored gelatin using 1-1/2 cups of boiling water for each. Pour each into an 8″ square pan. Chill overnight; cut in cubes.

2. Dissolve 1 3-oz. pkg. of lemon-flavored gelatin using 1 cup of boiling water. Cool, while you soften 1 8-oz. pkg. of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Add gelatin mixture gradually blending until smooth. Chill until slightly thickened.

3. Fold in cubed gelatin, and 6 cups (1 pkg.) of Kraft Miniature Marshmallows. Pour into 9″ spring form pan, lined with 2 3-oz. pkgs. of split ladyfingers.

Chill until firm. Serves 10 to 12.

I firmly believe that recipes like these were written by a bunch of Mad Men characters while drunk (and/or stoned). I can absolutely picture an episode where they’re up against a deadline, the peons create a series of recipes to feature a company’s products (“Let’s add gelatin IN the gelatin! BRILLIANT.“), Peggy snarkily observes, “None of you have ever cooked anything, have you?” and Don saves the day with a profound soliloquy about marshmallows and family.

And then Betty throws a plate of Delight Fantastic at somebody.

Back in our modern world, it’s time to make Jell-O — lots of it!

I had lime on hand, but ended up using strawberry instead of raspberry.

I realized have a lot of gelatin sitting around, including vegetarian versions (based on agar agar) for when I make kosher gummy snacks for the kids’ lunches at summer camp. So this bizarre recipe let me clean out the cupboards a little bit.

My daughter took the majority of these photographs; her goal in life is to be an artist, and she loves playing with the camera. Digital photography is perfect for her more “experimental” shots.

Mixing Jell-O with cream cheese led to another culinary “discovery” (in this case, something I’ve repeatedly demonstrated in both retro and regular recipe attempts) — liquids and lipids don’t like to mix. Stir all you want, you’ll just get small lumps of fat in a water soup.

Finally I gave up and asked Buzz to run it through the blender; it was smooth and well-mixed in under a minute. (And oooooh did it taste nice.)

But then we had to mix in the marshmallows and Jell-O cubes, and we found a problem. The recipe called for a ridiculous quantity of marshmallows — 6 cups, which was way more than the approximately 2 cups of lemony cream cheese mixture. So we ruined the tasty lemony cream cheese by using it as a paste to stick a bag of marshmallows together.

And we ran into more trouble: the Jell-O cubes weren’t quite solid enough to endure being folded into the other components. They sort of smeared around. I stopped using the spatula for a moment because I was afraid I was crushing them too much.

In that brief pause, Buzz said, “I know!” and started mixing with his hands. All this accomplished was getting goo all over his hands instead of the spatula.

There is something about how glisteny this is that just disturbs me.

Oh well. Time to put it into the lady fingers, I guess. (eww!)

Spending the night in the refrigerator did not improve the Delight Fantastic. I at least did some productive work in the meantime, but it just sat there getting more soggy-looking.

Every step of the way I seemed to find something that made me laugh at this completely silly recipe. When I un-molded the Delight (or should it be the Fantastic?) after 24 hours, it immediately puffed out an inch around its perimeter. It’s like I’d asked it to wear a pair of jeans that was just a little too small, then after a long day it finally got to take them off — foomp!

After that, I was a little worried it would just continuing expanding horizontally until it oozed off the plate and became a strange, gelatinous pancake; however, it held its post-mold shape until we were ready to have dessert a few hours later.

I refused to serve this on a stack of balloons, by the way. That risks turning “elegant ‘n easy” into “briefly explosive, then all over the floor.”

This is probably the most excited I’ve seen the kids get about any of the retro recipes; they know these things are risky, although to their credit they always taste a bite. But they loved every part of Delight Fantastic — the name just sounded so ridiculously good, the bright colors, the Jell-O making process, the marshmallows… they knew this was going to be the Best Thing Ever.

Especially when I told them they could have as much as they want. (I looked generous and kind, while secretly knowing they weren’t going to really enjoy the mushy sugar overdrive enough to eat it all.)

The marshmallows totally killed this. Oh, wow, those marshmallows. They were in every bite, and they had soaked up moisture from the surrounding gelatins so they tasted squishy and weird. Even the kids quickly got tired of it; my daughter picked all the marshmallows out.

Opinion was divided regarding the lady finger “crust.” Buzz thought bites that included lady fingers were the only edible parts, since the dry spongy texture contrasted with the slimy gelatinous innards; I thought they were too dry and flavorless, perhaps because my taste buds were hiding from the overly sweet filling.

I will admit, it was sort of fun to make, in that “wow this is going to be so horrible” way. Each step just built up the silliness; like a bad movie that you just can’t walk out of because you want to see what stupid plot twist is coming next. It would almost be worth making to take to a potluck supper just so you’d have a great story to tell everyone at the party. “Yeah, I thought it would be an elegant centerpiece, but it’s really sad looking, isn’t it? Haha!”

If you ever try making this:

1. Check if there’s any other options… such as, perhaps, not making it.
2. Use only as much water as the recipe calls for (I used slightly more, following the package directions), and refrigerate the Jell-O as long as possible.
3. There’s still time to reconsider. Maybe you can just bring cupcakes to the office holiday party?
4. Use less marshmallows and more lemon-cheese mixture. (Look at the original recipe picture — it’s lots of yellow, not lots of white.)
5. Throw it away. Seriously. People like a nice cheese plate or assorted vegetables.

Wow. Just… wow.

“In five Army surveys, Banana Cream Pie rates as a top GI favorite! [Are you surprised?]“

What surprises me is that there have been multiple Army surveys about pie preference. (Presumably, they were interested in more than just pie. Desserts in general, perhaps.)

We decided to make this for a quick-n-easy dessert one weekend, and the kids were quite excited since the recipe was easily within their skill level. All they needed me for was baking the crust (although I also ended up making the pudding after they got bored while slicing bananas).

BANANA CREAM PIE

Cream pie filling (2 to 3 cups)
1 baked (8 or 9-inch pie shell)
2 to 3 ripe bananas*

* Use fully ripe bananas … yellow peel flecked with brown.

For cream pie filling, use a commercial pudding mix and follow package directions, or use your own favorite recipe. Cool filling thoroughly. Cover bottom of pie shell with small amount of cooled filling. Peel and slice bananas. Add alternate layers of ripe banana slices and filling. Top with sweetened whipped cream and additional ripe banana slices, if desired. Makes 1 (8 or 9-inch) pie.

It’s not an impressive recipe, but it’s also not bad. Nice fresh bananas help add something to the vanilla pudding filling, somehow making it taste more like banana pudding. Still, I’d be surprised if this is the banana cream pie recipe that would make a GI giddy — I have tasted made-from-scratch banana pudding, and it blows boxed pudding out of the water. You’d think the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita)
could find a better version to really make their fruit shine. Commercial pudding mix, really?

1-1/2 cups Ann Page Elbow Macaroni
1 cup White House Milk
1 cup water
1-1/2 cups soft bread crumbs
1 tablespoon melted butter
2 tablespoons chopped green pepper
1/2 teaspoon Ann Page Pepper
1-1/2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1-1/2 tablespoons grated onion
2 cups grated cheese (1/2 pound)
3/4 teaspoon salt
Ann Page Paprika
2 eggs, well beaten

Cook macaroni according to package directions; drain. Heat evaporated milk and water; pour over bread crumbs; add remaining ingredients except eggs. Add bread crumb mixture to well-beaten eggs; combine with macaroni. Pour into buttered loaf pan; bake in moderate oven, 350° F., for 50 minutes or until loaf is firm. Garnish with broiled tomatoes and parsley, if desired. 6 servings.

As usual, I substituted liberally for Ann Page’s brand-name recommendations. Fun side note: the White House Milk Company was a subsidiary of A&P for a while, making evaporated milk. But when researching the company, I came across this image….

But that is some seriously nasty smoke coming out of their smokestacks. I’m assuming it is from some sort of boiler to pasteurize, sterilize, and/or evaporate the milk… but I’m also assuming some of that particulate pollution ended up wafting back into the factory. Yum!

Anyhow, you’re here for the retro cooking, not retro pollution. Here are the poor ingredients, little suspecting the trauma they’re about to undergo…

Note: you can use 2 cups of milk in place of the evaporated milk plus water. Y’know, if you’re crazy enough to want to try this yourself.

Mixing everything together just was not appetizing at all. For some reason, a fair number of retro recipes go through a stage where they look like barf.

Some never get beyond that stage.

Thankfully, it looked a lot less disturbing once it was mixed with macaroni and poured in the loaf pan.

Overall, preparation was really easy. It does need to “bake” for an awfully long time, presumably since it is unnecessarily liquid. (Really, 1 cup of milk and 1 egg should be enough.)

But out it came eventually! Removal from the pan wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped, since a few corners decided to stick. However, that gave me a chance to work on puzzle-building skills while we broiled tomato halves in the oven with a sprinkle of salt, pepper, and Parmesan.

Garnished with the extra parsley and a few tomatoes, it actually looked pretty elegant. For a baked macaroni loaf, at least.

No surprise, this was basically a macaroni casserole with bits of green pepper in it. That meant the kids enjoyed it. There was some sort of subtle weirdness to the flavor, though. We couldn’t pin down whether it was from the egg, the parsley, or the green pepper, or possibly a bit of each. None of these is a typical mac-n-cheese ingredient, with good reason.

I probably won’t make this specific recipe again. The one nice thing about this was that it used a loaf pan, creating far fewer leftovers than a typical casserole dish — but that didn’t make up for the meh flavor, or the ridiculous “meatless meat loaf” advertising angle. This is absolutely nothing like a meatloaf.

White House Milk factory image from the Milwaukee Public Library. “Meatless” meat loaf recipe courtesy of Retrospace.

The recipe, posted to Flicr by Cowtools, is a suggested use of your OSTERIZER. (We’ll pretend my KRUPS blender is actually an OSTERIZER.)

Now, according to the recipe illustration, this is supposed to make a septagonal pie.

I’m not kidding, count the sides. I thought I was too tired, because it sure LOOKED like an octagon but I just couldn’t get the edges to add up. And for extra trippy goodness, it’s got five triangles radiating from the middle, making easy serving implausible. Since I believe that pi and pie are intricately linked, I instead approximated the pie as a circle. Reverse calculus! (Buzz tried to discuss theorems about the constructability of polygons at this point, which is when I realized we should probably just apologize for the mathiness and return you to your regularly scheduled retro recipe…)

The crust and chocolate garnish are pretty straightforward. The orange velvet part requires some overly complicated instructions.

3/4 cup whipping cream
3 eggs, separated
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup hot water
3/4 cup sugar
6 oz. can orange concentrate
1/2 slice lemon, peeled
Dash of salt
2 tbsp. sugar for egg whites
9″ chocolate wafer pieshell

Method: Prepare your favorite chocolate wafer pie shell and set aside. Soften gelatin in cold water. Dissolve in hot water. Put the cream in the OSTERIZER container. Cover and mix at Lo Speed until thick. Spoon into a cup. Put egg yolks in glass container with any of the cream that adheres to the blades. Cover and run at Lo Speed until lemon colored. With the OSTERIZER running, add gelatin, sugar, salt, lemon, and orange concentrate, through the feeder cap opening in the cover. Turn to Hi Speed and mix until smooth. Beat egg whites with a rotary beater until foamy. Gradually add 2 tablespoons sugar. Fold the orange mixture into the egg whites. Fold in the whipped cream. Pour into chocolate wafer crust. Chill until set. Garnish with chocolate bits.

Yield: 9-inch pie

You’ll notice all those emphasized bits are cleverly interwoven descriptions of the wonderful feature of your lovely OSTERIZER blender. It has two speeds and an opening in the cover. You’ll also notice the speeds are named “Hi” and “Lo” — don’t want to confuse the fragile housewife brain with too many complicated letters…

I digress. When everything is dumped into the blender and blended at whatever speed it needs, it’s poured into my favorite chocolate wafer pie shell and chilled. Really not that hard.

However, I will note: don’t use your blender to make whipped cream. I thought it would be easy, but it turned out that a top layer was perfectly whipped, a middle layer which was partially solidified but mostly liquid, and a bottom layer (most in contact with the blades) was thoroughly curdled. The partially-whipped cream would have been fine, but chunks of fat are extremely disgusting in whipped cream; I had to whip up more with my mixer to replace it, before folding everything together.

I added some chocolate curls to the top. (Eight of them. Take that, assymetry.)

The taste and consistency is exactly what you’d expect from orange juice, whipped cream, egg whites, and a bit of gelatin. But the amount of ingredients and work required for is crazy, considering that you would get the same result with orange Jell-O whipped and folded with whipped cream — which has the additional advantage of no raw eggs for the egg-wary.

It’s also really a Yellow Velvet Pie; a few drops of red food coloring would have helped.

If you’ve got time on your hands and an OSTERIZER that’s gathering dust, this might be worth trying. It certainly tasted fine However, the recipe certainly was created by an appliance company trying to oversell its product. Blenders are great for a few things, but not everything.