1950's "Church" Banana Bread

I admit I always hated banana bread with a passion.  The dense, door stop quality, pudding consistency breads of my youth were just over the top with banana flavor and nothing else.  Coupled with an evil tendency to flare up my heartburn I soon shied away from banana bread for good.  You can imagine my discomfiture the other day when my wife said "Let's make banana bread".  "Yeah sure, I'll make it but you can eat it, I hate the stuff."  So as with anything else my wife suggests to eat I immediately spring into action with a search for a vintage recipe.  The only problem is there is no vintage recipe for banana bread.

Scalloped Apples & Sweet Potatoes

     In the realm of sweet potato recipes lives the Southern style marshmallow baked sweet potatoes that seem to occupy space on every holiday table in America... right next to the green bean casserole.  I have fought with this denizen of overindulgence for many a year as I cannot abide this sticky sweet concoction yet I love sweet potatoes and yearned to be able to set them free from a syrupy, gooey, marshmallow laden fate.  At first I tried mashed sweet potatoes with a praline topping, better but equally as sweet and almost akin to an uncrusted sweet potato pie.  Luckily this year, thanks to the Gutenberg Project, I was able to find this recipe.

A Christmas Story Meatloaf Dinner: Braised Sweet & Sour Cabbage

     I was in the mood for meatloaf after receiving my vintage Universal Chopper and my mind was immediately drawn to the movie "A Christmas Story" where the family is seen eating the same dinner every night, namely meatloaf, mashed potatoes and braised red cabbage.  So what better way to break in my new kitchen gadget than by recreating that dinner.

Diner Style Hashed Browned Potatoes

   I love writing about diner style and old sub shop recipes.  Part of it is the thrill of reconstructing a recipe that may have been lost to time had I not saved it, the other part is because this is the world I grew up in.  Being almost 43 I am allowed to have a hindsight perspective on life.  The world we live in now is not the world I grew up in and I'm not entirely sure we've progressed while marching to the never ending tune of progress.

A Chicken Salad Recipe to Rule Them All

     When I set out to create a chicken salad recipe it was for an idea I've been tossing around for some time, a sandwich/sub shop modeled after the ones that used to be in every neighborhood of Baltimore when I grew up.  This is not high end food, this is not hipster food, this is not $100 hamburgers.  What this is is just good old fashioned working man's food eaten for lunch or after a good time at the local bar.

Chicken Soup Recipe, Depression Era

     I've tried many ways of making chicken soup over the years and while they were all good they weren't fantastic I was always looking for something else.  This started as a research project into Depression Era cooking.  One of things that Herbert Hoover promised as president was "A chicken in every pot" and there's a reason for this, chicken was expensive, especially young chickens.  Chickens were kept for laying eggs and after 5 years when they stopped laying that's when they ended up as dinner.

Maryland Zucchini Crabcakes

When times were tough and you couldn't afford to buy crab meat this neat little recipe stood in for the Authentic Crab Cake.  They are delicious in their own right and would probably fool someone who wasn't a native Marylander but since I'm from Baltimore I can say they don't fool me.  Don't let this dissuade you from trying them though as it's a great new way to use zucchini.  You will have to shred the zucchini and place in a towel 1 cup and time.  Fold the towel and make a ball squeezing very tightly to get out as much water as possible.  If you skimp in this step your crabcakes will come out too damp.

Hungarian Pork With Sauerkraut

Eastern European countries have many ways to cook cabbage and pork.  My Polish/Russian grandparents cooked a dish called Kapusta that was a mixture of pork, cabbage and sauerkraut.  This dish being the Hungarian equivalent, it has some differences though.  The addition of tomatoes gives it a sweet kick to counter the vinegar taste of the sauerkraut and all is brought together with the ever present sour cream at the end.  This dish is more of a stew than a main dish and is best served in a nice wide bowl.  Leftovers can be frozen.  For the pork, get a cheap cut of meat like a picnic ham.  Use only the meaty part reserving the fat for use in another recipe.  Properly speaking, this dish is a Szekler recipe which originated with the Szekely people who live in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania.  My family descends from this group with Tamasi's being mentioned in various codexes from the 1300's as "Counts of the Szeklers" and having fought hard against the constant Turkish invasions.  The origins of the Szeklers are unclear and it is thought they are descendants of the Avars who settled in that area in late Roman times and were used as a border control by the later Byzantine Empire.  When the Magyars came later and settled Hungary the Szeklers continued their border control responsibilities. This recipe is from the New Brunswick Orthodox Church Cookbook printed in 1958.

Liptauer Cheese Spread

This is another one of those Hungarian dishes I found in my old Hungarian cookbook from New Brunswick, NJ printed in the 50's.  Lipto cheese is a sheep's milk cheese similar to feta but soft like cream cheese.  It's nigh on impossible to find here where I live but not to worry, Neufchatel cheese is a great substitute.  I used the Fresh Market brand of Neufchatel in making this recipe.  Traditionally Liptauer is a snack consumed while drinking beer.  It's served on toast points usually with thin sliced of Kolbas.  I used a Genoa salami instead but any kind of preserved stick pepperoni or summer sausage will work.  It's best to make this a day ahead and let the flavors meld in the refrigerator.

Eggplant Creole

Note: This recipe has been edited 12/18/14 from the original as I finally got it to come together the way the original was supposed to look like when finished.

This recipe is from a Crisco sponsored cookbook printed in the early 1920's.  When I first saw it I expected something spicy, after all it's Creole and Louisiana is known for it's fiery foods but in this case Creole seems to be mean cooked with tomatoes.  I made this recipe the way the original was laid out but immediately saw the need for some changes as the cooking directions are rather vague as vintage recipes are wont to be and it also calls for the boiling of the eggplant which was something of a disaster (We now boil the eggplant, see below).  Keep this in mind when you make it that this is the modified, kitchen tested recipe which is what sets this blog apart from other vintage recipe sites.  This recipe was a side dish in it's original form but by the 1930's the Great Depression had turned it into a main dish.  I ate it with a poached egg on top and it is both a nutritious and filling meal that doesn't cost that much.  This recipe lived on into the 1960's where it appears again in another of my cookbooks returning to it's roots as a side dish.

Summer Breeze Makes Me Feel Fine...

 

I love Florida.  While the rest of the country is stuck in freezing temperatures, the first indications of spring are here in Jacksonville.  The robins have returned along with other migratory birds and the lawn needs mowing for the first time this year.  On the other hand it's a harbinger of things to come, sweltering in the heat when it's 90+ degrees outside and dripping with humidity.

Glazed Pork Chops and Onions

This is a nifty little recipe that comes by way of an obscure cookbook printed by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in the 60's.  It was put together from submissions by Marylanders who sent in their cherished family recipes which have to date back farther than the 1960's.  This recipe serves as a reminder that there are more ways to cook onions than mere frying.  It was often popular in the vintage era to pre-boil onions then roast them in the oven.  This serves to bring out the sweetness of the onion especially with Bermuda Onions.  I've learned a couple of things from this recipe especially the nature of Bermuda Onions which are extremely hard to find in the States these days having been displaced by Granax variety onions grown in Vidalia, Ga., Walla-walla, Wa., Maui, etc.  Organic red (Spanish) onions are the same thing as the old Bermuda onions and readily substitute in any recipe calling for Bermuda Onions.  Another thing I learned was about onion sizes.  Onions as sold in stores currently are super jumbo sized compared to what was available in the vintage era.  It is best summed up this way: Small onion - 2oz, medium onion - 4oz, large onion - 8oz.  Most of the onions I test weighed at work today ran from 3/4 to a whole pound which is great if a recipe calls for 2 large onions diced, sliced, julienned or what have you but not so great when you need them whole.  I did manage to find 2, 1/2 pound organic red onions that worked perfectly in this recipe.  The sauce is interesting but mixes with the onion juice to taste oh so divine in the end.

Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco

I love it when ads chime on about so called experts and how they are singing the praises of whatever product being offered like a barbershop quartet.  Of course these were the days before we were so cleverly informed by our government of the alleged dangers of smoking.  All of the experts today agree like lemmings that smoking damages the health, but once again who are these experts?  For the sake of the ad they were the members of the tobacco buying consortium in the South so of course they're going to sing the praises of tobacco.  Lucky Strike differentiated themselves from the other cigarettes of the time period because they were made of 100% toasted burley tobacco rather than flue cured virginia.  What does this mean in laymans terms?  Burley has nutter slightly cocoa taste and a heavier nicotine kick while virginia tobacco is lighter and grassier with a new mown hay smell.  Before you ask, I know all this from being a pipe smoker and having smoked both types of tobacco in their purest forms. 

Kraft, Good "eatin' cheeses"

I'm not really sure why this ad has eatin' cheeses in parenthesis but usually that's the mark of a word that doesn't really mean what you think it does.  If I say cheese I'm talking of fermented milk that's cooked and makes lovely assortment of dairy products.  If I say "cheese" I might be talking about cheez whiz, 10% cheese, 90% whiz, i.e. a product that contains the name cheese but is anything but the real deal.  So when Kraft describes their cheeses as good "eatin' cheeses" I can only assume they are poking fun at the fact that they sell cheese like substance.  Well now, I think for the purposes of this ad that what Kraft used to produce and/or import was actually real cheese.

Not Everything is Better With Jell-o

In the 1950's Americans were so concerned with the threat of nuclear war that they saw fit to make even the food blast proof.  Jell-o answered the call and millions of housewives soon learned to encase their food in a Jell-o forcefield capable of withstanding the most punishing nuclear blasts.  Husbands soon tired of the Jell-o mania and started throwing the gelatinous concoctions out of house windows giving rise to a new UFO hysteria as innocent bystanders witnessed the unidentified flying dinners soaring across the sky.  By the early 1960's the Jell-o mania had subsided in favor of real dinners that did not need to be incarcerated in ground up hooves.

Ad: Eight O'Clock Coffee

1958 A&P Eight O'Clock Coffee

Ah, coffee in the morning what could be better?  How about coffee and chicory?  Adding chicory to coffee is a New Orleans tradition since time immemorial.  It started during the French Revolution when coffee imports were less due to the British blocade so the French took to roasting chicory, a native of the endive family, grinding it up and adding it to coffee.  It added a sweet flavour and has a laxative quality when drunk in larger amounts.

Noodles And Pot Cheese

Noodles and Pot cheese is a meal that my dad has been talking about for awhile now.  He remembered as a kid growing up in New Brunswick, NJ his parents going out to the dairy farm down the road and one of the things they would buy every so often was pot cheese.  It took me a bit of looking but pot cheese in essence is just a curdled milk cheese, a way for farmers to use up leftover milk after the cream has separated and been skimmed off.  While skim milk is what is traditionally used in this recipe, it's important to remember that unless you've had organic skim milk you've never really experienced what real skim milk is.  The commercial dairy skim milk is little better than powdered milk mixed with alot of water and lacks the taste and richness of true skim milk which is closer to 2% milk in flavor and richness.  So if you're going to do this, go organic and get some organic skim milk.  You will also need some cheesecloth and a colander.  1 quart of milk makes enough pot cheese for 4 servings and it needs to be used up within a day as it doesn't keep well.

The Baked Bean Spammich

I don't know how of God's green Earth anyone can find this appetizing.  The ad says "Husband home for lunch?... Pamper him like this"  Pamper?  If my wife served this to me, and she's from the Philippines so she's served me some weird stuff, I think I'd just start going out for lunch.  And what is that on the side, a "man-style salad of lettuce, canned peach and cottage cheese."  Oh, thank you for cleaning that up because I could have swore it looked like sliced croquet ball on a bed of vaguely green crepe paper and topped with foaming insulation.  This really deserves to be in the gallery of regrettable food because even the artistic side of it is lacking.  Now don't get me wrong, I like Spam, I don't buy it so often because of the price but it's nice sliced thin and fried crisp with breakfast.  Occasionally I might entertain having a spam sandwich but I'm in no way ready to take the plunge and have spam sushi like in Hawaii. 

Baked BBQ Pork Chops & Fried Apples

This is an easy recipe to do for dinner one night.  Make up the BBQ sauce and just store it in the fridge and you'll have it around whenever you need it.  The sauce is a take on Carolina Low-Country Sauce and being such is much thinner than the thick sauces sold in the store.  Store bought sauces, in addition to being full of chemical garbage, are finishing sauces, not meant to be cooked with as they turn into chewey goop.  This sauce will thicken a bit while cooking in the oven and after separating the fat can be used as a garnish for the chops.

1950's Beef Stroganoff Recipe

Most everyone loves the beefy creamy taste of Beef Stroganoff.  A kind of one pot casserole cooked on the stove it satisfies a family and uses less electricity (or gas) to cook than a traditional casserole cooked in the oven.  This recipe will be similar to many that populate the internet with the exception that it is back to basics with fresh wholesome ingredients rather than an over-reliance on canned mushroom soup like so many recipes that I see.  Beef tenderloin can be found on sale sometimes but we usually buy a large pack of it from BJ's Wholesale Club.  If it's too much money to be considered then you can substitute Sirloin Steak instead just increase the simmering time.