A thread popped up on one of the boards that I frequent, about antique cookbooks and actually using them.

“Hey,” I thought, “I have several antique cookbooks, and this could be fun!”

So I went straight to the oldest one I have, published in 1908. It was probably my great-grandmother’s, and was handed down to me through my great-aunt’s line. It still has her juvenile-delinquent pencil drawings on the figures showing the cuts of meat, putting a saddle or a draft harness on each animal. She always was a rebel, my Aunt Muriel, and a kick in the pants.

That cookbook was called:

The White House Cook Book

A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home

containing

Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, etc.

I found surprisingly little that I could use in it. I wanted a dish that showed its age, but which we could still eat. A whole lot of it revolved around large families and dinner parties and situations for which I am simply not equipped. While I’d love to corn my own beef, I’ve looked into it before and learned that saltpeter is really hard to find these days. And I’d have to scale that back anyway, as I won’t be corning a whole side of beef at a time anyway.

I will also rarely need to call on this book to make terrapin soup, although I could see squirrel stew coming in handy once in a while considering my hobbies. I will not be making eyewash from eggs, nor Grandmother’s Universal Liniment from scratch. No, I can rely on the local Walgreen’s for my modern-day liniment needs.

There was a startling paucity of vegetable recipes, and of those that I could find, so many were so extremely overdone. An otherwise promising-looking recipe for Cucumber A La Creme called for boiling them until they were soft? Boiled cucumbers? I boggle.

But I did find the following likely dish:

Corn Pudding

This is a Virginia dish. Scrape the substance out of twelve ears of tender, green, uncooked corn (it is better scraped than grated, as you do not get those husky particles which you cannot avoid with a grater); add yolks and whites, beaten separately, of four eggs, a teaspoonful of sugar, the same of flour mixed in a tablespoonful of butter, a small quantity of salt and pepper, and one pint of milk. Bake about half or three-quarters of an hour.

So that’s more or less what I did. I cut it roughly in half, because there are only three of us, and of course, I couldn’t find green corn, but I figured yellow would do. I didn’t measure much, flying by the seat of my pants like people did then.

 

 

It started to look familiar by the time I had it mixed up and ready to pop in the oven.

 

 

And when it came out, it was clear. Yup, I’d reinvented creamed corn. It was slightly eggy, but still good, and perfectly normal.

The next one though, oh the next one. I don’t know what exactly I thought I was smoking, but I thought it would be fun to jump to the 70s, and pick something that totally showcased that poor, misbegotten decade. Yes folks, I made a jello mold.

And not just any jello mold.

No; I made jellied meat.

For this culinary masterpiece, I went to the 1972 Good Housekeeping One-Dish Dinners. There is not a doubt in my mind that I have this book through some sort of diabolical plan of my mother; maybe she slipped it into a box of perfectly normal, self-respecting books when we were cleaning out my grandparents things. Surely she couldn’t have made anything in it. Right?

This creation was actually titled Shimmering Chicken Mold. It contained chicken, ham, grapes, and watercress. Grapes. In chicken. Yes.

I cheated on this one a little too. I got me a canned ham (perfectly period, and not the cheating part), one of those roasted deli chickens, and spinach, since I couldn’t find watercress.

I dutifully halved my grapes, cubed my meat, and layered things into the closest I could come to a salad mold, a mediium-sized mixing bowl. There was a whole lot of sitting and waiting for gelatin to set with this recipe, which I bet was one of the appeals during this decade, or at least in this cookbook, which was perpetually bragging on how little time each recipe took.

 

 

Because I too have a significant evil streak, I didn’t tell the kids anything about my little social experiment. When they saw me unveil the thing, gasps of horror drowned out the television. John said, jokingly, “Is that Jello?” He was completely unnerved when I told him that yes, and it was meat jello no less.

 

 

We all talked a little, between snorting laughs about just how wrong the 70s were. He thought something like this had to come from the hippies, but no, I don’t think so. I think this came more from a generation of women brought up by full-time homemakers, but suddenly thrust into the working world, and trying to balance that with maintaining a 50s-ideal of a perfect household. Yeah, I might go off the deep and and make meat jello for my guests too, if that were dumped on me without notice.

They were sports, I have to give them that. We were all laughing too hard to eat at several points, but I really did want them to try it. And they did, and pronounced it disgusting. I ate more than they did; it wasn’t bad at first, if you could get your head away from the concept, but so salty, and so, so bland. Greens are simply not meant to be suspended in essense of chicken. Sweet bobble-headed Mary, was that shit bad. I gave the kids their leave to leave it, but they had to eat their corn before they fixed anything for themselves.

And I may have discovered the trick to getting the kids to eat their vegetables without complaint; make something truly horrifying, and the corn will seem positively mouth-watering in contrast.

And the worst part? I took all of the chickeny-hammy goodness out to the dogs. Who looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Well, maybe I had, but I was pretty damn funny.