When the back of the box isn't enough

From 1966, I give you Betty Crocker's Cake and Frosting Mix Book:

Notice that's cake AND frosting mix. They tell you all kindsa stuff you can do with frosting mixes too, like making meringues or fudge or fondant out of frosting mix, or "Children's Surprises" such as Cheerios-Peanut Butter Fudge Balls, Cheerios-Fudge Confections, or Frozen Cheerios Squares. (Yes, Betty Crocker is the official imaginary spokeslady of General Mills, which makes Cheerios. But GM makes other cereals too, don't they?
Not as far as this book is concerned.)

Anyway. I'm fascinated by cookbooks which purport to tell one how to cook when really they aren't telling you to do anything of the sort. These days, we have the Cake Mix Doctor, a presumably very nice lady who advises readers to do unspeakable things with cake mixes, often to the point of adding enough extra ingredients to them that you could have made a perfectly good dessert without using the cake mix in the first place. And then there is the More is Better school of cake-mix doctoring, where inconceivable amounts of sugar and artificial flavor are combined into a sinkhole of cloying sweetness, like this "Strawberry Creme Cake" which I actually saw some crazy lady making on TV--strawberry cake mix (ever tried that? If you're not diabetic, probably not), a can of strawberry nectar instead of water (that's another 200 calories), strawberry jam between the layers, and a can of that glycerin-rich, gluey strawberry frosting to top it off.

And speaking of TV cooking shows, can I just say that I saw a lady making cinnamon toast on one a few months ago, and she actually told people you didn't have to use cinnamon if you didn't want to. That some people liked the way it spices up the toast, but that plain sugar was good too. I submit to you that when cinnamon toast without cinnamon is the topic of a TV cooking show, we have too many cooking shows on TV.

Anyway. None of that here. This book has some dumb ideas, sure, but it also spends a lot of time suggesting harmless ways to decorate cakes (dig the Tootsie Rolls on the chocolate cowboy cake!), and has extensive sections on frosting techniques. It also contains what strikes me as a completely superfluous section on "basics." If you can't follow the three steps on the box, I fail to see how two chapters of additional reading are going to help you. Still, we are treated to the Q&A "Why Isn't My Cake Perfect?" (NINE different categories of failure are possible--and you used a CAKE MIX!!! Who's the real failure here?). We also get the 911 call "I Have a Frosting Problem!" Two potential problems for "creamy-type" frostings (too thick and too thin), four for "fluffy-type" (not "beating up," stickiness (?), rubberiness, and "disintegration," an alarming concept to say the least).

More as the week progresses and my meds kick in.

Apropos of nothing

Half a year away from Halloween, yet I still feel compelled to post this image. I just love the bag. Also, you have to admit the tagline is ominously funny. It wouldn't have had such a sinister ring in 1954, of course.

I suppose this post does at least continue the theme of my craptacular image scanning. I think I've apologized enough for that over the years, so I won't do it here. You can get your lovingly-photographed, Photoshopped and touched-up images just about anywhere on the Web these days. And that's great. It's just not what I do.

A How-To

A very cool thing about 50's magazines is they assumed women knew how to knit--I mean knit, like, whole sweaters out of fingering weight yarn on size 2 needles knitting. So they often have patterns and in fact when they have patterns they tend to have half a dozen or so.

I'm putting this one up because it looks kind of cool and trendy and in line with what the young people like these days (those who knit, anyway). It's a remarkably simple pattern which, in the interest of accuracy, I'm not going to try to re-type here, but if you are interested in it, just click on the image of the instructions and you will get a larger version that should be readable.

I'm not starting this at the moment because I swore not to start anything new until I finish my daughter's latest cardigan; it has already been rendered superfluous by spring temperatures but I want to complete it before she outgrows it. Maybe in September, the cap?

From the October 1954 Family Circle.
























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New blog!

And it's not one of mine, even!

Kitchen Retro has fun stuff and covers some of the same quote-unquote recipes featured here, which gives a nice sense of perspective, I think. She also has a great series of how-to's for those of you into making your own marshmallow animals (all of you, I hope). Plus, Party Meatloaf is already in her blogroll, so naturally I am returning the favor.

More photos soon--my scanner was buried under DVDs of Blue's Clues all weekend; sorry.

Flickr Pool

No, I don't have anything there--how do people find time to blog *and* take pictures *and* post them on Flickr?

But anyway: vintage cookbooks.

Somthing greasy this way comes

Yes, it's Halloween in April. Almost as scary as breaded, fried pork chops, we have Crisco-Fried Croquettes:


You make them by combining tuna fish and white sauce into a sufficiently viscous lump, then frying it. Serve with fried potatoes. The "salad" appears to be a bell pepper stuffed with macaroni-mayonnaise salad.

The doctors Crisco talked to said it was OK to eat this way "seven days a week!" Presumably they were all cardiologists who needed to make a boat payment in a hurry.





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