If Henry Kissinger was Petite, Pretty and Black

Why is it that in the 1970s photo re-touching was only applied by secret agents to either erase or add shady political characters to grainy Soviet balcony gatherings? Sure, it wasn’t always great; the non-person often left behind an inexplicable gap in a tight line-up and their shadow. But could this technology have also been put to use for occasions such as this? What is that gentleman on top of the author’s umbrella doing sticking a knife into his head? Could that be the author’s husband, Lee Elder? Is he trying to tell us something?

Sadly, the bizarre photo cropping is not the only odd thing about this book. To wit: the blurbs on the flyleaf:

“For many years, I have wondered why someone did not publish a ‘Favorite Recipes from the Tour’ book. Now, we have one. In its own way, it is very revealing as it lets us know what really soothes the appetites of our favorite people.

These man who play this game we all love so much, seem to enjoy everything from fish sticks to Coquille Ste. Jaques; Kentucky Fried to Poulet en Cocotte Bonne Femme; tacos to Carne Asada a la Tampiqueña. At each stop along the way, they have their favorite spots and learn to enjoy what is the specialty of the locale.

When they have a chance to go into their own kitchens, though, and say ‘Now, here is what I’d really like to have for dinner,’ it is interesting to see what they do choose.

Whatever, the Rose Elder Golfer’s Cookbook is a welcome addition to the bookshelf.”

— Tom Place (PGA Tour)

Really, Tom? There exists a man on this planet who actually asks for “Rose’s Own Clean the Refrigerator Stew”? (page 149) According to this book, what these well-paid PGA Tour professionals crave are not the fancy foreign foods they eat while away, but "Congealed Salad." Whatever. 

 There’s this from Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times): 

“You can go to your pro if you like to get a recipe for that loop in your backswing. I want his wife’s recipe for Tripe A La Mode De Caen, garnee sous cloche. Who wants Chicken Kiev when they can get Chicken Doral? I mean, why should I settle for chili dogs when Lee Elder can get Pompano-in-a-bag?”

Why, indeed. Curiously, none of these recipes is in the book, so he’s going to have to find another way to get them out of his pro’s wife. Likewise, the fabled “Pompano-in-a-bag” is also not listed, so we’ll all have to just settle for chili dogs.

There are 4 recipes for meatloaf, however, including the charmingly named “Dale’s Mother’s Meat Loaf” which comes with this note: “After several meat loaf recipes after Dale and I were first married, he finally asked me to get his mother’s recipe…and here it is!” That’s one recipe for a happy marriage, folks.

Finally, a glimpse at Phil Musick’s author bio on the back flyleaf gives us a clue as to the general “spirit of ‘75” air that guides the crazy in this book. It begins:

“If Henry Kissinger was petite, pretty, black and somewhat less busy, he would be Rose Elder.”

The people of Cambodia, Chile and Argentina probably agree.

The Golfer’s Cookbook, Rose Elder, 1977

Also from this book: What A Load Of Bull, Booze Cake, Clean The Refrigerator Stew

“Is that a brain?!”

“Oh, wait — it’s that white broccoli, isn’t it.” — Anonymous 7 year-old.

This may indeed look like it takes hardly any time at all to prepare — get yourself a head of cauliflower and bang it on a plate with a bit of obligatory parsley around the edges — but for the “woman in a hurry” this cook book is written for, it is rather disingenuous.

While the giant raw vegetable can be made in a jiffy (after all, nature has done most of the work for you), procuring the ethnic props to serve it with takes rather more time. First one has to scour the second-hand shops in an Eastern European neighborhood of your choice to find a pristine-condition doll in traditional garb, and then steal a nice large serving platter from a museum of antiquities. Then you have to wait until an elderly relative kicks the bucket so you can inherit the silver serving fork and plate.

This shouldn’t be a problem, however, since raw cauliflower takes a while to decompose. It’s not like it’s going to go cold or anything.

Quick Dishes For A Woman In A Hurry, Culinary Arts Institute, 1982

Beet-Pineapple Mold and Other Perfect Salads

 In his foundational text on the subject, The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst notes that “typography exists to honor content.” He goes on to say: “when type is poorly chosen, what the words say linguistically and what the letters imply visually are disharmonious, dishonest, out of tune.”

As far as page layouts go, this one isn’t bad. There is proportion, balance, an easy line for the eye to follow. The recipe titles are clear; there is enough white space to lend a certain grace and clarity to the page. The typographer has utilized italics, all-caps, tab spaces and hyphens with a practiced and subtle eye. The page as a whole exhibits classic depths of margin and gutter. Clearly, a professional is at work and we should rightly take a moment to applaud what usually goes — by design — unnoticed. It is typographic poetry.

It’s a damn shame the actual words constitute such shit.

Salad Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1969

Suckling Pig

This particular suckling pig was procured from the little-publicized Livestock Foodstuffs Agency which provides toothsome-looking models for culinary photography. For some animals, whose only other avenue in life is a factory farm, it can be an appealing career choice, though it does come tinged with the occupational hazard of actually being cooked and eaten in the course of doing your job. For this reason, insurance rates run high, a cost passed on to the consumer. 

Not every hopeful beast is chosen, of course; a high priority is placed on a blemish-free and succulent appearance. Job training differs species to species — suckling pigs practice the apple-in-the-mouth pose under strict tutelage so that they may remain still, often balanced on a spit or serving platter for hours at a time. Many find the experience of being slathered in barbecue sauce quite relaxing, especially when it is rubbed in by a sympathetic food stylist. 

Despite the potential rewards that attend this profession it remains unregulated, though unionization has improved conditions in recent years with a set fee schedule and the provision of regular bathroom breaks and worker’s compensation packages for those nicked and burned in the line of duty. Sadly even this is sometimes not enough to forestall ruthless food editors from abusing their employees as one can plainly see from this example. Fortunately, the mandatory Livestock Foodstuffs Agency Life Insurance policy will provide for his porcine wife and piglets for a period of three years or until any exercise their right to sacrifice themselves for bacon.

The Art of Carving, House and Garden, 1959

In Your Face!

 Bukkakacake 

Serves Four.

If the above makes sense to you, you are a Perv and spend far too much time on the internet. ‘Nuff said.

Grand Diplôme Cooking Course, Volume 3, 1971

Also from these books: Sweetbreads Niquette, Your Goose Is Cooked, Vatel’s Haddock Up To Here, Frankfurter Salad

Salmon Avocado Mold

In 1969 some prescient folks at Better Homes and Gardens saw that the generation soon to be known as the Baby Boomers comprised the bulk of the demographic their cook books were aimed at. Thinking ahead, they decided to include as many recipes as possible for the toothless, the gummy, the denture-set. By blending, whizzing, creaming and smashing normally solid ingredients and then reconstituting them as semi-solids in non-threatening shapes (helped along by plenty of gelatin), they managed to put the fear of God into their customers, who all flocked to their dentists and invested in really expensive preventive orthodontia to forestall the possibility they would ever have to face such foodstuffs before death relieved them of the chance they’d be force-fed them in a nursing home.

Exhibit A: “A spectacular salad for a foursome is the Salmon Avocado Mold. Frosted with an avocado dressing, cut wedges are pretty on the plates. It’s a do-ahead beauty to make the hostess’ job easier.”

Salad Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1969

Also from this book: Banana-Cheese Dressing, Ham Cabbage Mold, Wash Your Mouth Out With Soap

Vatel's Haddock Up To Here

A Poisson Play (or, Too Little, Too Late)

A Play In One Scene.

April, 1671, Château de Chantilly, France. 4am

 FRANÇOIS VATEL:

Who goes there?

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Why it is I, a humble fisherman.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

Oh thank goodness — I’ve been waiting for you. I presume you have my order?

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Sure. I’ve got a couple bream, a small turbot and a nice Dover Sole. And in this basket I have four perch, an eel and a bit of skate wing. The rest of the skate didn’t make it, but the wing is OK if you sauté it with a bit of butter. Oh, and also a haddock.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

Is this all?

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

I’ve been out on a boat all night mate. You’re lucky to get this.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

It’s not enough! I have to feed 2000 people!

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

I thought it was a pretty good catch myself.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

How am I going to manage with this! I placed an order for 2000 fishes!

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Not with me you didn’t. Look: I walked all the way here in the dark, you ungrateful sod. Do you want the fish or not?

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

Mon Dieu!

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

It can’t be that bad. You look tired. Have you had enough sleep? You look a bit ragged around the edges if you don’t mind me saying.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

I’ve been awake for 12 straight days. You have no idea.

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Bloody Hell, mate. Go to bed.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

Can’t. Got to cook dinner for 2000 tomorrow.

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

That’s a bit steep. My Missus wouldn’t have that many over in one sitting.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

The King has waited five years for this banquet. Yesterday the roast failed at two tables — don’t ask — and today: no fish! It’s a disaster!

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Ask yourself: What Would Jesus Do? He was pretty handy at dilemmas like this.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

I shall never survive the disgrace. My career is in ruins!

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Look: are you going to take this fish or not? It's not every day I have haddock.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

What’s the point? I’m a dead man!

HUMBLE FISHMONGER:

Whatev. Too much drama. I’m off home. Thanks for nothing. I bid you adieu, Sir.

FRANÇOIS VATEL:

Au revior. Try not to crush the jonquils on your way out. Where’s my sword? Where’s my damn sword?

*  *  *  *  

Three hundred years later we can see what Gourville may have served Louis XIV that Friday once Vatel's corpse had been found by the messenger sent to inform him all the fish he ordered had in fact been delivered after all. 

Grand Diplôme Cooking Course, Volume 2, 1971

Also from these books: Sweetbreads Niquette, Your Goose Is Cooked, In Your Face!, Frankfurter Salad

Brown, Glamorous Brown

Ah, brown. The color of romance, of love. The color of nature, but without the greens, and blues, reds, yellows, purples, oranges also found there. The color of mud, or wood. Brown, the color of excitement, of daring, of imagination. The color of earthworms and moths and English people’s teeth. Brown, the color that lights up the heart and mind and sets your loins on fire. Would that all things were brown, or shades of brown: raw sienna, burnt umber, mustards and ochre, tan, khaki and beige. Brown, glorious brown.

Behold how this hostess has paid homage to brown, pulling out her best pottery and brown tablecloth and a fat handful of cinnamon sticks, plus topping the cake with a hefty layer of brown sugar! Naughty minx! Even the flowers are brown. 

Make-Ahead Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1971

A Connubial Breakfast

Once upon a time not so very long ago, people married almost total strangers. Sure, they’d been on a few dates, dinner and a movie, and there was probably some chaste kissing at the lady’s doorstep at the end of the evening. After a period of engagement a wedding was had, followed by a reception and then the newlyweds retired to a hotel room to consummate their union before setting off in the morning for a week’s honeymoon.

Imagine the shock of sex after a really busy and emotionally draining day full of relatives in some strange bed with a guy you’ve never seen naked before but with whom you will have to spend the rest of your life even if the sex is horribly bad. Imagine discovering as you lay there all sore listening to him snore like a freight train.

When they return from their honeymoon the groom will pick up his bride and carry her over the threshold of their new home. Suddenly, married life begins without any practice at all and she’s probably already pregnant.

If she’s lucky, she will have been given a household management guide by her mother, which was an encyclopedic compendium of advice and reference for everything the new wife would face in her role as head of the household. Everything from how to buy furniture to how to make curtains to how to clean and what to wear, to cooking and being a hostess was described in detail. Mrs. Beeton had this pretty much covered in the tome that came under her name and was the absolute authority when it came to all things of the matronly persuasion.

If she’s less lucky she will have gotten married in 1965 and been given Happy Living! A Guidebook For Brides courtesy of Sibleys of Rochester, a department store hoping to cash in on all the purchasing it suggests you do. To help, it comes with a Bride’s Gift Record wherein one can list all the gifts one receives and keep track of whether you’ve acknowledged them of not. It’s ambitious; there are numbered lines for 256 gifts.

Among the truly revolting dishes it presents in nauseating Technicolor is this Apple-Beef Ring With Green Bean Succotash that resembles a dog bowl. Husbands must have recoiled in horror.

On the facing page is a recipe for A Connubial Breakfast of ham and eggs because “the bride, unsure of her mate’s morning preferences, might well serve them, for they bring that proverbial bliss.”

We all know what her mate’s morning preference is for "proverbial bliss," but curiously the guidebook doesn’t say anything about that whatsoever.

Happy Living! A Guidebook for Brides, American Bride Publications, 1965

Also from this book: Three Courses (Of Course), Creamed Eggs In A Corned Beef Crust, All For One And One For All!

Salad Worms and Melon Whales

Dear Lover of Fine Food:

This book is an experience in garnishing. At your next party, you can impress your friends with your new discoveries. Your guests will not only enjoy your fine cooking but also will appreciate your garnishing artistry.

Encouraged by the overwhelming success of your fine cooking and garnishing ideas, you will continue to create sumptuous garnishes that inspire your guests to ask you to share your expertise with them.

*    *    *    *

What the authors of How To Garnish have failed to grasp is the fundamental raison d’être of their materials. A garnish is meant to accent the main event, to support the qualities that make the dish appealing. A touch of contrasting color, or a complementary flavor, or a visually interesting texture all provide the dish with a sense of charm and thoughtfulness. A few pea shoots that have dropped from heaven onto that dab of crème fraiche remind us of the delightfully moist and clingy nature of that pale dollop. Otherwise it lies there like a shiny blob.

One is not required to eat the garnish, however, especially if color and texture are the point. In Chinese restaurants one is often confronted with an elaborately carved accompaniment: a radish flower, say, or a spring onion froth. Children devour these with joy. For many years in Western cuisine the only garnish one ever saw was a sprig of parsley, often the only green on the plate. The thing is that  parsley looks like the dish has been accented with green pubic hair, or like a Chia Pet project, so it became the vogue to snip parsley all over the plate like green dandruff. Now parsley is all but banished from the kitchen for fear of being disconcertingly retro. It practically screams "I have a lack of imagination."

You can go a step too far in the other direction though. 

Judging by their seemingly coke-fuelled creations, this ought to be called “How NOT to Garnish.” Do not, for example, serve lettuce embellished with worms, even if they are made from carrot and radish. No-one likes caterpillars with their salad.

The watermelon creature filled with balls has lost all the dignity it may once have had, and that is not a birthday-scape; it is a crime scene that looks like the aftermath of a deranged speed binge whose perpetrator crashed before the children arrived.

The art of garni is no joke; ask Ferran Adrià, who made a career out of reinventing it. Actually if you get to speak to Ferran Adrià, don’t say anything: just get down on your knees and bow your head. Show some respect.

How To Garnish, Harvey Rosen, International Culinary Consultants, 1983

Also from this book: Sea Cucumber