S’mores

The word “orthodox” comes to us from the Greek, orthos (right, true, straight) and doxa (opinion, praise). It means adherence to the accepted norms, especially of religious beliefs. To be orthodox is to toe the line.

The opposite is heterodox, which means “other teaching,” and from which we get “heresy.” To commit heterodoxy is to stray from the accepted belief.

If you go off the rails altogether, you are guilty of apostasy; you are an apostate. That’s someone who has abandoned the belief system completely.

In order to understand this series of words, let us use the S’more as an example.

The orthodox version would be to toast a marshmallow to puffy meltiness over a campfire on a long stick, then at the exact moment when the sugars caramelize, to pull it off the stick by sandwiching it between two graham crackers (that is to say, one large one that has been broken in half), within which already lies half a bar of Hershey’s milk chocolate. The hot marshmallow then melts the chocolate to exactly the right consistency to form a unified gooey center. The S’more is then eaten like a sandwich, only with an ecstatic smile upon one’s face.

The heterodox version of this ritual is to use, say, something other than milk chocolate, or a different kind of cracker. Perhaps the violation is to attempt a S’more using unmelted marshmallow, or one that has been toasted over a regular stovetop burner. The absence of an actual campfire could be considered a heterodox S’more-making environment. One could, presumably, simply buy a ready-made S’more from a purveyor of unholy summertime snack foods.

An apostate would simply end their campfire meal by smoking a cigarette instead of making S’mores at all. Or not even go camping. Or they could approximate the S’more experience by using this recipe and filing utterly to enjoy life.

Family Dinners in a Hurry, Golden Press, 1970

Also from this book: The Arithmetic of Desperation, The Earl of Bunwich Folds

Survival Is Overrated

The single most astonishing thing about survivalist manuals is the assumption that life can be conducted as “normal” if an event of such apocalyptic proportions happens that it wipes out the food supply, water supply, electricity, etc., and turns your former neighbors into desperate thieves who want to steal your shit.

Lead us not into temptation, lest thou neighbor has a gun and shoots your ass.

There is a smugness to the idea that just because someone on the “outside” after such an event has not planned in advance like yourself, then they should suffer. Serves them right. So not only are you supposed to conduct “normal” family life inside your bunker, but you must also become a heartless bastard too.

Shelf after shelf of dehydrated peas. 

Survivalism is a neurosis which finds comfort in math. Supplies must be calculated by weight and volume in advance, and last for a specific amount of time at a predictable rate of consumption. The books which cater to this planning are all about charts and tables.

How to store food in your walls to prevent your hungry neighbors from getting it.

The Survival Food Storage book by Mark and Zhana Thomason goes a step further and is all about the furniture and very floors and walls of your house. Want to store enough food for your entire family for a whole year? Then use food containers to build furniture and stuff them into your walls. This would be awesome if you want to live in a LEGO style house full of rectangular boxes, but you’d have to be, as their illustrations suggest, a stick figure to find it at all comfortable.

Modular Living at its most modular. 

What they don’t account for is what happens to all your lovely beds and tables and fish-tank holders and book-cases once you have depleted your stock. One can imagine a wretched-looking family all eyeing that last box of dehydrated peas in an empty room with a feral desperation in their eyes.

On the other hand, they might just succumb to poisoning brought about by drinking toilet water. Of course one would only resort to that after drinking the contents of the water bed, and swimming pool. Wait, what? I thought they couldn’t go outside? Oh — they only recommend doing that if there is no radioactive fallout. Good call. Don’t drink the glowing water.

If you're thirsty drink from the toilet reservoir. Never the bowl. 

Survivalists approach their topic with the fervent ardor of the newly religious, anxious to spread the word (at a cost, of course; they’re not giving away this advice for free!) to converts. Thus you also find a veritable treasure trove of like-minded books and pamphlets (all with the same home-typed feel) at the back. This one lists such gems for the awkwardly worded How To Prosper During The Coming Bad Years, How You Can Profit From The Coming Price Controls, and How To Prepare For The Coming Crash, all of which sound like gripping reads. Also listed are several Revelations-Style titles as The Survival Bible, Disaster Survival Handbook, Passport To Survival, and Just In Case. (How does one choose?) In case starvation is an issue, there is Putting Food By, Let’s Try Barter, Just Add Water, and Making The Best Of Basics.

Sweetheart, you've lost weight. Let's sit here and dream about food.  

The essential question that underlies all of these books is what sort of world these folks will expect to find once their year of self-sufficiency is over.

One with less crates of milk powder, one presumes. And not enough Kool Aid.

Survival Food Storage, Mark and Zhana Thomason, 1980

Déclassé Pie

This is a pair of tarts. I mean a tart of pears. Actually, it looks like only one pear was used to make this pie. A crumble isn’t usually also a pie, but a pie can be crumbled. I know this is cheesy, but there’s cheese on top. I mean cheeze. I mean three Kraft Singles cut into triangles. Serve while your family prays. I mean, they will give you praise. Serve this pie only to your prey.

Pies and Cakes, Better Homes and Gardens, 1967

Also from this book: The Saddest Wedding Cake That Ever Was

Calories, Calories, Calories!

If I want to lose weight, I want to gaze at Jennifer Hudson’s new slim frame and live vicariously through her by fantasizing that I, too, could drop lbs like that.

What I do not want to do is count every miserable calorie that I ingest. I do not want to buy this book. I do not want to hold a “low-cal party.”

I do not want to eat this well-balanced meal for dinner. I do not know, or want to know, what that brown log-like thing is. I am suspicious of what looks like shredded cheese on the fruit salad. And if someone EVER tries to make me drink a glass of milk, I will shank myself in the carotid artery with that thin, sharpened fork.

The Forward tells me that “Some folks can eat like the proverbial horse and look as though they regularly dined on sautéed butterfly antennae.” I would like the recipe for that, please.

It also says “Calories, calories. The word is used endlessly until it seems that food is nothing but a writhing mass of calories.”

It ain’t gonna work if you make food sound like an orgy. Only if it sounds like Jennifer Hudson.

Calorie Counter’s Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1970

The Saddest Wedding Cake That Ever Was

The Saddest Wedding Cake That Ever Was

Once upon a time there was a wedding cake which was made for the nuptials of a young couple who had met at a bus stop and fallen in love. It had seemed to the girl that she would never find a beau, and had given up looking. People, she knew, called her “homely,” which was a euphemism for someone who rode the 61 into town at 4:30 pm to begin her working day as an office cleaner. The young fellow usually rode his bicycle in to work, but it had a flat tire and so he’d taken the bus instead. They’d gotten off at the same stop and found themselves waiting for the 61 again later that night, alone together under a streetlight in the light drizzle.

One thing had led to another fairly rapidly, and a wedding was required. The young man wore his best pair of trousers and trimmed his beard; his bride put on blue eye shadow and a smile. Her aunt had made the cake “on the cheap,” as she said, due to the lack of advance notice, and felt she couldn’t be blamed for it. “You get what you pay for,” she was often overheard claiming, as if this explained most things.

It was necessarily a small reception, things being what they were — just a few photos of the happy pair, and a few of the parents too, the groom’s father grimacing for the camera. They held it in the pub’s back room before the evening crowd piled in. There were drinks of course — pints of bitter, mostly — and a small bowl of mixed nuts. The bride’s mother popped next door for a bag of bon-bons to liven things up when it looked like the nuts would go a bit quick.

The wedding cake wore a tulle-covered heart made from two pipe cleaners, and a sugar bell atop cement-like icing which had been applied with what could only be called a heavy hand. It was plain sponge, without vanilla, because the aunt had run out and not realized until it was too late.

The saddest wedding cake that ever was sat on the bar while the wedding party drowned their sorrows in beer. All except the bride, that is, who sipped at a glass of orange juice, Doctor’s orders. Every now and then she ran her hand over her belly self-consciously, just in case it had all been a dream.

Eventually, the bar became noisy, and smoky, and someone, no-one knows who, accidentally stubbed out a cigarette on the top tier. Someone else poked a finger into one side, and still another drew an obscene picture in the icing with a cocktail sword.

It was only after the married couple roused themselves at noon the next day that they remembered the cake. But by then it had considered itself abandoned, and thrown itself away.

The End.

 Pies and Cakes, Better Homes and Gardens, 1967

Also from this book: Déclassé Pie

The Arithmetic of Desperation

MATH TEST

How many ingredients does this recipe have? What about if you read the ingredients on the labels?

If you were to multiply the mixture equally among 4 dessert dishes, how much would you have left over?

What do you have to do to reconcile the use of fractions and decimals in an addition problem?

If you have a total of 19 ounces of topping and pudding, how much air will you have to whip in to fill six dessert dishes?

What if you use really large volume dessert dishes?

What if you used fancy glasses instead?

An envelope of whipped topping mix travels 600 miles on a train at 70 m.p.h. It meets a can of chocolate pudding traveling in the opposite direction at 3 o’clock. At what point do you realize this problem is a Zen koan?

Calculate how many times your grandma would shake her head if she knew you were serving this to your guests? If grandma was 60 years old? If grandma was 100 years old?

What is the calorie differential between preparing this recipe and making actual chocolate custard?

Find the volume of chocolate whip produced if you whip it, whip it good.

What percentage of a single serving of this dessert consists of whipped topping mix? Of chocolate pudding? Of shame?

Express the relationship between six servings of chocolate whip and total ounces of new thigh fat as a ratio.

If Sally asks five people to a dinner party, but one of her guests shows up without having RSVP’d, another fails to bring her +1, and another, who cannot get a sitter brings her two small children, and her husband who is a surgeon gets called away after the first course, how much chocolate whip should she prepare? How much vodka will she need to drink to get through the evening? (Show you work.)

Family Dinners in a Hurry, Golden Press, 1970

Also from this book: S'mores, The Earl of Bunwich Folds

Great Dinners

Ammunition

He knew about the affair as soon as she began serving him steak. There could be no other explanation. She’d always been a Mac ‘n Cheese kind of girl, Hamburger Helper if you were lucky. She wasn’t any kind of cook. He knew that when he married her. He married her because she was pregnant. He knew his life was a cliché. He’d accepted that.

That was 15 years ago and Sammy Jo was in high school now, giving him a heart attack every time she left the house. He said everything he’d been supposed to say, made jokes about curfews and guns, laughed nervously despite himself. Truth was, he’d never really learned to shoot a gun. Truth was he couldn’t remember where he’d hidden the box of ammunition. It had been years. He feared ever having to use a gun. He thinks he probably hid it somewhere he’d forget on purpose.

She’d put a big fat steak on the table. He couldn’t believe it. There was no way to make sense of a steak like that. It was enormous, bloody, seething with fat around the edges. It bled onto the plate. Parts of it were charred from the pan. What’s the occasion? he’d said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Nothin’, she’d replied. It was going cheap.

He knew that couldn’t possibly be true. This was a woman whose dedication to cheap carbohydrates meant that there were always more buns than hotdogs because “you can always eat ‘em with ketchup.” She was the kind of woman who ate hot dog buns with ketchup. Not the kind who’d cook a steak. He felt a bit ill and sat down.

The next week she did it again. Sammy Jo had gone out on a date and he’d come home to the smell of meaty grease. She’d showered, he could smell the shampoo. There was a bottle of red wine on the table. He had no idea what to make of that. He can’t remember the last time he drank wine. Possibly never. For a few uncomfortable minutes he felt himself sweat wondering how you got into a bottle of wine. All he had was a bottle opener on his key ring, like any other man. Then he realized it was a screw top. Pour yourself a glass, she called from the kitchen.

Afterwards, he asked her why again, and she used her kitten voice to tell him it was because he deserved it. He wondered what, exactly, he deserved. A nice steak, she said. Men like steak. He wasn’t so sure. In fact, he had become convinced that men did not like steak; that it was some kind of conspiracy on the part of women who couldn’t cook to hide something. Like ammunition. As far as he could recall, he’d never particularly expressed a desire for steak, knowing, as he did, that it wasn’t cheap and that she couldn’t cook. Suddenly, he hated steak. He entertained the thought of becoming a vegetarian.

She’d tried to go down on him. That was when he was sure about the other man. He’d let her, kept his eyes closed, and couldn’t come. She’d rolled over, and he’d said it’s not your fault.

That night, he sat up listening for Sammy Jo to come home. Eleven, twelve, one, one-thirty. One thirty-four. Tires crunching. Another 15 minutes at the door. He wanted to surprise her with the gun, but it occurred to him that her boyfriend might be bigger than him, and have a bigger gun. A loaded one. He meant to get up and let her know he’d been waiting up, give her a piece of his mind about the curfew, but when she slipped in and stepped silently up the stairs, he held his breath.

He was a man sitting alone in the dark with blue balls and a cheating wife who couldn’t cook, a daughter who smelled like cigarettes, an empty gun in his lap and a belly full of steak. When he finally breathed, it sounded like a cry escaping around the lump big as a bottle in his throat. He swallowed it back down.

He remembered where he’d put the ammunition. He suddenly remembered, clear as broken glass. 

Great Dinners from LIFE, Eleanor Graves, 1969

Also from this book: Fish Fly

Canasta Special

Because electronic entertainments have become so ubiquitous today, it’s often hard to recall what people did with their leisure time before television, gaming and the internet.

What they did was play cards. Canasta was one of the most popular card games of the 1950s. It’s a rummy-derivative, and a glance of one of the many variations on the rules is enough to give you the cold sweats.

One of the ways card playing could be made more sociable was to serve food and drinks. This recipe from a homemade booklet from one of the more genteel neighborhoods of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania also indicates that those snacks were pretty healthy. This is good because looking at the cut of women’s clothing from the 1950s also gives you the cold sweats.

If you’ve ever wondered who on earth ate all those molded salads you see in cookbooks from this era, then here’s your answer. It was that or starve while playing cards.

Of note is the curious case of the last instruction in the recipe: “Chill.” back then, it meant to place the molded salad in the refrigerator so that it could set — but now it also means to relax, calm down. After making the Canasta Special and some cocktails, a hostess could, indeed, chill.

When the novelty of playing cards wore off and the prospect of gossiping over a Jell-O salad no longer seemed appealing, many women took “chill pills” instead.

What’s Cooking In Fox Chapel

Ingenious Disingenuousness

Ingenuousness is a virtue meaning “noble” which found its name in the late 1500s. It comes from the Latin for begetting, gen-. There is an understanding of honor attached to it, suggesting the bearer is honest, candid, upright.

When first there is a positive thing, it is quickly followed by its evil twin, the negative; thus we have disingenuous, which dates from the 1600s, meaning the exact opposite.

The cover of this book is disingenuous. If you read the subtitle, it claims to be a book promoting health and “low-calorie desserts.” Yet the picture is of a Baked Alaska, which cannot possibly be either healthy or low-cal. It also dandies up a rather plain and uninspiring ingredient — yogurt, which might be hard to sell otherwise. It says that you can maintain your diet by indulging in elaborate sweets, which is a lie.

If disingenuousness is your thing, you can get a big helping of it every day at the supermarket checkout, where the magazine tunnel bombards your brain with the paradoxical message that you can eat your way slim. How do they sell this absurdity? By appealing to their target audience’s two biggest weaknesses: their addiction to junk food and the shame they feel about their weight. 

Any given cover subscribes to a formula which provides both: a lead story about losing weight paired with tempting photos of brightly colored and often seasonally decorated food. It’s guilt porn.  Does anyone really ever make these elaborate cakes? Probably not — all they are is a slick visual designed to tweak that addiction and sell ad space. These magazines have no investment in actually making their readership diet successfully, or they won’t stay in business.

The disingenuity comes not only in the premise emblazoned across the covers, but in their very nature.

Yogurt Cookery, Sophie Kay, 1978

Also from this book: Yogo-Cheese

Yogo-Cheese

As many of you canny readers will already be aware, the end-times are coming, and folks have to prepare or perish. We all know the scenario: a strange meteor will signal higher taxes; plagues of locusts will eat all of our crops; the government will confiscate our guns, women and liquor; rivers will run red; and the Ruskies will nuke us to oblivion in a pinko-commie plot to take over the world.

If you’re going to survive the apocalypse, you need to stock your bunker with hand-crank radios, cans of Spam, toilet paper, and plenty of Sudokus. What you’ll miss is good old-fashioned home cooking, because you’ll be eating out of cans and drinking your own urine for a very long time.

So why not learn some kitchen skills you can use to serve your family a proper meal and stave off the boredom that experts warn could result in a bloodbath? If a nice helping of Yogo-cheese won’t cut the tension in your concrete shelter, nothing will.

It’s easy: all you’ll need is fresh yogurt and a working refrigerator, some Ritz crackers and a sense of whimsy. And salt. You don’t have to call it “Yogo-Cheese” if you don’t want to be too literal. You can call it anything you want. We just called it that to get your attention because we know that your friends and neighbors — the ones who will be eaten, evaporated or shot when disaster strikes — will overlook it.

Be warned: these are the same people who will be pounding on the metal doors trying to get in to save themselves once the going gets tough on the outside, but don’t give in. Did they help you stockpile that case of Ketchup in the corner? No.

Case closed. 

Yogurt Cookery, Sophie Kay, 1978

Also from this book: Burned At The Stake

Also from this book: Ingenious Disingenousness