Found: My Life Purpose

I suppose it took long enough. Finding my life's purpose, that is. And knowing my track record, this life's purpose will last all of about three weeks. But it's something.

And don't panic. I haven't abandoned my real blog. I just thought this particular project deserved its own space.

So, here's what happened: My neighbor, Interplanet Janet, is a free spirit who lately has been mastering hula hooping. She goes out into her front yard, with a stack of hula hoops, and just starts hula hooping, and if one of the passers-by happens to stop and exhibit any curiosity, she will hand them one of her spare hula hoops off the stack and urge them to join in. On Saturdays, she usually has a pack of children gathered around and she leads them in a rousing afternoon of swiveling their hips. So I thought, "Gee, that's neat, how she just sort of revived a dead art form that was popular mid-century. I wish I could do something like that."

Concurrently, I was reading James Lileks' brilliant Gallery of Regrettable Food, which is a pictorial smorgasbord of appetite-suppressing cookbook photos from 1950's and 60's cookbooks. But, um....regrettably, Mr. Lileks chose only to lampoon the recipes, not to actually recreate and taste them.

Other authors had come close to what I was looking for, most notably Jane and Michael Stern in their book American Gourmet, but the Sterns focused more on mid-century recipes for swank, "company" food. What I wanted was a test kitchen for the Southern-Baptist-covered-dish-fellowship sort of recipe, the kind that used plenty of store-bought ingredients to make the housewife's job easier, like Jell-O and Velveeta Cheese.

And, since I am lately (despite two-days-a-week of respectable work) all BUT a housewife, minus the bridge partners and club luncheons, I thought, why not me?

When moving out of my mother's house for the final time, I absconded with a set of cookbooks which had been sitting unused on the top of the refrigerator all of my life, called Favorite Recipes of America. Staff Home Economist Mary Anne Richards explains, in the preface, that "The Recipes in...FAVORITE RECIPES OF AMERICA were selected from the more than 100,000 recipes in my files to represent regional cookery at its very best...Each of these favorite American Recipes was home tested by cooks across the nation just like you. Every homemaker endorsed her own favorite recipe. Her name appears under her personal recipe. You'll treasure the many recipes in this collection which will become your favorites."

The copyright date is 1968, but the general flavor of the recipes collected therein (no pun intended) leads me to believe that the recipes were collected over the 1940's and 50's - lots of congealed salads, thrifty ways to stretch your ingredients, a submission from Mamie Eisenhower - that sort of thing.

So, this boxed set of recipe books (five books, titled MEATS, DESSERTS, VEGETABLES, SALADS, and CASSEROLES), which I had kept all these years never knowing why, would become my starting point. I'm starting with the SALADS volume, because it seems to contain the most vomit-inducing-on-paper recipes, most of them involving lemon gelatin and potted meat. In the same dish.

I had thought that the books were bought and owned by my mother, but apparently not. A handwritten note found inside the MEATS volume read:

Dear Dorothy,

Have a Happy Birthday! And a happy summer. See you in Wichita!

Lovingly,
Mary Helen

Dorothy would be my grandmother. In 1968, any trip to Wichita would be owing to her duties as Past Supreme President of the Social Order of the Beauceant, a title she would boast of frequently, though when she said it it came out all as one word (PassupremeprezdentatheBeauceant). Her duties as Past Supreme President took all over the world, including (but not limited to) Alaska, Scandinavia, and seven times to Hawaii (four times as an escort).

I have no idea who Mary Helen was, but she must not have been a very close friend, otherwise she would have known that the only book my grandmother would have need of would be the volume called CASSEROLES, especially if it had a chapter called "Casseroles containing cans of water chestnuts and crushed potato chips".

For this project, my self-created rules are:

1. I will follow the recipe ingredients and measurements to the letter, which is a struggle as I tend to eyeball measurements and add ingredients that I think would benefit the recipe.

2. Whenever possible, I will use ingredients that I, in my furtive imagination, think would have been readily available to a housewife of the fifties or sixties. Knowing the advances made in food preservation and transportation since then, for example, I will eschew a major national brand of a particular product in favor of a lesser known, regional brand. The exception being Jello-O brand gelatin, which is de rigueur in the preparation of congealed salads (unless the recipe calls for unflavored gelatin, in which case I will use Knox).

3. Each recipe will be blindly taste-tested by my partner, Jet Screamer - that is, he will taste each recipe before knowing what the ingredients are. If he manages to get a bite down without vomiting, he will then be told the ingredients and see if that influences his final rating. Though I will gladly contribute my own comments on each dish, the final rating will be determined by Jet, who for our purposes here will serve as my breadwinning 1950's suburban husband.

4. For now, my only source of recipes is the aforementioned five-book set. Once I have some petty cash (lovingly known in my household as "Lucy's allowance from Ricky") I will search up some antiquated cookbooks in used book stores. But I'll gladly accept recipe submissions here, if you don't have the stomach to make it yourself.

That's it. Stay tuned. Tomorrow is recipe number one - "Guess What Salad"!