TALK ABOUT GOOD: Vintage Recipe Roulette with my grandmother's 1975 Methodist Church cookbook
Episode One: The defiantly brown Calico Casserole
Although there is plenty of literal fodder for further wondrous derision in 20th century cookbooks as a genre – the casual culinary gentrification of Rice Chex Reuben Salad, the flatly nihilist Fritos Prune Whip – the dawn of a new year calls for a new approach, something hideous, yes, but also something full of love, that holds good and evil in a single hand, just like the world. I’d like to propose a new vintage recipe series by spinning the barrel of a single slim volume: Talk About Good, my grandmother’s hand-annotated copy of the 1975 Bogota, Texas United Methodist Church community cookbook.
In just 164 pages, this collection of homestyle recipes encapsulates the unlikely intersections of 1800s frontier cuisine, post-war convenience foods, and the mid-century American fetishization of canned chow mein noodles. It is gleefully unstandardized, with measurements like “packages” and “tall cans”, instructing us to “bake in a slow oven” or to “cook until done”. It careens wildly from scratch biscuits that would make angels weep, to casseroles containing only instant rice and condensed soup, to pickles requiring a full 14 days of repeated boiling and cooling with a variety of chemical additives. Every blessed seafood recipe starts with a can. The Strawberry Cookies contain no strawberries, and regrettably, the Scotch Cake contains no scotch, but the Sixty-Four Vanilla Wafer Cake actually does require counting to 64, the Sauerkraut Cake sure as heck contains sauerkraut, and Mrs. Ruth Varner’s beef and vegetable Calico Casserole contains…
Raisin Bran.
Calico Casserole.
The name evokes your childhood copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, doesn’t it? Let me assure you, this recipe follows through on that promise, assuming you mean the copy your dog Ginger vomited on when you were 9.
RECIPE
This appears to be a standard beef and vegetable casserole, minimally processed and simply flavored, until you get to the last ingredient. Talk about burying the lede:
The ingredient list for this downhome family repast is carefully written, with more specifications regarding can size and yield than most other contemporaneous community recipes. Luckily, despite the yawning decades between now and then, all of the ingredients remain widely available. Still, the word “chopped” leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Are we talking sophisticated and chiffon-esque onion shavings? Peppers casually and haphazardly lopped like so much nightshade Antoinette? Using context clue skills learned in a 3rd grade lesson on Laura Ingalls Wilder, I aimed for the middle with canned pea-sized dice.
Sous-chefing handled, I turned to the sauté pan. It takes about 15 minutes to have this casserole ready for dishing: ten minutes for beef browning, and a few more to fluff the rice. Despite the name Minute Rice, it actually takes 5 whole minutes for liquid to osmose its way fully betwixt the biopolymers of the pre-boiled grain product. Perhaps contempt for this persistent and blatantly false advertising is what led Mrs. Varner to emasculate it by using lowercase letters in her text. (What led her to eschew the Oxford comma, though, I’ll never comprehend.)
APPEARANCE
This may be the most defiantly brown thing I’ve ever made.
It does have a scattering of cheery yellow, canned green, and skinned red bits of plant matter, but obscured as they are beneath a sullen and inadvisable bran crust, they don’t so much recall their namesake cotton print as they do used burlap. I tried letting it sit for a few minutes to improve its cohesion for serving, but the ingredients seem to actively repel each other in lumpy rebellion when plated. It also appears to have eaten the parsley garnish while my back was turned.
This is foreshadowing.
TEXTURE
Imagine a tumbleweed crossing Death Valley at a leisurely pace, perhaps a half mile a year if it has snagged the desiccated corpse of a Mojave ground squirrel and is dragging it behind. After 30 years, it will have made it across the widest part of the desert. If you then collected said tumbleweed, chopped it into canned pea-sized pieces, and ran it through two cycles in a 12-cubic foot industrial freeze dryer, it might be almost as dry as this casserole.
TASTE
It certainly is adequately salted, but the flavor is otherwise a beefy blank canvas on which the various and sundry ingredients can re-enact Tolkien’s Battle of the Five Armies in graphic detail, unencumbered by the cool reason of seasoning. The green peppers loathe the bran flakes, and it’s mutual. The canned peas, fearsome and unyielding, have sworn vengeance on the knightly corn. The raisins, enraged, poison the lot.
This thrifty, nutritious, and filling casserole is a blight upon humanity which leaves the kitchen landscape maimed and smoldering. I plan to have the oven professionally fumigated.
What would improve it? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but adding a can of condensed cream of mushroom would go a long way. Even still, you’d have to swap the canned peas for frozen, and of course the Raisin Bran has to go.
You might as well just open a couple cans of chili.
As a result of surviving the 2007 North American peanut butter shortage, I have a pathological aversion to wasting food, so I ate a full serving for lunch and then picked out the cereal and peas so I can add the rest to some kind of cursed soup on another day. It was difficult to clean my plate. The unvarnished beef; the vast, unfeeling expanse of the flaky topping; the perversion of dried fruit canoodling with canned legumes – I shan’t soon recover.
It took a piece of black licorice to get the taste out of my mouth, and friends, I only wish I were joking.
-END-
SNEAK PEEK ON UPCOMING INSTALLMENTS:
Throughout the year, I’ll offer the history, preparation, and review of one or two examples from each of the seven sections in the book, such as:
Mountain Dew Salad, which contains both Jell-O gelatin and Jell-O pudding and pie filling, as well as, yes, Mountain Dew. As bad as it sounds, it’s probably better than the Jell-O Corned Beef Salad.
Tamale Pie requires the preparation of a polenta-like substance and the addition of a half cup of catsup. This is a sin akin to murdering a unicorn if you’re from south of Dallas, but apparently Ms. June Stanley was not.
Orange Cake is an innocuous name, isn’t it? My grandmother was the most devout, most incredibly kind person I have ever known, and she crossed this one out with a giant X across the entirety of the recipe, with a brutality otherwise never witnessed in the entire time I overlapped with her on this earth. What unforgivable baking heresy stoked the flames of her 4-foot-11 ire? I can’t wait to find out.