Cookbook Review: Favorite Recipe's From America's Dairyland (WI State Dept. of Agriculture, 1965)

 

I love old cookbooks.  Don't get me wrong, new cookbooks have really gotten rad.  The boom in chef-driven restaurants, and the cookbooks that chronicle them, have been a huge boon to our craft.  The idea that we can plunk down $50 on Amazon and get inside the heads of luminaries like Thomas Keller, Grant Achatz, Martin Picard, and Michel Richard has been a massive, massive boost for our collective creativity and technical ability.  Plus, and you'll hear me beating the drum pretty frequently, the honesty of these guys has raised the bar!  The days of Michelin three-star guys in the 80's getting away with telling us almost how to make their dishes are over, and it's Keller we have to thank, by and large.

But here's the trouble: yeah, new cookbooks are great for picking up technical processes, but we can't really use them for ideas.  We'll crib the odd sauce recipe, but we try not to steal entire dishes.  (Well, most of us do, anyway, but man, that cauliflower sformato at Luca looks pretty familiar...)  I may use Dave Chang's ratios for ramen broth, but I'm not going to go into business selling his ramen bowls.  The vacherin at Cintronelle is pretty sick, but I'm not going to do it, because Richard already did it!  

However, if you crib from cookbooks that are older than dirt, that's not stealing, it's paying homage!  Also, it's a hell of a show of technical ability, since the recipes are usually so poorly written that they won't come out unless you're a stone cold badass.  The point is that you should be able to learn something from any cookbook.  Anyone can get inspired by Gordon Ramsay, but that's not real inspiration!  That's secondhand!  You're just coat-tailing off his inspiration.  However, if you find some old spiral-bound book of Italian recipes from some fraternal organization that was operated out of a Catholic meeting hall (that was probably a Mafia front) in Chicago in like 1966, you know you've got your finger on a real nerve.

At any rate, I love old cookbooks, and wow, did I get my hands on an old one this time.  I don't really see anyone going out and buying it (although there are like 10 copies on Amazon right now).  This review is going to be more like a homage to this and all other old-timey cookbooks, less about what worked and what didn't, and more about what these old books can do for young cooks.

The Concept: As stated above, this book hails from Wisconsin.  Now I have nothing bad to say about Wisconsin cuisine.  I love the upper midwest, and these people have gotten sausage and cheese refined to an art form.  However, this book is also from the sixties, which was, shall we say, not the most golden of ages, when it comes to American cuisine.  The French were revitalizing their cuisine under the flag of nouvelle cuisine, and we were folding Velveeta into canned peas.  This book has it's finger on that pulse.  There have been places in the US where great cuisine was coming out in the sixties, at New York's French temples, or in Louisiana roadhouses, or in red sauce joints in Little Italy, Chicago, but the upper midwest was, to put it charitably, not one of these places.  

The Specs:  This book is 128 pages, and has easily 300 recipes.  They definitely went for quantity in stead of quality.  It's one of those books that averages well over two recipes per page, and often, the recipes lack context.  Is the sago-thickened buttermilk and raisin soup intended to be savory or sweet?  What could the sauce made of condensed milk, confectioner's sugar, lemon, and butter possibly, possibly be for?  Is the carrot loaf intended as a prank?  There's a lot here, but not a lot of depth.

What's good?:  As I said earlier, these books aren't always useful, so much as they are interesting.  Usually, you can mine a book like this for some inspiration, even if you change everything about the building blocks.  However, it's also solid as a historical document.  For instance, there is a visual cheese glossary, outlining a comprehensive list of every cheese found in a sixties American grocery store, and it's fascinating!  Also, it opens up the door to a completely (justly) forgotten era of American gastronomy, where things like hot pineapple egg nog (!) exist.  And no, I didn't try it.  There's giving an old recipe the benefit of the doubt, and there's just plain wasting time.  

Where you really find stuff you can use in books like this is typically the dessert sections (this is especially true in books from the north).  I gave a few of the dessert recipes a try (read about them below), and I may try a few more.  The lemon cheese pie was especially intriguing.  In case you're curious, the cheese called for is 'Wisconsin Natural American.'  I mean yeah, that sounds genuinely horrible, but it's like midget porn: I'm just intrigued enough to give it a lash.  I'll let y'all know how that comes out.

What stinks?:  Man, what doesn't?  This one was rough.  I got significantly more amusement than inspiration out of it.  Lots and lots of cream cheese.  This was America's great cream cheese period.  Lots of canned olives, and recipes calling for 'boiled dressing,' which I think is basically just coleslaw sauce, but who calls it that anymore?  The book, curiously enough, doesn't contain a recipe for it, so I guess it's a pantry item?  Anyway, yikes.  Probably the spookiest recipe I saw (which I won't try, because the ingredients are too expensive to just throw away), sitting there innocently, sandwiched between the buttermilk ham souffle (?!) and something called a Salmon Roly Poly, were the innocuously-enough named 'English lamp chops.'  In it, lamb chops are given a marination in butter, salt, and pepper (so far so good), then napped with Worcestershire-flavored bechamel (suspect, but ok, I guess).  Then, the whole thing is covered in American cheese and breadcrumbs and thrown into the oven for an hour.  In what world are those lamb chops not hockey pucks after that?  Maybe that's why all the cheese.  This book is a laugh a minute, and a fantastic historical document, but I wouldn't serve most of the food to my worst enemy.

Recipes Tested:

Rhubarb mousse: (pictured in https://hotdogsandcaviar.blogspot.com/2020/12/rhubarb-shortbread-rhu-tang-rhu-tang.html, where I worked it into a really nice shortcake.  It was essentially a semifreddo, but was too unstable for restaurant use.  It was runny, and the book asked you to half-freeze it, but after a whole night in the freezer the fat was curdling.  However, I really loved the flavor!  I won't make the mousse again, but the idea of using rhubarb puree in a mousse or cream filling was a great one.  I just think next time I'll do an actual semifreddo, or a bavarian, something along those lines.  My one quibble is that the recipe called for 1 cup of cooked, mashed rhubarb.  Cooked how?  Boiled?  Grilled?  Steamed?  Deep-fried?  I figured it out, but that's the problem with cookbooks that squeeze 300 recipes into 120 pages.  Details get lost.

Buttermilk Pie: This one came out really nice!  I'd never made buttermilk pie before, but I used to like to get it down the street at Hominy Grill, back when that was a thing.  The filling was just sugar, lemon, buttermilk, and egg.  It was similar to a chess pie.   My issue with it was that they instruct you to separate and whip the egg whites, and the texture was a little foamy for my taste.  (That's why I selectefd this image, terrible as it is, because you could really see the odd texture.)  I think if I did it again, I'd just whisk the eggs together.  (There was no recipe for the crust, but that wasn't nearly as big an issue for me as the rhubarb thing.  My crust game is strong.  All of you need to go out and buy the The Professional Pastry Chef, by Bo Friberg.  It's a massive, expensive doorstopper, but his fundamentals are incredibly strong.)  

Chocolate Peppermint Pudding:  Okay, I had to try one of the crazy recipes, right?  This monstrosity is essentually a candy cane bavarian.  You dissolve a ton of candy canes in cream, and then add bloomed gelatin (in this case, way, way too much gelatin, and why the hell can't cookbooks start using leaf gelatin, the powdered stuff is completely irritating to work with). The whole thing is topped with a crown of whipped cream, and dusted with more crunched up peppermint candy and chocolate mini chips.  (The recipe actually called for chocolate shot, but ain't nobody got time for that.  Also, I used those chalky peppermint candies for this layer, since they seemed to be less irritating to bite down on.)  This one was a split decision.  I thought it was fun, and funny, unearthly texture bedamned.  My wife was less charitable.  Needless to say, I don't think this one is going into heavy rotation, although I did like the idea of dissolving candy canes. in liquid.  Kind of a drag they turn it the color of Pepto.  

Oh, and the recipe called for ladyfingers, which I didn't realize you can't just buy at the grocery anymore.  I was going to make ladyfingers, but that seemed like a lot of effort for a dessert flavored with dissolved candy canes, so I went with that South Caroline pudding standby, Nilla Wafers, which worked fine.

The Verdict:  I mean, as a cookbook, like 1/5.  I had to cherry pick recipes I thought wouldn't be awful, and even then, they weren't great.  However, as a historical document, I would rate it much more charitably.  Cookbooks chronicle the cuisine of a place, but also a time, and it's fascinating to peek behind the curtain and learn that in the LBJ years, the American kitchen was an absolutely terrifying place.  Seriously, baked shrimp and cheese custard?  None of those words belong in the same sentence. 

-JS