THE COOKBOOK TEST #0032: MORE LIFELONG FAVORITES - SENIOR PERSPECTIVE COOKBOOK VOL. 21
INSTALLMENT #0032 (PAID) AN EXTINCTION-LEVEL EVENT / EATING NOSTALGIA / NOBODY EXPECTS THE MINNESOTA INQUISITION / CRAB ROLLS / APRICOT SURPRISE
Dear Subscribers,
Growing up in the Upper Midwest, I am more conscious than most Americans of the damage done to our food folkways by industrialized Big Food. If you live in New England, you’ve got your chowders and oysters and ocean fare to be proud of. The southeast? BBQ and soul food. Texas? Tex-Mex and beyond. California? Fruit and produce that’s the envy of the world. But when you enter the Midwest and the Great Plains, home cuisine overall is more dependent on what’s at the supermarket, and since the 1950s, what’s at the supermarket has mostly been pretty dire stuff - a lot of sugar, a lot of salt, not a lot of flavor.
When Big Food came to town in the middle of the 20th Century, it was an extinction level event for a lot of Germanic and Scandinavian and Italian-American home cooking - slow and sometimes complicated ways of making food were quickly replaced with ersatz combinations of creamed mushroom soup and mayonnaise and/or Cool Whip-based concoctions.
We still have some incredibly good country meat stores and a charcuterie and cheese culture that is quietly world-class, but even that tends to get overlooked in favor of quick-and-easy family favorites. The damage can be seen in gory detail whenever you pick up a church basement or folk food cookbook around here - case in point, MORE LIFELONG FAVORITES, SENIOR PERSPECTIVE COOKBOOK VOL. 21.
We picked up More Lifelong Favorites for $4 in Motley, Minnesota, where it was displayed on the counter of a surprisingly good seafood factory outlet store called Morey’s. (I do not fully understand what said factory was doing in the middle of a landlocked state, but I will say that at least some of its seafood seemed to be lake-derived, which makes a bit of sense.)
The thrust of the book, as you’d expect, is stuff that old people in the middle of the Upper Midwest have been eating since the dawn of time. This means everything from “salads” like Grapes-n-Cream (including bits of Heath bars, of course), to out-of-style soups (Dill Pickle Soup, anyone?), to “Pina Colada Cake,” [1] to “Ethnic Dishes” including dubious takes on Chinese food (Subgum!).
But as always, the proof is in the pudding - it’s possible some of these highly industrialized recipes will surprise us. To the kitchen!
at your service,
James
MORE LIFELONG FAVORITES, SENIOR PERSPECTIVE COOKBOOK VOL. 21
BY JIM PALMER
SENIOR PERSPECTIVE | 2023 | $4
At this “critical assessment” point in the writeup, I have to begrudgingly give it up for Senior Perspective Cookbook Vol. 21. Its recipes read cleanly, they are organized sensibly into sections, and the text flows nicely around the various small-town advertisements and snapshot-quality photos of people’s grandchildren doing things in various kitchens.
As much as this is clearly a self-published work of passion, it’s also a serviceable and respectably edited cookbook. Nothing pleases me more than wandering into a movie or book and finding out that it’s an absolutely shoddy disaster, but readers of this book will be denied that dark joy - it’s actually a competent work of culinary writing.
If there’s any obvious way to criticize this thing, it’s to say that it accurately reflects the worlds of its contributors - kitchens and pantries that are dominated by mass-marketed foodstuffs that are long on processed ingredients, sugar, and salt, and short on any kind of tie to the land or complicated flavor. On any given page you’ll find Velveeta, or margarine, or cream of mushroom soup, or cola, or Jell-O. That said: you might also find a call for venison, or chopped rhubarb, or fresh asparagus - there’s some life hiding within these pages.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE MINNESOTA INQUISITION
One of the first recipes I gravitated to in this book is a sweet treat called Pork and Bean Bars, which are, as you would fear, actually made with a can of VanCamp’s Pork and Beans. The fact that these bars present as an innocuous sweet dessert yet pack a forbidden pork punch immediately put me in the mind of Reconquista Spain, when the simple trick of putting pork in freakin’ EVERYTHING was just one of many ways to smoke out the remaining observant Muslims and Jews in an effort to thoroughly cleanse the land for Christianity. So with that said, if you end up making these, please don’t bring them to an interfaith brunch.
The first thing I noticed when making these bars is that the frosting is good. Like, extremely good. A mix of butter, cream cheese, shredded coconut, chopped nuts, powdered sugar, and vanilla, this stuff is remarkably layered in flavor and sweet without being overpowering or one-note.
The second thing I noticed, upon actually tasting the finished bars with frosting, is that the creator of this recipe basically reinvented carrot cake. Cinnamon-forward, a little earthy, topped with cream cheese-powered goodness, Pork and Bean Bars are firmly in the carrot cake camp of desserts. You can taste the beans if you strain for it (they have an earthy graininess that anchors the cake) and the pork is thoroughly invisible, but if you were told it was carrot cake you’d likely believe it.
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