THE COOKBOOK TEST #0045: THE BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS BARBECUE BOOK

INSTALLMENT #0045 (PAID) A SIMPLER, BETTER-STAFFED TIME / A FOOT WIDE, A MILE DEEP / MARSHMALLOWS ... YOU CAN DRINK?! / A HIGH STAKES GAME OF 'HIDE THE MUSHROOM' / HOT DIGGITY...BURGER?! / MARSHMALLOW

Dear Subscribers,

They don't make 'em like they used to. Once upon time, when magazines were mighty publishing endeavors that strode the land, colossus-like, magazines also produced cookbooks. These weren't modern cookbooks, which is to say one author working on a miserable $10-20K budget without the benefit of editorial support. These were serious projects, often years in the making with teams of testers, writers, editors, photographers, and publishers ensuring that the finished works were original, fully functional, and gorgeously illustrated.

One of the unexpected joys of writing THE COOKBOOK TEST has been diving into the 1950s-1970s magazine-driven era of cookbook publishing and unearthing these works, still widely available at most quality antiques stores for about $3-8 a pop. They're usually time capsules in terms of both ingredients and taste, and you often end up staring eye-to-eye with a lot of margarine, marshmallows, and/or processed cheese. But the recipes that look good tend to turn out well, and they're often powered by methods or ingredient combinations so far out of fashion that they feel crisp and new and exciting.

THE BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS BARBECUE BOOK is such a perfect example of these massive, team-led, ego-free exercises in prestige magazine-driven cookbook publishing that it doesn't list a main author. In fact, it lists no authors, photographers, or editors at all - there's no trace of the people who labored to put this thing together. 

Certainly part of it is because many of these recipes were no doubt culled from the magazine itself, but part of it is that this thing is the opposite of an Instagram influencer effort. It's legitimately 100% about the food and the reader, and 0% about the life and opinions of the people who wrote the book. It makes for an easy read, and it really does feel like an artifact from the past. 

The implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) white / middle class / conventional nuclear family framing makes it feel dated, too - if Leave it to Beaver is the cultural touchstone of MAGA-coded white suburban postwar prosperity, this is a book that you can easily imagine the Beaver's parents consulting as they served burgers and steaks to their demographically identical neighbors.

at your service,

James

THE BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS BARBECUE BOOK
MEREDITH PRESS | 1965 

"Barbecue," as per The Better Homes and Gardens Barbecue Book, does not really mean barbecue, as in the largely-African American pioneered art of smoking meats and pairing often Southern-derived side dishes that is one of our country's great gifts to world gastronomy. Although there are a scant few smoked food recipes and a brief mention of smoke cooking, what a barbecue means in this book's context is a cookout, a casual gathering with burgers and/or hot dogs and/or steaks at the center of things, likely with some salads and potato salads and ice cream desserts.

This book offers 17 ways to make hamburgers, ranging from Pizza Burgers to Burger Mountains to Dilly Hamburgers. It's tempting to criticize the book for a lack of imagination, but within each of its limited categories (burgers, steaks, salads, non-alcoholic drinks) is a galaxy of variants, some of which are legitimately creative and/or bizarre. The book covers about one square foot's worth of gastronomic terrain, but then it digs roughly a mile deep. It's not a bad approach. 

MARSHMALLOWS ... YOU CAN DRINK?!

Pineapple Mallowade is one of those "what the hell is going on here" recipes where the basic method (in this case, "dissolve marshmallows to add to your drink") is essentially alien to modern humanity. As it turns out, the method is perfectly sound - the marshmallows add sweetness and body; the pineapple and lemon juices add tartness and the main flavor elements of the drink; ginger ale adds carbonation and lightness. Over ice, this is a remarkably refreshing kids' cocktail; if you took the pineapple juice down by a cup, added a 1/4 cup of lime juice, and added a couple kinds of herbed simple syrups (mint? rosemary? basil?) you could very easily get a grown-up n/a cocktail that would be a perfect hot-weather patio sipper. As written, it was popular with kids at a cookout, so full marks for fulfilling its mandate.

PINEAPPLE MALLOWADE

24 marshmallows
1 cup water
2 1/4 cups unsweetened pineapple juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
dash salt
3 1/2 cups ginger ale, chilled

Place marshmallows and water in top of double boiler. Heat over boiling water until marshmallows are completely melted, stirring occasionally. Add fruit juices and salt, mix well, and chill. To serve: add ginger ale just before serving. Pour into ice-filled glasses.

A HIGH STAKES GAME OF 'HIDE THE MUSHROOM'

If you're familiar with the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, you might also be familiar with the Jucy Lucy, our national hamburger: two extremely thin patties stuffed with cheese and crimped together into a molten-hot, dangerous, cheese-spewing lava bomb. [1] So I was pleased to stumble upon a Stuffed Hamburger recipe in the Barbecue Book, and willing to give it a shot, despite all the putzing around that this sort of thing inevitably entails.

The first bit of putzing was grating the onion, which is a culinary task I absolutely loathe. The onion falls apart instantly, and the fumes weaponize. Note to self: Use the food processor.

The second bit of putzing was shaping the patties - the original recipe called for three eggs, making a very wet, gloppy meat mixture that was difficult to handle.

Thus: my recipe below omits one of the eggs and adds 1/4 Cup of bread crumbs, to make a slightly drier, easier-to-work-with ground beef material. I also omitted the book's called-for bacon, which is mysteriously supposed to wrap around the "edge" of the burger. There are enough moving parts with this thing before we get bacon involved, and, ultimately, the flavor was plenty rich and satisfying without it.