Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Friday is National Sandwich Day. If you’re having a backyard barbecue or picnic, or just making sandwiches for lunch, consider making this light, flavorful potato bread to help celebrate the occasion.

I found this recipe in the April 4, 1967, Alton Evening Telegraph. It was part of a media blitz for Eddie Doucette’s “French Cooking Can Be Fun” show at Alton’s Monticello College. There was a lot of cool stuff in there, which you can see in Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. Tempt Them is a free download, and it’s also available in print if you (as I do) prefer having a book in the kitchen.

I can’t overemphasize how much fun Eddie Doucette’s recipes are, how much joy he takes in spreading the message that “cooking can be fun”.

The article that featured this recipe is “You Can Have Fun With Yeast”. It’s a typically upbeat and encouraging article from Chef Doucette. He starts off quoting his mother about the importance of bread, talks about the nostalgia, drama, and romance of working with yeast, and ends with a positive affirmation about the pleasures of home cooking:

With our modern mode of cooking and baking it is a pleasure to produce sumptuous light taste-provoking baked goods, whether it be for your own table, a surprise gift for a dear friend, a church social or what-have-you, I’m certain you’ll find you can have “Fun With Yeast.”

It’s an upbeat sentiment that others can only see pessimistically.

When I was growing up nobody could show me how to bake bread—and it’s only gotten worse. It seems such a shame that as a culture we don’t teach our children about the basic things in life—bread making, gardening, sewing—and the value of work. At some point, all these things got to be beneath our dignity. If you can’t work with your hands, you lose the richness of your life and the sense of being productive. — Edward Espe Brown (Flour Power)

Doucette’s unstated motto is, why complain that people don’t bake, when you can instead show people the joy of baking? That cooking can be and is fun!

The process of making a jack-o-lantern is truly a gory one, well-suited for Hallowe’en. Depending on your proclivities, the most gorious is that all of Jack’s slimy viscera must be removed, usually by reaching in and tearing them out by hand. It’s a messy process, but without it your jack-o-lantern will rot much faster, and won’t be able to hold a candle securely or keep it lit.

But Jack’s innards don’t all have to be tossed. When looking for a good use for pumpkins this year, I was surprised to find that I hadn’t already posted this recipe for roasted pumpkin seeds. I love pumpkin seeds, and this recipe is so good and so easy I use it year-round for other squash seeds, such as the butternut squash I made yesterday as I write this.

Pumpkin seeds are the best of squashes for edible seeds. They’re a great size and have more meat. All of the seeds from inside the pumpkin should be kept for this great salty snack.

Clearing the seeds off Jack’s gut-strings is a further mess but well worth the work. The easiest way I’ve found to clean them is to put the guts into a big bowl, cover them with water, and then remove the seeds by hand. Many will come out easily; others will have to be pulled loose from the wet, stringy entrails. The seeds usually separate easily by squeezing them at the point where they attach to the strings.

When I wrote last year that “I’ve taken to carving two Hallowe’en pumpkins so that I have more body parts left over” a good part of it was so that I’ll have more pumpkin seeds. It’s very easy to go through an entire pumpkin’s seeds very quickly.

You’ll need to carve the pumpkins at least a day ahead of when you need the seeds: the critical step in this recipe compared to more complicated recipes is that the seeds need to be soaked in very salty water overnight. This, I suspect, tenderizes the seeds as well as infuses them with flavor. Previous recipes I’ve tried tended to make chewier pumpkin seeds with less flavor, even if they used more spices.

Orange, brandy, and gin. A great relaxing accompaniment to a lazy summer afternoon.

The very first hard liquor I had was a fuzzy navel at a family Christmas party back in the seventies. I’m pretty sure my aunt and uncle made it using Hiram Walker Peach Schnapps. If not, it was De Kuyper Peachtree Schnapps, but unlike De Kuyper, Hiram Walker was partly a Michigan business. Even looking at the Total Wine website right now, they don’t have Hiram Walker Peach Schnapps in Texas, “but we found it at Grand Rapids, MI.”

So when I saw the wonderful artwork on the cover of Plain and Fancy ways of using Hiram Walker Cordials (PDF File, 9.2 MB), I bought it despite having no desire whatsoever of keeping my liquor “cabinet” stocked with multiple flavors of cordials. While I’m pleasantly impressed with people who do have well-stocked liquor cabinets, I just don’t drink enough for that. Even on my limited shelf, I have liquor that’s over ten years old.

One of the liquors I enjoy but don’t drink often is brandy. And, it turns out, most of the brandy recipes in Plain and Fancy are very simple. So both of the drinks I tried from this pamphlet are from the two facing pages focused on “California Brandy”. I chose the Piledriver and the Sidecar because they use alcohols I already had on hand.

I don’t know if Hiram Walker California Brandy was merely brandy from California, or if it was some sort of special cordial. Either way, I didn’t use California brandy, and I didn’t use Hiram Walker. I used a Raynal & Cie French brandy.

In the Piledriver, I also replaced the Hiram Walker Sloe Gin with Bombay Sapphire. For the orange juice I did indeed use orange juice, albeit frozen orange juice concentrate, reconstituted.

For the Sidecar, I replaced the Hiram Walker Triple Sec with Grand Marnier. I did have to go out and buy a lime. One lime is very close to one ounce of lime juice.

The pamphlet’s purpose appears to be convincing people to keep lots of cordials on hand and experience the “new world of fun, excitement and discovery in Hiram Walker Cordials” for all your “memorable moments—those special occasions—plain or fancy!”

Orange macadamia nut fudge, from the Imperial Sugar Company’s 125th Anniversary Cookbook in 1968.

Most of the time, the easiest source for online cookbooks is archive.org. It has its own search facility for finding titles. If you’re looking for an ingredient or term rather than a title, you can use a general purpose search engine. You can search for that term and restrict the search to archive.org. Most search engines have something like a site:hostname search. To find all mentions of old fashioned brown sugar on archive.org, for example, search for "old fashioned brown sugar" site:archive.org.

If you’re using macOS or iOS, you may find xSearch useful. With it, I can just type ia texas cook book to search the Internet Archive. I set the xSearch shortcut to “ia”, and the URL to “https://archive.org/search.php?query=%s”. The “%s” is replaced with whatever text comes after “ia” and the space. In this example, that means searching all of the titles at the archive for the words texas, cook, and book.

There are several collections at Universities also, and they have some great old cookbooks available for download. One of my favorites is Michigan State University’s Sliker Culinary Collection of Little Cookbooks. It is filled with wonderful old pamphlets and promotional books, such as Diamond Walnut Recipe Gems. Fair warning, browsing this collection can easily make hours disappear without feeling the time pass at all.

Often, university collections focus on the specific geographical area that the university serves. Even closer to my heart than MSU’s little cookbooks is their Feeding Michigan collection. This doesn’t collect commercial pamphlets, but community cookbooks dating all the way back to the 1800s—all from Michigan. Two great cookbooks if you don’t want to randomly browse it and lose those many hours are The Charlotte Cook Book and The Grand Rapids Cook Book.

A balanced breakfast: granola and cardamom lassi.

An unbalanced breakfast: ginger lassi and rocky road fudge.

Ginger lassi prepped for blending in a mason jar.

I discovered breakfast lassi in the Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2006. Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez’s recipe calls for yogurt, cardamom, sugar, and ice, whipped in a blender. They’re basically very simple smoothies without fruit.

Cardamom Lassi

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 5 minutes
Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez
Review: Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2006 (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 8 oz Greek yogurt (1 cup)
• 1-2 tbsp sugar
• 1 large ice cube
• ¼ tsp cardamom

Steps

1. Place all ingredients into blender container.
2. Grind until ice is ground.
3. Whip until desired consistency.

Do you make mashed potatoes for National Potato Day? Crack open a can of beer and use up any leftover mashed potatoes in this sauerkraut-bacon casserole. Eddie Doucette recommended this for Oktoberfest, but if you’re willing to use the oven it’ll be good any time of the year. It might even be good made in a covered grill, but you’ll still want to broil it to get a nice golden crust on the potatoes.

Just thinking about that… I’ll bet it would be awesome made in a charcoal oven.

Eddie Doucette’s Oktoberfest Sauerkraut

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Eddie Doucette
Tempt Them with Tastier Foods: An Eddie Doucette Recipe Collection

Ingredients

• 3-½ cups sauerkraut, drained
• 5 slices meaty bacon, diced
• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• ½ tsp caraway seeds
• ½ cup beer
• 2-3 cups or so mashed potatoes

Steps

1. Dump the drained sauerkraut loosely in a greased casserole dish.
2. Sauté the bacon and onion lightly.
3. Add the bacon and onion to the sauerkraut along with the caraway and beer.
4. Toss lightly to mix throughout.
5. Add enough beer or water to barely cover.
6. Cover the casserole dish and bake at 375° for 25 minutes.
7. Remove and top with mashed potatoes.
8. Place under the broiler until golden brown.

I’m going to assume you know how to make mashed potatoes; if not, Doucette has a really nice recipe for Golden Mashed Potatoes which I’ve reproduced in Tempt Them with Tastier Foods. And of course there are mashed potato recipes all over the Internet. It’s not particularly difficult. The recipe is practically in the title: boil or bake potatoes. Mash them. For extra credit, whip in some butter, some milk and/or cream, and some salt.

In my interpretation of the recipe, you’ll need about two cups, but whatever you feel like: more potatoes is never a bad thing. But be careful if you make the mashed potatoes fresh for this recipe: I ended up eating about half of the mashed potatoes I made for the topping before I got around to using it as topping. I had barely enough left over.

Tempt Them with Tastier Foods (PDF File, 10.5 MB) contains all of the Eddie Doucette recipes that I could find searching online auction sites and newspaper archives. It includes all of the recipes from the typewritten viewer notes that I wrote about earlier and a lot more. Most of the new recipes come from IGA store advertisements throughout the sixties. Despite some occasional weirdness, I’ve yet to try a recipe that wasn’t tasty. Some are amazing.

His potato bread recipe, for example, came from the pre-presentation press materials of his 1967 French Cooking Can Be Fun evening at Monticello College in Alton, Illinois. As I wrote in my announcement post, he pretty much took over the Alton Evening Telegraph for his media blitz. One of the articles was You Can Have Fun with Yeast.

With our modern mode of cooking and baking it is a pleasure to produce sumptuous light taste-provoking baked goods, whether it be for your own table, a surprise gift for a dear friend, a church social or what-have-you, I’m certain you’ll find you can have “Fun With Yeast.”

I’ve never made potato bread before, so I thought I’d try his recipe. It was amazing—and it was easy to follow, too. Normally I have to make some adjustment for kind of flour and for things the recipe-writer assumed. In this case, I made the potato-liquid mix as directed (using the potato option) and put exactly 4-½ cups (19 ounces) of sifted flour on top of it in the bread machine. With no adjustments at all, out came a perfect loaf.

Eddie Doucette’s mantra: “Cooking Can Be Fun”.

In my post about the recipes I found from a viewer of Eddie Doucette’s 1954 television show “Home Cooking”, I noted that he later became the IGA chef and introduced many recipes in abbreviated form in IGA ads in local newspapers. I promised “a few of” those recipes “in a future post”. This is that post, and by “a few”, I mean every recipe I could find researching old newspapers and scouring auction sites for old ephemera. I’ve collected them as a PDF (PDF File, 10.5 MB), an ePub (ePub ebook file, 9.4 MB), and as a print collection.

I was unable to try all of the recipes, but I did try a lot, and they are some very nice recipes. IGA was, and is, a grocery store semi-chain. It stood for “Independent Grocers Alliance”. Recipes under Eddie Doucette’s name began appearing in IGA ads in late 1961 but the official start of Doucette’s relationship with IGA was 1962.

Introducing Eddie Doucette… IGA’s own Chef (former N.B.C. TV Chef and noted food authority) whose recipes and ideas will help brighten mealtime for you in ’62!

Recipes continued to appear under his name in IGA advertisements into 1971. It appears that IGA would provide the recipes to local grocery store owners; the grocery store owners could choose to reproduce these recipes in their advertisements, or provide them, perhaps on recipe cards, to shoppers at the point of sale.

With the IGA deal, he went beyond Chicago. His recipes appeared throughout the United States from Mexico, Missouri to Pocatello, Idaho. They even appeared in the Camrose Canadian of Camrose, Alberta, Canada.

He continued his cooking demonstrations around the country, now under the IGA brand. The Uintah County Library Regional History Center has a 1964 photo of Chef Eddie Doucette showing “some tantalizing food magic at Rex’s IGA Foodliner store demonstration”. Rex’s IGA Foodliner was in Vernal, Uintah County, Utah.