If you don't already know, I am a huge fan of cookbooks. I especially like old cookbooks. I have a large collection of Betty Crocker and Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks from the late 1960s and early 1970s. I am in the mood to clean out old clutter. As a result, I thought perhaps I should pare down my cookbook collection. I've been looking through some of them tonight which inspired this post. I have written in the past about the horrors of the Jello cookbook. Let me tell you Better Homes and Gardens really didn't do much better. I truly believe the recipes in these cookbooks were the inspiration of a cook on acid. I mean, do you want to have Golden Nugget Meat Pie for dinner tomorrow night? I know I sure don't. I didn't even look at the ingredients. The name alone was enough to scare me away. I have a JC Penney catalog from 1972 so I know for a fact that clothes designers were on acid. Now I'm convinced that the cooks in test kitchens were too. They had to be on some kind of drugs.
I leave you with an example of a tasty 1967 treat from the Better Homes and Gardens Jiffy Cooking:
Deviled Ham Pie rates high as a luncheon dish. Deviled ham is surrounded with pastry, then topped with asparagus spears. Prepare easy cheese sauce from canned soup. Yum. I know I can't wait to try it.
So basically you put a pie crust in a pan, spread one 4 1/2 oz can of deviled ham on the bottom, top the ham with a 3oz can of mushrooms, then put another pie crust on top of the whole thing. Bake for 15 minutes. In the mean time heat up a 10oz package of frozen asparagus. Also heat one 11oz can of cheddar cheese soup and 1/4 cup milk. Arrange the asparagus in a spoke fashion on top of the pie and then cover with the cheese sauce.
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