Corn on the cob was dinner. Lunch will be a tomato sandwich. Is it summer or what?
I have this 1964 Bisquick cookbook that is my very favorite. Say what you will about the arrival of space age food (READ: HEAVILY MANUFACTURED) into modern culture in the 1950s and 60s (i.e. jello, box cake mixes, TV dinners).
There is a concept captured in this cookbook that I am just fascinated with:
the concept of eating just one produce item for a meal.
Let me show you where this happens.
Once-A-Year Shortcake Supper
At the height of the summer season, make a whole meal of crusty-tender golden shortcake, served warm and generously buttered, then heaped with fresh slides peaches or strawberries. Pass a pitcher of cream or a bowl of sweetened whipped cream, and serve with steaming hot, good coffee! Let your family eat their fill-- good enough for company, too.
No joke. If I could time travel to just watch this meal, I would be ENDLESSLY FASCINATED.
Not to mention that I can just SEE the Ad Men who wrote this:
Make sure every noun has at least 3 adjectives, all complimentary! I don't care if it's dirt! It better be "hearty, succulent rooty dirt!"
When I searched for this particular supper wording, I found that this Bisquick cookbook encourages multiple events of "just have one thing for supper" (fritters, chicken & biscuits, pancakes, etc.) Hmm...I smell conspiracy. A conspiracy to keep selling me Bisquick.
Why am I fascinated by this?
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I was a child of the "get an ingredient" style of cookbooks and cooking. It was all about the recipe. The recipe was the highest metric in cooking, not skill, forethought, or flavor. It meant that I found a recipe, I shopped all over town for the ingredients, and then made that recipe--come heck or high water!--and then sat there and evaluated if I liked it or not. There was absolutely NO consideration of price, availability, freshness, social conscience, farmers, NOTHING! Why would you? You can go to the store and just keep looking, looking, looking (and Amazon.com helps zero here because it facilitates this behavior to the zillionth degree, you can buy cinnamon from the slope of just one mountain, jeez) and you buy what you need! How dare you even think that that thing is "out of season" or "won't taste as good preserved" or...or...or...
Desire was placed before appropriateness. Want strawberries in December? Sure! Your local store in Timbuktu has strawberries every day of the year. (Try to put off the thought that they taste like STRAW.)
Want corn on the cob in January? Yup. Check the fresh produce section or, in a pinch, the freezer section. They'll be mushy and taste like water, but whatever!
Really craving X? No worries. Just get to the store.
You probably have everything but that one special ingredient that you
need (almond extract, soy sauce, hearts of palm) that you only use for this recipe.
Easily
I can say "I've never made a cake from scratch". By my generation,
making a cake from the basic ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs is lost to
all but probably professional bakers, whom I assume know how because
they have to make large cake sizes, not because they know much about
cake making. My grandmother could make cakes from scratch. I can't. At
sale prices of $1 a box that make either a 9"x13" or a 2 layer 8" round
cake or 48 mini cupcakes (ahem, I might be speaking from experience there), I can't think why I would reach for flour. But that's another
thing...I'm getting off track. Besides, in researching for this blog
post, I've been unnerved that I never actually thought to myself "Hmm..I AM low on phosphate."
1956 Bisquick strawberry shortcake. You can feel it coming on.
Biscuit mix-- so easy! and look how high that 'shortcake' is stacked!
The ad itself tells you. Do you want something now? Yes, you can have
it. "And why not?"
Another 1954 ad: Enter another product: Whip cream in a can ready whenever you are. Were you, just like me, confused and fascinated by the "Pass a pitcher of cream or a bowl of sweetened whipped cream" from the supper suggestion above, thinking "Uhm, is that Cool Whip?"
But back on track: One item for dinner. It's not just Bisquick that has this.
Exhibit B: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods has the chapter: The Sugar Snow. This is all about collecting maple sap, boiling it to make maple syrup, and then the neighborhood getting together for one night to eat NOTHING BUT PANCAKES AND SYRUP.
Think about that for a second. An entire community getting together to do nothing but celebrate that they have low or no cost sugar for the next year. There were pancakes (probably made WITHOUT Bisquick...humph! How did they live?) and syrup and maple syrup candy made on snow. Not one person said "But what about our need for protein?" or "Should I serve a fruit salad with this?"
Just down the hatch. Maple syrup or f'in bust.
For just one night. One meal. And if nature didn't give you that bounty, you didn't have that meal. In this case, you did not have SUGAR.
FOR A YEAR.
That a sobering and realistic thought that I think it totally alien to my culture. If it is a bad year for:
- maple syrup (yup, can happen. Global warming wrecks havoc with the below freezing/above freezing requirements of harvesting, to say nothing of insect or disease killing off maple trees)
- strawberries (a mistimed rain and you have moldy or burst strawberries)
- corn (uh...insects and raccoons are ALWAYS beating you to the crop, especially if you downsize to your own "yard")
- cucumbers
- tomatoes
you
just
don't
get
any.
Wow. Sit and really think about that. How would you live if the guarantee of corn on the cob was gone? What if it was a "Wow, we'll be really blessed this year if we have corn!" feeling? Sounds very agrarian and very much ties blessings to the land. If you get this (corn, strawberries, maple syrup), you are blessed. If you don't, too bad. Hope for next year.
I have one more recent cookbook that focuses on the concept of eating foods in season. Still, the recipes look very ingredient-y. Like "Yes, you can have nothing BUT sweet potatoes for a meal! As long as you have cinnamon from the left side of Mount WhoSaWhatsIt!"
All of this is to say, with some forethought and anticipation:
Last night I had nothing but corn on the cob for supper. Just steamed corn on the cob with salted butter and more salt doused over the top. I didn't even sit down. I ate it standing up in the kitchen.
My neighbor is on a short trip and left me in charge of her tomatoes with instructions to "eat any that get ripe" while she is gone.
Today, I'll eat a tomato sandwich for lunch. Probably standing up.
~
As of this writing in August 2022, you can still procure a copy of the 1964 Bisquick cookbook on Ebay as "vintage." The illustrator, Jolly Roger Bradfield, is a hoot and illustrated other books!