Once again I am here to make a belated theme post for Bay Area Kei’s Bibliotheca Blog Circle, and also just a belated blog post in general.
I wasn’t planning to take effectively a month off, but that is indeed what happened. It’s not for lack of inspiration either – I have plenty of potential topics waiting in the wings, even a few drafts that are fairly fleshed out. But due to a variety of factors I won’t bore you with, there’s been little Content Creation of late.
I could soliloquize or wax philosophical on productivity or not making your hobbies a job or something, but I think showing you yet another unusual vintage cookbook is a better use of all our time.
Branded Content
My resident personal shopper often frequents local thrift stores, and while for many items prices have risen and quality has lowered, old books are still dirt cheap. One time she presented me with a massive stack of old cookbooks, or a ‘haul’, if you will, and before I could express my concerns she assured me she spent a total of two (2) US dollars for the lot.
One gold mine (wait, I haven’t introduced what makes this a pun yet…uhh…let’s call it foreshadowing) for a snapshot of a culinary era are what the industry seems to term Promotional Cookbooks. These usually are put out by a specific brand of foodstuffs and only contain recipes that make use of their products. It’s often not hard to fill an entire cookbook with perfectly reasonable recipes this way – for example, the Jell-o brand has long included both gelatin and pudding dessert mixes, so despite what people fear, their cookbooks feature a lot of typical dessert fare.
But this isn’t always the case. One of the more questionable cookbooks brought home recently was for Rice Krispies, you know, the breakfast cereal from which you can make ‘cereal treats’, as they say on baking competition reality shows. I immediately thumbed through it and was not at all surprised to find a bunch of recipes that all basically amounted to…small variations on cereal treats.
Four whole categories, eh
These cookbooks, amongst others, often supply material for people’s disgust and outrage at old recipes, but as I’ve mentioned before, there’s never been more terrible recipes out and about than now. (Also, some of you need to work on your feelings about mayonnaise.) A little while ago, I would have handwaved at the phenomenon of ‘Instagram desserts’.
My mom actually made this one with my niece. They had fun, but the end result was…a result.
Now, with the increased usage of Large Language Models (commonly mistermed ‘AI’ by marketing departments) to feed the Content Machine, there’s stuff out there that’s unhinged on an inhuman level. We sure ended up in the most banal of cyberpunk dystopias.
“Hey Tom, what if we just have them roll sugar cookies in cereal?” “Yeah, whatever, put it in.”
Gems of Gold
So you see, the pun I made earlier- never mind. In stark contrast to the Rice Krispies book is this incredibly expensive pamphlet from the California Honey Advisory Board.
First of all, I cannot say enough just how mindblowing this thing is. I have a few other cookbooks put out by trade or government organizations rather than brands. And those cookbooks amount to a spiral-bound, softcover tome you could put together at your local copy shop. This pamphlet?
Every single instance of that ‘Honey’ medallion at the top of each page has spot gloss. The pages alternate between a warm white and a golden brown, I think to represent different shades of honey? Just the paper it’s printed on feels pricey as hell. Based on what little I know about current printing presses, you would be hard-pressed (oh! I timed one correctly!) to even be able to print something this fancy in the US anymore.
Love to keep three (3) cinnamon sticks and one (1) chicken egg next to my breadboard
But the unbelievable level of quality in the printing isn’t why I set this opposite our sad little cereal book. Rather, it’s that…what can’t you make with honey? It hardly feels like a promotional cookbook at all. Not to say there aren’t some interesting recipes in there, but.
I did some cursory searching on the ol’ world wide web and found a few more materials the California Honey Advisory Board put out at probably around the same time as this one.
Unfortunately, there’s no year of publication listed anywhere on this beaut
The quality of the graphic design of the others give credence to my suspicions that this was Somebody’s Baby. There’s no reason for it to exist in the form it does.
My Last Attempt to Connect This Post to Fruit
The September theme was Fruits of Fall, and while I heavily encourage people to interpret our themes metaphorically, I’m also here writing a dessert blog. So there’s gonna be actual fruit, right?
Here’s the fruit.
See, lately one of my housemates has been into eating bread. Like, cut from a loaf. But none of us here eat very much of anything – we regularly struggle to finish leftovers before they reach a questionable age. Put these two realities together and you get…a steady supply of stale bread. So I’ve made a fair few bread puddings this year.
My latest bread bounty
Gems of Gold (with Honey) promises “Old Fashioned Flavor” for their Lemony Bread Pudding, but I mean. It’s bread pudding. You kinda just need the ratios. I added raisins per request, and one of my taste-testers picked up a can of evaporated milk to pour over her slice.
Usually I just throw everything into a casserole dish and leave it in there, but it was suggested I use a bundt pan to make it a little more photogenic. I don’t recommend this.
Time to cook the eggy soup
The trick to cleanly unmolding gelatin desserts is to thoroughly grease your mold. (And a firm set. Also luck, but people will tell you otherwise.) So that’s what I did, cuz bread pudding is more or less a firm custard, right. Right?
Okay, so actually it didn’t unmold too bad. But the squelching as I gently shook it free from the pan did a lot of psychic damage. And when I went to cover up the flawed surface with a decorative sprinkling of powdered sugar, I stopped in my tracks, as my synapses fired enough to compute
IF dessert >= squelchy
ABSORB powdered sugar
Just leave it in the pan, folks.
Of course, glazes wouldn’t dissolve, and are a popular addition to bundt desserts, but I don’t really relish making a dessert sticky on top of squelchy.
That does it for this vintage victual venture – look forward to my next dessert post featuring a Halloween dessert courtesy of Canadians (maybe. I have to workshop it a little first.)
kelp 