Scanned from Be Milwaukee's Guest, Recipes Collected and Tested by the Junior League of Milwaukee - 1959
I could scarcely be crankier at myself for muffing the opportunity to present this comb-bound recipe gem on a particularly Wisconsin-centric holiday, such as the recently passed St. Nick's Day, but hey -- any day is a great day for pork cake!
I'm a big fan of the melding of meat and sweet (mmm...bacon candy...), and surely have been known to savor a sumptuously larded crust, but I can't swear that I've ever seen a baked good quite so aggressively piggy as this. Pinwheel rolls studded with flecks of seasoned ground beef, yes, but those were generally presented as a savory, hand-wielded Wellington sort of course rather than spiced, as this seems to be, in the manner of a dessert or breakfast sweet. I'm pleading woeful ignorance about the pastries of the Badger State here, so might someone be so kind as to enlighten me -- is this a traditional Wisconsin breakfast or dessert treat, or a relic of the cookbook's era? If the former, I'm booking a trip on Midwest Airlines posthaste. If the latter -- who's up for a bake-along this weekend?
Over the last year, I've posted quite a few of my grandma Bunny's recipes here on Slashfood. There was her recipe for Lemon Thing last summer, Zucchini Bread in August, Apple Cake in the fall, Shrimp Curry Improv for those quick weeknight dinners and her recipe for Kheera ka Rayta just last week.
Yesterday, Yumsugar posed the question, "What's your most treasured recipe?" Their query made me realize that I've never posted my favorite recipe from Bunny (both in terms of which one I like to eat the most, as well as which card I favor). I have a very special place in my culinary heart for this card, which instructs the reader on how to make Mushroom-Spinach Salad. I remember being about six years old and helping Bunny wash the spinach and slice the mushrooms for this dish. I can instantly recall how helping make the salad made it that much more delicious to me.
I also treasure this recipe for the physical presence of the card. I love that Bunny marked it with her signature bunny sketch, that she starred it to indicate that it was particularly tasty and that it has a stain just left of center that shows it was loved. I get great joy from having it as a symbol of connection to my personal food heritage.
It's been more than six months since I scanned and posted one of the recipe cards from my grandmother Bunny's collection. I was motivated to pull the little oak box off the living room bookshelf last night, out of curiosity and a desire to shake up my cooking a bit (I've been cooking the same three or four meals (pasta with scrambled sausage and veggies, turkey burger with cauliflower and salad with grilled chicken) far too often lately.
The recipe on this card appealed to me because of the simplicity of the dish, as well as the fact that tomatoes and cucumbers are now in season and appearing plentifully all across grocery stores and farmers markets. This is something that I'd eat on its own for a fresh lunch salad (maybe with a few crackers or pita chips) but you could incorporate it into an Indian-themed spread or use it to supplement take out from your local curry place.
For those times that you need to feed twenty-five women, here's a recipe you could turn to. The card is faded and stained, and I can imagine some harried woman trying to pull this dish together, while the kitchen wall phone rang and the pasta pot boiled over on the stove, putting the flame out. It looks like a little bit of water from the tuna splashed onto the recipe card. There are a few notes in pencil on the back for substitutions and serving suggestions. It's a time machine, back to another age, when salmon only came out of a can and pimentos seemed exotic.
Here is another one from the recipe card file I picked up at an antique store years ago. I was flipping through her salad section today, to see if she had any interesting thoughts on how to use the bunch of kale that's been in my fridge for the last week (I always make it the same way and was hoping for some inspiration) when I stumbled across this one. It isn't actually anything particularly special, but I found the idea of an arranged salad with a quick blender dressing sort of appealing. Very retro and yet appropriate for the time of year.
Here's another entry in my recipes from vintage cookbooks series. My mom found this 1913 edition of A Calendar of Dinners at a Portland thrift store several years ago. Knowing my affection for old and eclectic cookbooks, she bought it (for all of $.50) and tucked it away to give to me at the next gift-giving holiday. I often trot it out when I have people sitting around my living room, it's an excellent conversation piece. Most folks are fascinated by the creativity of those early 20th century marketers, as they managed to include Crisco in the preparation of almost every food imaginable.
You can see most of the recipe in the picture above, but just in case you actually want to test this one out, the recipe is also after the jump.
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