Where Are The Gentle Gar Avast, This Goomy Preakness Keen?

WOO HOO OLD COOKBOOKS!!!!

Man, I lucked onto a doozy:  The One Pot Dinner by Hannah G. Scheel! 

Ze front cover, mon sewer

WHOOSH FLASHBACK It is 1970, and I am A Kid. I actually remember seeing this book shrink-wrapped with three bars of Dove soap, sitting there on the grocery store shelf.  I lived in an Ivory Soap household, though, so we passed on this incredible one-dollar value at the time. 

OK WHOOSH FLASH FOREWARD WE'RE BACK IN 2024 whew. 

Ze detail du la back cover, el monsieur von dude

Why am I using the sophisticated Fronsh Ag Scent? you ask. Well I will tell you. Shit calm down. See, this cookbook is all class, just like Dove soap, which was and is the classiest of all the soaps.

See? I told you.

 Only the classiest of the cookbook writers could write this special Dove Soap edition, in fact, and so they found a classy broad for the job. 

How do we know that Ms. Scheel was a classy broad? 

She gives us an intro that begins with a quote from Samuel Johnson and goes on to include Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Alexander Woollcott, Byron, Alexander Dumas, the Apostle Paul, Thomas Moore, Aristophanes, Chesterson, Cervantes, George Meredith, and back to Byron again.  

This ^^^ kind of adorable horseshittery continues all through the book.

Our first section, SOUPS, begins with a quote (surprise!) from H. L. Mencken, and another from Napoleon, and another from Thackeray.

  No I was not fucking with you.   

And what's up first?  This:

Come on Hannah. That's 'We Need To Defrost The Freezer' soup. Quote Mencken all you want. 

This aside, Ms. Scheels recipes are surprisingly solid. The book is divided into 'Soups' and 'Meats', and, you know...everything fits into one pot, and you cook it. Written before the day of the Crockpot, thank God, hence no 'dump and go' ten-hour atrocities (I'm looking at you, Julie Pachenko),  you are ensured a tasty, if Americanized, meal. 

-no really I mean it. You can take a good, even inspired, meal out of here!  Is it fine food?  Well geeze no it's not, this is a soap premium ffs. But you might like it, you won't die, and nobody will hate you.

_____________

Deep breath.

Whole new ballgame, if baseball were played in the kitchen and the umpire was Richard Nixon, risen from the dead, with stuff all falling off him.

Here we have The Quick and Easy Cookbook.

The Quick and Easy Cookbook is one of those check stand 'impulse buy' publications, Much like The Weekly World News with which it shared space on the rack, it features the strange, the bizarre, and the outright disgusting, although without any of the attention to accuracy, editorial pride or professional standards of The Weekly World News. 

Whatsoever. At all. None.

So listen. As I go through my latest haul of cookbooks, I put little bookmarks in all the places I'd like to highlight, as per figure a. and b.

fig. a

El figuro B      

And see, this^^^ is an aerial shot, and we're looking down at all the wacky bookmarks I have stuck in. Note also the dogeared pages.  Mere slips of paper did not suffice to aid this tiptoe through the culinary tulips, which were all dead.   

Let's just rip off the bandaid and get this over with:

If you didn't know already, the difference between 'Russian' and 'Persian' is the color of the caviar.

Feeling OK?  Got your water wings? That was a first quick dunking. M. Arcati, avert your eyes. Here we go.

This is their idea of a fucking meat loaf, people.

Oh, the substitutions. Oh Lordy. 

If suicidal ideation were edible

Just...

What did the teenagers do to deserve this?  Why is it specifically for teenagers?

...and then come runnin' up to bustin' we got BEEF MOTHERFUCKING WELLINGTON because why not dammit. Why not bend Beef Wellington over a chair too?  

........and because I'm feeling sadistic:  

   Not lying - this recipe made me speechless with rage. I had to get up and roam around for a bit, pretending to harangue an audience on why this^^^ is an affront to the whole idea of food (they hung on every word btw.) I mean, to take one of Gods' most innocent and blessed creatures from the ocean and subject it to...?

    

  GAAAAAAAAH  

I need to go drink now.

 

You better go check on your dog.