Retro Baking: 100 Classic Contest Winners Updated for Today (Retro Series)

Rating:
Summary: Buy the Book for the Kitch, not the Kitchen
Review: `Retro Baking' by Maureen Fischer, a food columnist and editor at `women's' magazines has also been a judge at many traditional recipe contests. And, the recipes in this book are advertised, per the subtitle, to be winning recipes at these food contests, updated `for today'.

This book is a booth in `comfort food central'. It does not contain many of the comfort food classics, even those classics which are baked such as macaroni and cheese and meat loaf, but it makes up for these with lots of other casserole recipes straight from the darkest 1950s, in the freedom which followed the lifting of World War II rationing and before the great influx of foreign food influences spearheaded by Julia Child, Alice Waters, pizza shops, Hispanic immigrations, and Asian immigrations from Southeast Asia.

For a list price of about $17, we get:

Breads and Rolls - 17 recipes, primarily breakfast breads and variations on white bread with cheese.
Savory Bakery - 15 recipes of casseroles with veal, chicken, salmon, bacon, and beef.
Cookies - 20 recipes with lots of peanut butter and a nice assortment of press, drop, and roll cookies.
Cakes - 19 recipes with several uncommon recipes and a few old standards such as chocolate cake.
Pies - 15 recipes with lots of apple and other fruit pies and custard pies.
Other Desserts - 15 recipes with cobblers, crumbles, upside down cakes.

106 decent recipes for $17 is not too bad as most cookbooks go, if the recipes fit your needs and produce good results. I believe these recipes will produce good results if you are already an accomplished cook and baker. The instructions are typical of the kind of recipes you will find in a church fundraising cookbook. Among other things, it means that lots of things are inexact and there are lots of inconsistencies from one recipe to the next. For example, yeast is sometimes specified as `one packet' and sometimes as `2 ¼ teaspoons', even though these mean exactly the same thing. All yeast is `fast acting', but sometimes it is bloomed with warm water and sometimes it is dumped into the other ingredients as you would do with `instant yeast'. The temperature of the yeast blooming water is never more precise than `warm'. My point is that an experienced cook would take all of these things in stride, but an inexperienced cook may be tripped up by, for example, making the water too hot and kill the yeast. Other imprecision's are seen in not specifying the cut of meat to be used in many recipes. Probably the worst of the instructions are in heating meat. One instruction tells us to saute until tender. Sautéing will never tenderize meat. As it becomes more thoroughly cooked, it will become firmer to the touch. Another very odd instruction has us browning a pork chop on one side, flipping it over, and going off to spend 15 minutes to prepare a relish with no instructions to take the poor chop off the heat to prevent it from drying out.

But then again, you will not buy this book to learn how to cook or bake. For that task, there are excellent alternatives, my favorite light but thorough ones being Wayne Harley Brachman's `American Desserts' and Judith Fertig's `All American Desserts'. For savory baking, check out Jim Villas' `Crazy for Casseroles'. All three books are high on comfort and high on sound cooking instruction.

The illustrations in this volume really tell the story that this book is about memories of the fifties. I am simply amazed that the book designers have been able to collect so many kitchy illustrations. While these are great to look at, they can be very misleading when it comes to figuring out the associated recipe. The picture on the page with the lemon pie recipe shows a lemon meringue pie, yet there is no trace of meringue in the recipe. Oops.

I will give the author / editor a fair amount of credit for using almost exclusively fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, in spite of illustrations showing canned fruit pie fillings, the recipes use fresh fruits. There is a fair representation of canned soups in some recipes, but nothing overbearing.

The biggest surprise in the book is that there is not a single credit given to the people who came up with these recipes either with the recipe, in acknowledgments, or in a credits or bibliography page. There is not even a reference to where these recipes may have been published. While this book is a `fluff piece', part of a whole series of retro themed books, this does not excuse it, in my mind for either claiming to be something it is not, or failing to provide credit if it is in fact a compilation of contest winning recipes.

These recipes will work if you are an experienced cook and will be very successful at clogging your arteries even if you are not an experienced cook. If you are in love with instant nostalgia, buy this book. Otherwise, check out Wayne Harley Brachman's books on `American Desserts' and `Retro Desserts'.