Mission Inedible

The tomato sauce would run like a rolling red, anti-oxidant river...

The spaghetti would twine like the flaxen hair of trumpeting angels...

The wine would flow like the vats of jolly Bacchus on a bender...

The garlic bread would crunch like Italian leather cowboy boots over a dry Sicilian riverbank.

This was the image my college friends and I projected the time we decided to cook ourselves a real spaghetti dinner in the dorms. When you're half-starved, having subsisted most of the year on ramen and Dr. Pepper, imagination can take you pretty far.

What imagination cannot do is conjure you actual things like pots, or pans, or a stove or utensils or bowls. Which, among our group of eight, hadn't been a priority.

I mean, speaking only for myself, I knew how to heat up a mean Chef Boyardee beef ravioli in my coffeemaker.

This should give you all a reasonable sense of the quality of things to come in this tale.

So in spite of no household equipment and very little money, the spirit of youth would not be deterred for our Spaghetti Extravaganza. This dream would not die.

We would improvis, we decided. We would MacGyver ourselves the best dinner we'd had in months!

We divided the tasks like an elite special ops team. My friend Austin and his roommates were in charge of ingredients for sauce. Upstairs, Ed had connections with wise and grizzled 21-year-olds; he'd snag the wine. Scoobie and I would round up some utensils. Dan would work out serving logistics and pasta. We pooled our money, and disippated like fog.

We reconnoitered later in Austin's dorm-room, dropping our supplies in the center for appraisal. Some bought. Some borrowed. Some smuggled from dining service through elaborate covert tactics and distraction techniques.

In moments, we had the first bowl of pasta bubbling away in the microwave in a lifted plastic bowl.

It would need to bubble there, we discovered, for the better half of the next semester.

But other problems also bubbled before us. Because it was as we started to assemble the sauce that we realized we only had one bowl to do everything in and we were already nuking in it. How would we heat the sauce if the first half of the pasta was still in it?

And while less ambitious people would have just used the styrofoam plates we'd invested in, we felt this lacked the glamor, the size, the sturdiness, and the, er, non-meltiness we required.

Then Dan got a lightbulb idea.

Er, rather, Dan noticed the ceiling fixture had kind of an... oh.... large glass bowl sort of shape to it.

And that's when the guys decided to climb up and use their light shade as the mother of all pasta platters.

Well, as the token girls in the group, Scoobie and I, we had our standards. We said:

"You can't use a light fixture that's been up there for years as a pasta bowl!!...

It's had bugs and dust and lead paint chips in it and who knows what else?!...

Blank faces. Crickets chirping.

"We have to wash it first."

So Scoobie and I went off to the dorm bathroom to give it a good scrub down and bring a little sanity and sanitation back into the festivities.

But by the time we returned-- the serving bowl chandlier removed of fly specks and 50 years of cigarette smoke-- there was another scent in the air. One of real home cooking!

Yes, after the pasta nuked for the better part of an hour and a half until it was glowing green and if not exactly al dente, at least alright-ish...

After the garlic bread popped hot out of the toaster slots and the oregano stopped flaming...

After the jar sauce was hot and thickened with bits of produce chopped with a plastic knife...

After all this... We sat down to dine.

Oh, as we passed the shaker cheese and Ed poured the box wine into Dixie cups, we sat on the floor of Austin and the guys' palacial manor dining room, we leaned back, sighed with weary contentment, and suddenly knew...

This was how The Other Half lived.

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Humorbloggers
Humor-blogs

Food, Peculiar Food! Finding the Funny in Vintage Recipes

On my other blog, The Thrift Shop Romantic, I occasionally do humor posts featuring some of the terrifying, comical, and virtually inedible recipes found in vintage cookbooks. And I realize that many of the folks here are not actually the same folks that visit there. Which makes sense because why would you guys care about grandma-chic decorating? I see your point.

On the other hand, why should you, my dear Cabbages friends, MISS OUT on all the gag-worthy unflavored gelatin, the added MSG, the impractical, gravity-defying food arrangement and the hot dogs which do death-defying stunts?

Why should you miss out on the culinary masterpieces (and mania) associated with dishes like The Meatloaf Train? Or Sea Lion Salad?

Why should you, readers who I care about, be prevented from seeing housewives from the 1940s lose their marbles over trying to create interesting meals for their family with just cream cheese, Worchestershire sauce, a can of pears and some pimiento?

Why shouldn't you see how EASY it is to hollow out an artichoke and make candlestick holders out of them to impress family and friends?

WHY, WHY, WHY? I asked myself.

Well, no reason really.

So I've compiled a few of the links here. NOTE: Management of Of Cabbages and Kings and The Thrift Shop Romantic is NOT responsible for any digestive problems, vomiting or sudden bursts of laughter you might experience as a result of these posts. Any eruptions of any sort are your own issue.

And here we go!

• Whatever Happened to Baby Greens? or Strange Salads of 1940. My latest post, sharing inspirational (and insane) ideas like The Bunny Salad, Sea Lion Salad, Salads that stare back and "perky" salads that look like they might need a surgical reduction. Says the book, "Tra-la!" Click here.

• Artichoked Up over Befuddling Vintage Vittles. Artichokes aren't just for dinner anymore. Didn't you know?-- they're also a DECORATOR ITEM. See this, Tahitian cuisine straight from Oscar Mayer, and so much more. Click here.

• Dubious Dinners and Riotous Retro Recipes. What can you make with irradiated Pet milk? The disembodied head of a 1930s radio star tells us! Are those peas or does that pie have acne? Why are those sausages doing an Esther Williams imitation? These questions and more will be answered. Click here.

• Horrors of Home Cooking: Recipes of Yesteryear. Ah, the thrifted cookbook that started it all. Here we look at 101 Ways to be Original in All Your Cooking, every single one of which use Lea and Perrin's Worchestershire sauce. All aboard the Meat Loaf Train! Click here.

Or you could see what's cooking over at Humor-blogs.

Stealth Mom and the Mayonnaise Infiltration of 82

Home cooking. The words conjure up images of Mom and apple pie. But for some, beneath the warm memories of home and hearth there also lurks a darker underbelly. One of coercion, deceit, betrayal... and condiments.

Yes, today, my friends, I will share with you how my childhood dining was regularly infiltrated by the Stealth Mom-- who I've come to suspect was actually a secret agent for the United Mayonnaise and Sour Cream Council.

My mother, I should begin by explaining, was a very good cook and also a pretty darned honest person all around. And it's important I begin the story like this, because you need to fully understand the confusing dichotomy that Dad and I experienced under her clever double-agent manipulations.

On one hand, you had the loving mom and wife who planned nutritious meals, made fantastic beef barley soup, amazing chili, and drool-worthy baked goods... The mom who did this uncomplainingly, and to whom Dad and I both sincerely owe our gratitude....

And then on the other hand, you had the evil mastermind who plotted to invade our tastebuds and gastrointestinal systems with the handful of deeply detested non-nutrive elements like mayonnaise and sour cream (me), and onions and mushrooms (Dad), in an effort to expand our personal horizons.

See, Mom herself disliked very few foods-- except for lima beans which gave her a dangerous allergic reaction that made her puff up a like an inflatable lawn ornament at Christmas. (The aversion being, then, kinda understandable.)

So as a result of Mom's great love of all that was culinary, she found it simply impossible to believe that my dad or I truly didn't like a particular flavor or texture. She felt it wasn't so much the taste we were reacting to, as in... oh, I don't know... the bad publicity or something.... Food we viewed unjustly as having a shady reputation... Martyred by prejudice...

And so quietly, subtly, she made it her personal quest to prove us wrong.

This was done by slipping disliked ingredients into a meal with the sly ingenuity of a 15th century usurper to the English throne on a poisoning campaign. I mean, when it came to what was in his din-din, honestly, Edward V had to watch his back less than my father and I did.

The irony was that Dad and I could also totally taste-- and often see-- what was lurking in the food.

"Does this tuna have mayonnaise on it?" I'd ask, after a bite of the unpleasant tang, the slick texture, and a survey of the suspicious white coating that no fish in its right mind would find sea-worthy.

"Er, no," said my otherwise honest maternal archetype. "No, just don't worry about it." Big smile. "Have your sandwich. The bread's getting soggy."

But I was not so easily dissuaded. "I really think there's mayonnaise on here," I'd insist, the Mayometer in my brain issuing great whoops of "WARNING WARNING WARNING-- ABORT-- ABORT-- STEP AWAY FROM THE SANDWICH!"-- that there was a contaminated substance lurking.

"Oh, that..." She'd give a casual wave of the hand. "That's just the oil from the way it was packed. Don't give it a second thought. Eat up."

I'd eye the sandwich suspiciously, drilling down with my optical Anti-Condiment Detector and picking up distinct mayonnaise residue through its microscopic lens. "I don't know, Mom... It doesn't look anything like oil. It really looks like--"

"Oh, just eat it already!" she'd finally say, exasperated. And adding, with a narrow expression, "You can't taste the mayonnaise, anyway."

That was the giveaway: "you can't taste the mayonnaise, anyway." Which is probably why she didn't get into, say, being a double agent for American national security during the Cold War or anything because, she didn't have her Believable Denial down quite solidly enough.

They would have worn her down too soon.

Well, recently, in discussing old recipes, I've learned that others, too, grew up having to form proper defenses against their own personal Stealth Moms. In fact, such was the popularity of this concept during my formative years and before, that there apparently were cookbooks encouraging mothers to work their mega-mom meal mojo on tricking husbands and young'uns into eating the inedible. So it wasn't just an isolated incident. My mom was part of a movement!

And now I understand that Jessica Seinfeld-- Jerry "No Soup For You" Seinfeld's wife-- has a cookbook out called Deceptively Delicious, and she's marketing the Stealth Mom to a whole new generation.

As an adult, I can certainly appreciate the need to ensure your loved ones get their proper nutrition...

But as a child who lived under the Covert Mayonnaise Infiltration of the 80s, I can only find myself shrieking, "Beware, my little friends! The Stealth Mom is on the prowl... And she has ways of making you eat!"

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Do you have memories of mealtime trauma? Were you the child of a Stealth Mom? Of Cabbages and Kings would love to hear from you!

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I hear they respect a person's right not to like mayonnaise over at Humor-blogs.