Fifties Football Food

I love my library book sale. I found a copy of Pillsbury's 10th Grand National Bake-Off Cookbook. The cookbook cost 25 cents in 1958. A recipe for this decadent bread was in it. Nobody worried about cholesterol in the Fifties.

The whole cookbook was chock full of yeast dough recipes I will never make. The Bubble Loaf was hidden at the end under "Busy Day" Short-cut Recipes. Meets my requirements: easy to make and tastes good. And you get to pull the loaf apart with your fingers.

Upon reading the recipe, I imagined eating this Bread with cold Beer, a Cheese Board and Apples while watching football in front of the TV. I can imagine this with Soup too. And I think this loaf might be excellent done with Salami. Then you would not have to cook all that Bacon. I have one of these yummies in the oven right now.

Bacon Cheese Bubble Loaf

2 cans Pillsbury Refrigerated Biscuits
1/2 pound cooked Bacon, chopped
1/4 cup grated Parmesan Cheese
1/4 cup Green Pepper, chopped
1/4 cup Onion, chopped
1/2 cup melted Butter or Margarine

Combine Bacon, Cheese, Onion, Green Pepper in a large bowl. Cut the Biscuits into quarters. Dip Biscuit pieces into melted Butter and drop into the Bacon mixture. Mix until well blended. Turn into a greased 9x5x3 inch loaf pan. Bake in a moderately hot oven (400 degree) oven for 30-35 minutes. Loosen edges. Cool 3 minutes before removing from the pan.

Note: I did this recipe in a loaf pan, and found the middle does not bake well. I liked the way it tasted (yummy) but it did not turn out well. Then the light dawned. The refrigerated biscuits of the 50s and 60s were about half the size of current refrigerated biscuits. You only need ONE PACKAGE of biscuits. Duh.

Dog Days Yummy

I posted a Dog Treats recipe my dog likes.

I found this Dog treat on the internet and just had to share. The dog days of Summer are here. I am making this. Picture is kind of fuzzy but the recipe is great. If my Baby Dog will not eat this, I will.

Ms. Susan Dunn's Sweet & Sour Sauce

This is another recipe from Simpson-Fletcher's Soul Food Recipes.  I am making homemade Egg Rolls today. I buy the Egg Roll Skins at local Asian Market. I am going to make this Sauce. So good for anything one would find on a PuPu Platter extravaganza. I like it on Crackers with Cheese. 

I produce this recipe verbatim. I use a small can of Crushed Pineapple. 

SWEET & SOUR SAUCE.

1 (1 lb.) can of Apricots
1/2 (1 lb.) can of Pineapple
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/4 teaspoon White Pepper
1/2 cup Honey
4 tablespoons Vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Salt

Force Apricots through a sieve. Put into a saucepan and add all the remaining ingredients except the Vinegar. Cook the mixture over high heat until the Sugar is dissolved and the mixture boils. Reduce heat and cook 10 minutes longer. Remove from heat and allow to cool slightly and then stir in the Vinegar.

Don Marquis' Baked Beans Nirvana

Don Marquis' Very Special Baked Bean Recipe

From "The Almost Perfect State"
By Don Marquis
Doubleday, Page & Company
1927

If you WILL eat beans, here is the way to prepare them.

First, you must have an earthenware Bean Pot, about six hands high, and of a dark bay colour. It is better if this Bean Pot is inherited from a favourite grandmother, with a porous texture (the pot, not the grandmother) that has absorbed and retained the sentimental traditions of at least three generations. But if you own no such heirloom (more precious than the rubies of an imperial crown!) a new one can be made to do.

Procure your white navy beans, and pick them over on a Friday night, not hastily or cursorily, but with love and care, one bean at a time, for this is both an art and a science on which you have embarked--it is more; it is almost a religious rite. Cast from you all split beans, all rusty or spotted beans, all too-wrinkly beans; save only such superior beans, smooth, hard, and shining, as a twelve-months' old child would love to poke up his nose.

Put these aristocrats to soak in water that has three or four tablespoonfuls of baking soda in it. Don't ask me why the soda. I am not arguing with you. I am telling you.

Some people say that after these beans have soaked all night they are ready to bake. These people lie. They are not ready to bake. They are merely ready to boil.

Boil them from ten o'clock Saturday morning until noon, in a pot with a piece of salt pork in it. And time your boiling so that on the stroke of twelve there is very little of the liquid remaining. For they must not go into the Sacred Earthenware Bean Pot, the Ancestral Amphora, too soupy or sloppy.

Put into the bottom of the Bean Pot a layer of Beans four fingers deep. Poke deeply into this one bay leaf. Put on top of this a layer consisting of pieces of just the right kinds of salt pork. On top of the layer of pork, dribble a thin layer of thick New Orleans molasses.

Put in another layer of beans. Into this second layer poke four or five slender curling strips of pungent shredded onion. Put a dab of mustard on the onion. Then a sparse layer of pork. Then another dribbled layer of molasses.

Pause and put your Ego in harmony with the Cosmic All.

Build up these successive layers of beans, pork, and molasses, alternating the subtle bay leaf with the poetic onion, until the pot is filled within two inches of the top. From time to time, a conservative sprinkle of black pepper, as you work from the bottom upward. From time to time hum a verse of "Old Hundred." Don't put in any salt; the pork salts all.

Let the top layers of pork and molasses be a bit thicker than any of the others.

Bake, slowly, in a moderate oven, from noon until six o'clock in the evening. Some say it must be a brick oven. Nonsense! Your Bean Pot itself is your bricky heat-retaining medium.

Eat from six in the evening until midnight--and without fear of indigestion. The thorough cooking has taken all that sort of thing away.

Each separate bean of all these beans retains its form--almost. Almost. Not quite. Each bean is ready to melt tenderly into amalgamation with his neighbor bean. At the touch of the serving spoon the touched beans lose their individual identity, yield up their pride, merge gently into a kind of Bean Nirvana.

Some eat them with vinegar. Very good. Others with tomato catsup. I eat them with a squeeze of lemon juice. Ambrosia!