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| There are at least four things wrong with this cover. |
Written in 1951 by Sara M. Jordan, M.D. and Sheila Hibben, Good Food for Bad Stomachs is supposedly
a cookbook for people with sensitive stomachs, particularly those prone to
ulcers. At 243 pages long, it contained five hundred recipes “carefully
selected” under consultation from a doctor. Coming into this, I had assumed
that it would be five hundred different ways to boil chicken and vegetables. I
was wrong.
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| Well, not completely wrong. |
The recipes in the book were essentially a list of
ingredients and short paragraph descriptions on how to turn those ingredients
into proper meals. As you imagine, they are not very informative. What is more
interesting, though, is that a good deal of these recipes calls for heavy cream
and almost all of them use at least a tablespoon of butter. There were a grand
total of eight beef recipes in the entire book, but twenty pages worth of
seafood dishes, including ten recipes on oyster alone. It also had a recipe for
beef tea.
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| Seriously? |
Nevertheless, I decided to try some of these recipes out, for
if I’m to criticize something, I should probably suffer through it first. Of
the recipes, I chose two that seemed the simplest to make with what I had in
the fridge: the borsch and the beef stroganoff.
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| Easy enough. |
The borsch was a fairly straight forward recipe. I knew how
to make consommé already so that was half the battle. Once again, I was fairly
puzzled by the inclusion of butter and sour cream, but seeing how my stomach is
pretty much a cast iron bottomless pit, I was willing to let it slide. The only
thing that threw me off was the step of straining the potatoes. I had never
heard of this phrase and assume it means to push it through the sieve as a
search on Google on “straining potatoes” just lead to random euphemisms about
relieving oneself.
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| Apparently every family owned a double boiler. |
The beef stroganoff was a bit trickier as it called for smashing
the meat into thin steaks. It also called for a double boiler, which in this
case meant balancing a small pot inside a bigger one and praying that the Ikea
handle didn’t melt. Stoves in the 50’s apparently only had an on and off
switch as none of the recipes in this book referenced what type of heat you
were supposed to cook on. Since there were no suggestions on what to put the stroganoff
on, I choose quinoa as I did not have any noodles on hand and I don’t believe
in rice.
The finished result was mediocre but acceptable. The borsch
came out well, but then again it’s fairly difficult to go wrong on vegetable
soups. The mushroom sauce on the stroganoff tasted like a slightly less
processed version of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and outside the taste of
salt, the beef stroganoff itself was a bit bland and seemed to lack the beef flavor
one would expect from, well, beef. Must not have pounded it enough.
Things I learned about cooking in the 50’s:
- People loved to pound their meat with mallets
- Butter was pretty much a food group
- Boiled lemon juice was a common ingredient
- Don’t trust chefs from this era
Also, I ended up making the beef tea:
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| Really, seriously? |
No, I did not drink it.
Book rating: 5/10 (Pictures would have been nice)
Book rating: 5/10 (Pictures would have been nice)
Random quote: “Now
meringue glacée has a French name, which is bad, and it is an ornamental
concoction, which is bad. It sounds and looks evil. The meringue constituents
of it look, in fact, almost as evil as a couple of macaroons, which are made of
almonds, which are oily, and hence evil.” (Butter, though, is like the best
friend that keeps lending you money)
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