Sweetbreads: the greatest deception to ever hit a menu!! (being neither sweet, nor bread).
Sauerbraten: It may be unfashionable but Alton Brown has made it, and in fact we just had it tonight for dinner (using Alton’s recipe). One reason NOT to make it is it takes days to prepare (the beef has to pickle for 3 days).
I’d never heard of soft-shell clams. I’ve heard of soft-shell crabs. Are there clams that actually have soft shells?
I have a peasant-y looking gravy boat I use maybe twice a month, for sauces and gravies. It has a handle and pouring spout. But I always serve with a small spoon ladle, so I could just as well use a small bowl. No one ever pours sauce straight from the boat in this house.
Yeah. Soft-shell clams are also called “steamers,” and are served as such in New England, with clam broth to dip in for cleansing, and melted butter to dip in for yumminess. Pull them out of the shell with your fingers, yank off the membrane, and do your double-dip. Delicious.
I have a framed menu from the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel coffee shop dated October 26, 1942. I bought it at an antique place years ago as it was printed just two weeks before I was born. Here are some of its offerings:
Browned roast beef hash
Roast leg of veal
Sand dabs
Smoked beef tongue
Mashed turnips
Banana squash
Printaniere (whatever the hell that is) of vegetables
Apricot pie
Imported Portuguese sardines
Chef’s salad with prawns
Southern ham fritter with country gravy
Olympia oyster cocktail
And for booze, there was
Old-fashioned
Stinger
Sidecar
And Acme beer on draught
And that’s just scratching the surface. Mind you, this was not an extremely posh restaurant, but the coffee shop of a large, respectable LA hotel.
We do ham and pierogies, and then saurkraut mushroom soup. (Fuck if I can find the name of it. It’s Slovak, and it’s a traditional Xmas soup. It’s basically saurkraut, mushrooms, and small egg noodles. It’s delicious, but we only have it once a year)
My mother always puts potatos, cheddar cheese and onions in her pierogies, and then serves them with sauteed onions in tons of butter. Sometimes she makes just the mashed potato mixture for dinner. Sooooo good.
Is it machanka you’re thinking of for the soup?
Every American-style Mexican restaurant I’ve ever been to has Fajitas served in a sizzling pan on the menu. I think you’re not seeing a ‘gone out of style’ as much as ‘your friends don’t order it’.
For those interested in that sort of thing, the Los Angeles Public Library has a wonderful online resource of restaurant menus going back to the 1800s.
For instance if you enter “1942” for the date and “*” for menus that have been scanned, you get a bunch of 1942 menus including one for the Biltmore Bowl at the Biltmore Hotel, a dining car menu from the Golden State Limited, a restaurant called “Gourmet” in Hollywood which looks to be anything but, and several others including the most posh of all, the “Starlight Roof” menu from the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
You can certainly construct some oddities from this 1942 Waldorf Astoria menu, especially from the a la carte menu. You could start, for instance, with a nice glass of clam juice or yellow or red tomato juice. You could have a fish course featuring frog’s legs with tartare and potato chips. For an entree you could have something from the “home kitchen” like potted hamburg steak with mashed potato and picked beets, or a more conventional entree like “milk-fed chicken (half)” cooked in some unspecified way or “emincé of white meat of turkey in cream” with wild rice, which sounds more like what the soldiers would soon be lining up for at the canteen than fine dining. And the Waldorf reminds you when ordering desserts that sugar is being rationed and saccharine is available on request.
There is also what appears to a room service menu that’s downright frightening, where you can get calf’s head, calf’s brains sauté, calf’s liver, calf kidneys, or a large sweetbread which is the gullet or pancreas of a calf.
I’ve perused these menus quite a bit and one of the other oddities to modern tastes is that the wine menu is usually fairly sparse and unsophisticated. The Biltmore, for instance, lists only a dozen wines, all French, classified as “red” and “white” and by region, with no information about winery or vintage. Towards the bottom of the list are two California wines, listed generically as “Biltmore Sauterne” and “Biltmore Burgundy” for less than half the cost of the French wines. One assumes that in 1942 California wines may still have been somewhat in the “swill” category!
Sounds great to me! Bring me a calf’s head on a stick with a bottle of generic red swill! 
Ditto for us, except I don’t make gravy all that often any more.
Remember the old thread about the elegance of owning colanders? Perhaps gravy boats are the new colander…
yeah, mačanka came to mind (grandmother is Slovak.)
Now I’m getting hungry for kapusniak/kwasnica, a Polish soup with sauerkraut, smoked meats (sausage and bacon or ribs), and potato. looks like that’s in my dinner future.
My Ukrainian grandmother’s way was to stuff her vareniki with dry farmer’s cheese, boil them till they float, then lightly fry them in butter and onions. Then she added sour cream to the butter/onion mixture until all was well heated, just shy of boiling. God, were they good!!
I’ve only bought frozen commercially made pierogies, I know they can’t match the home-made. But there seem to be a dozen kinds, at least, and are a nice bland background to anything you care to add. I like the mushroom pierogies and saute a pound of mushrooms along with the pierogies. We used to boil a package of any kind, a package of mixed vegetables, and butter, dill, and sour cream on top of it all.
With the fruit kind, my family would serve those with sour cream with sugar beaten into it, so that’s a tip for you all (if you have fruit pierogi where you’re at.) I hate making those mofos. When I was a kid, a family friend would visit my mother every Wednesday and make pierogi from scratch for dinner. Sometimes beef, sometimes strawberry or blueberry, sometimes ruskie (the farmer’s cheese and potato mentioned above.) As a kid, I loved it, but didn’t quite appreciate it as much as I do the memories of it now. It was just a weekly routine to us. My mother and father cooked lots of Polish food, but pierogi was one thing both didn’t bother with. After doing them a few times myself, they really are a pain in the ass and best made in bulk. Kind of like making tamales in that way.
I’m honestly not sure if I had ever had it before that night. If I did I don’t remember it. I will have it again if given the opportunity, or I’ll just make it myself. It was that good!
pulykamell mentioned pimento cheese. I re-discovered that recently myself. I remember eating it when I was a kid but hadn’t had it in years. It’s really good on a hamburger.
I looked it up. From dictionary.com:
I’ve actually stared roasting Chickens regularly, and was also thinking how wierd it is that is has gotten less common.
It’s fairly easy, really cheap and really good, with a good but not excessive amount of leftovers, like a turkey gives you. I got one in the oven right now as a matter of fact.
About once a month… :rolleyes:
With ore-ida french fries, fresh from the oven.
I do believe that sloppy joes have been gradually superceded by tacos as a weekly ground beef entree in most American households over the past 2-3 decades.
You mean, like a pyrex measuring cup?
That even makes an appearance on our holiday table, I 'm afraid…
They don’t actually have soft shells, like soft shell crabs. But the shell is much thinner than other clams. They are available in seafood places in New England and up the coast into Canada, I think. And they are delicious.