I’ve got a recipe for pinto bean fudge.
This scares me, but intrigues me at the same time, in a morbid way. Anyone ever had fudge made with beans? Was it an acceptable foodstuff?
I like to collect old cookbooks, and my favorites are the church/civic group/fund-raiser type.
I’ve seen the recipe Cranky mentions, as well as the mock-apple pie recipe.
There is also a recurring recipe for “Poor Man’s Lasagne” which involves ketchup and cottage cheese instead of ricotta and mozzarella and tomato sauce. Yuck.
Yes, my question is “Why?” when seeing these strange recipes.
Anyone know?
I guess you answered yourselves!
If you can’t afford ricotta and mozzarella then you have to make do with ketchup and cottage cheese.
As was pointed out earlier, it’s only within the last 20 years or so that supermarkets have been able to supply “exotic” foodstuffs such as regional italian cheeses etc all year round (same with fresh fruit).
So there are probably two answers to “why?”:
- cos it’s cheap.
- cos it’s all there is to hand.
Dare I suggest that perhaps there might also be
- they sometimes taste pretty good, despite the ingredients!
– Quirm
hear, hear! 
d&r
I can see that Revtim has never had to persuade small children to eat strange food.
When you’re trying to get a small child to eat something unfamiliar, you don’t call it something weird like “Gahagafaga”–you give it a halfway familiar name, so as to encourage the consumption of the strange food product in question.
Small children need calories, and no, it’s not true that “if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat it”. Many small children will go hungry rather than eat something unfamiliar. I speak from personal experience. 
Small children are genetically hard-wired to be very suspicious of new foods–this is what kept homo habilis children, once they were too big to be carried by their mothers and were free to wander at will, from sampling every new berry, leaf, and root they happened across. Or rather, I should say, after a few generations, all the genes for “food curiosity in children” would have been removed from the population, leaving only children who would be extremely suspicious of new foods.
Thus, generations of colonial and pioneer moms presented the dish to their children as “mock apple pie”, not as “Aunt Millie’s Gahagafaga”.
Gahagafaga…
That sounds yummy. Care to share the recipe?
That makes more sense DDG, thanks!