I recently came across a stash of my grandmother’s cookbooks, recipes and kitchen hints in the form of newspaper clippings, notes written on index cards and, in a couple of cases, the order form for her annual batch of chicks. On reading, I discovered this culinary gem:
Liver Mexican Style
1/2 pound beef liver
1 onion
1 green pepper
1/2 cup cheese
1 1/4 tomato soup (cups, quarts, gills? Recipe doesn’t say)
1 cuo cooked rice
1/2 cup celery
Drop liver in boiling water 5 minutes. Drain and grind. Chop onion and pepper and mox altogether.
That’s it. I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that this probably went in to the oven to let the veg cook and the cheese melt.
This is worse than the old Kraft recipes that were touted on 1950s tv.
I dislike Lileks’s politics, but that website usually has me rolling. Decades of cookbooks, recipe cards, promotional cookbooks…it’s all there! And all of it is absolutely disgusting.
There are a few blogs where they find some weird looking old recipe and attempt to duplicate it at home, with pictures, and reviews by their families. ‘Retro recipe attempts’ and ‘mid-century menu’ are my favorites. Quite hilarious!
My own grandmother, god rest her, was a fine cook, she was French Canadian and made the Habitant white bean soup, and the pork pie. She boiled pigs knuckles for the meat and ground it up, put it in a pie with cloves or cinnamon. It was very rich and made me rather queasy. I didn’t appreciate her efforts at the time.
I would try that dish, except I’d sautée some of the ingredients, instead of boiling the liver.
(Reminds me of the time my elderly mother boiled link sausages. Her reasoning was that she boiled hot dogs, and they had the same shape. Other than that, she was a fine cook.)