I was just thinking about chicken a la king and how you hardly ever hear about people making or eating it these days. The very name of the dish gives me visions of grainy black-and-white film from the eisenhower era with dads in brown (brown!) suits and moms in shapeless dresses.
What are the other vanishing dishes of yesteryear?
Look up James Lilek’s book The Gallery of Regrettable Foods (I tyhink he still has some things related on his website). It’s full of justifiably forgotten recipes from the 1950s. Various dinner loaves, chicken-in-aspic, and fortunately forgotten casseroles.
Onion dip. Mm, all that sodium!
Chicken ala King ROCKS! It’s wonderful over puff pasty, which is how my mother serves it. And Chicken Divan is great, too.
StG
Succotash.
Last time we had Fondue, the kitchen was decorated in Avocado Green and Harvest Yellow. I think if made a brief reappearance an year or two ago and probably will again in another 30.
VEGETABLE JELLO MOLDS!!11! AAAAAAAAGGGGG!! :eek:
(Btw, how do you tell if a man in a black-and-white film is wearing a brown suit? Does his wife say, “Gee honey, you look like a pile o’ crap in that suit”?)
Obligatory link to the Gallery of Regrettable Food website (which I was coming in to post anyway):
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/spec.html
I’m a big fan of liver and onions and meatloaf, both of which qualify as “old people food” like this, but I tend to think a lot of those meals shouldn’t be missed or mourned. You never hear about pot roast anymore, and Spam isn’t as popular as it used to be (particularly when you’d always see grilled Spam with pineapple rings).
Whaddya mean, you never hear about pot roast? I make a killer pot roast, thank you very much.
Hmph.
Salmon croquettes. I still have to go to Luby’s Cafeteria every time I’m near one to have salmon croquettes just for a nostalgia trip. I wouldn’t know how to begin making the things, of course, nor would I allow that grade of salmon in my house (except to feed my cat with), but at the cafeteria? Yum!
Faggots and gravy. I’ll be back later to explain, as will no doubt be necessary.
By the way, on a recent drive, I discovered a diner in Delaware, just off the Interstate – half of the menu was Turkish, and the other half was made up of these relics – fried liver (like a pound of them), beef croquettes smothered in potatoes and gravy. Amazing.
You can get liver at various diners. It is just plain great food (if prepared correctly).
I picked up a book of recipes from the 1930s on eBay awhile ago. Quite a few things that you don’t see any more. Off the top of my head, there’s a Turkish omlette, which in basically scrambled eggs with honey added. :eek:
Marion Cunningham has a cookbook called “Lost Recipes” that focuses on just this kind of dish.
(–delicious recipes, not yucky scary jello molds.)
How about:
Beef stroganoff
Beef wellington
Rumaki
Cigarets in gravy? No, wait! Small branches of wood in gravy!
::Scott’s imagination goes wild::
No, wait, you meant Ffagodau Cymreig (Welsh Fagots)
http://www.welsh-products-online.co.uk/acatalog/Recipes.html
I ate quite a bit of chicken ala king a few years ago. I like MREs. (Of course, I’ve never had to like them!) But the crackers suck big-time. So after a while I had a stack of MRE crackers in the cupboard. The only way I could eat them was by buying tins of chicken ala king. It was good!
Onion dip. Lipton Onion Soup Mix and sour cream. Dad used to make it. I find myself making it maybe once a year. (Not really big into chips’n’dip.)
Faggots. Used to eat them at Ye Olde King’s Head, but they’re no longer on the menu. Just bringing them up again because I was slapped down in a chatroom for mentioning them – even after I explained exactly what they were. ‘That word’ is forbidden, because people might read ‘faggots are an English dish that are liver meatballs served in gravy’ and take it as ‘I hate homosexuals.’ :rolleyes:
My mom used to make ‘crap salad’, which I called ‘that jello salad with the apples and walnuts in it’. ANIACR, it consisted of lime Jell-O, lemon Jell-O, cottage cheese, diced red apples, diced green apples, chopped walnuts, and some Miracle Whip. If Pepto Bismol were green instead of pink, that’s what colour it was. Unbelievably, it was actually good! If anyone has the ‘official recipe’, I’d like to see it. My mom got it from my recently-late aunt in the '50s who got it from a women’s magazine.
I made meatloaf a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t turn out as well as dad’s. It’s in the freezer.
Dad made the best potroast. I make it maybe once a year. I prefer roast beef, roasting a prime rib and making Yorkshire pudding around Christmastime. (Now if only I had someone to cook for!)
I used to like succotash when I was a kid. I see it at the market, but haven’t had it in donkey’s years.
Hot turkey sandwich. For those who don’t know, this is slices of turkey breast piled on top of white bread and covered with white gravy. Served with mashed potatoes and succotash, with cranberry sauce on the side. I used to love it when I was a kid. Every so often I might have a plate at a diner for nostalgia’s sake.
Swiss steak. When was the last time anyone cooked that?
Shit. I had JUST obliterated that memory from my mind and you had to go plant it back in there. THere is no food so evil as chicken a la king. My mother would poison us with this just a couple times a year, and it was then I realized that not only were we poor, but that I liked eating damp drywall better.
Pineapple upside down cake.
Creamed peas on toast.
The head lunchlady at my high school would occasionally serve Chicken ala King to the teachers, over fresh biscuits. It was actually pretty good, as long as she didn’t serve it too often. I kidded her that 1) she had a cookbook in her office with an FM number on it, and 2) that if I ever saw SOS on the menu I would burn the cafeteria down! 