I'm still on my travels, but am taking a few minutes to make a post for today. My wonderful sister-in-law has lent me some cookbooks with great RotD candidates; there's an appalling microwave ham loaf that will be going up as soon as I have access to a color scanner I can use for non-work purposes.
For now I offer Peanut-Butter Cutlets, from the 1930 cookbook New Delineator Recipes. Author Ann Batchelder presents a range of dishes that exemplify the era when elegance and process were considered more important than flavor and texture. The book includes suggestions for sandwich fillings; two are "Equal parts olives, peanut butter, celery, mixed with a little salad dressing" and "Cottage cheese and pickles, olives, nuts or pimientos." Nothing perks up a brown-bag lunch like a cottage cheese sandwich! There are also scary directions for cooking vegetables, such as an asparagus recipe that says "Cook in boiling water until tender, keeping the tips above the water for the first ten minutes," by which point you have already been boiling asparagus for approximately nine and a half minutes too long.
Peanut-Butter Cutlets are included in a chapter of vegetarian dishes that help ensure vegetarians get their minimum supply of starch, protein and fat. And possibly meat; a recipe that includes kidney beans notes, "A ham-bone or a piece of bacon cooked with them adds to the flavor." Well, yes; specifically, it adds the distinctly non-vegetarian flavor of ham or bacon.
I chose Peanut-Butter Cutlets because I couldn't stop imagining the tremendous mess that must result when you try to fry a peanut-butter mixture. Enjoy!
Peanut-Butter Cutlets
1 1/2 cups peanut butter
1 1/2 cups hot milk
6 half-inch slices of bread
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper
Mix peanut butter with hot milk and seasoning, mixing together thoroughly. Dip slices of bread into the peanut-butter mixture. Saute in hot fat. Garnish with pickles and olives.
This dish offers both adequate protein and iron.
From New Delineator Recipes, Ann Batchelder, Butterick Publishing Company, 1930.
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2 comments:
I have no issue with the peanut butter cutlets. They actually sound like a variation of the grilled peanut butter sandwich.
Some of the other items listed above, however, distress me greatly. And explain why generations of Americans have grown up hating asparagus.
To me that recipe looks like an attempt at a vegan (or anyway egg-free) version of french toast. Only I don't think the diluted peanut butter would soak through the bread the same way the egg-and-milk liquid does.
I also notice that pepper is given as 'to taste' but a rather large amount of salt is specified, and that those are the entire list of seasonings.
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