Rosie Goes Retro
Rosie is redefining retro. I’m taking “vintage” recipes from the golden age in which I grew up and updating them for true simplicity and goodness, giving them a fresh make-over for today.
Sometimes I wonder how those of us of a “certain age” made it this long. Our lives, from birth, were fraught with danger. We slept soundly in cribs and played with toys, all brightly colored with lead-based paints. We rode our bikes without helmets. We rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags. We survived non-childproof cabinets and pill bottles and exposed electric sockets, often chewing on the wires. We strung hot-to-the-point-of-boiling candles on our Christmas trees.
Forget your bottled waters. We drank from bacteria-laden garden hoses. We licked batter that contained raw eggs off metal beaters still plugged in, and we didn’t get salmonella or have our tongues sliced off. We sucked candy cigarettes. We baked cakes in Easy-Bake ovens which reached 350° and had a tendency to trap children’s fingers, resulting in second- and third-degree burns. We played with molten plastic, heating molds to 400°F, with our Vacu-Forms. The Creepy Crawler oven made the Easy-Bake look positively tame. It produced toxic, burning liquid plastic on a sizzling hot plate, with potentially deadly fumes. We played with sparklers, burning at 2,000°F. Handheld fireworks for children!
Riding in the back of a truck in the summer time was a special event – even better in lawn chairs. We shot at each other with cap pistols. We played with deadly lawn darts. We went sledding in winter, with neither brakes nor helmets, on sleds with razor-sharp blades, navigating downhill around trees. We slid down blazing hot slides in the heat of the day, and we twirled on metal merry-go-rounds until falling-down dizzy. We swung so high in the air, the feet of our swingset lifted off the ground. We pushed rotary lawn mowers, barefoot or with flip flops, and yet we still have ten toes.
We’d never heard of second-hand smoke, but it was the norm. Most mothers continued to smoke and drink during their pregnancies. Oh, NO! Back up the truck! No cigarette ever touched Mama Hawthorne’s lips and she was a strict teetotaler. No doubt, that’s why everyone around her drank. At any rate, we lived through all this.
And then there was the food. We boomers really shouldn’t be alive.
Yes, the food… Highly processed, sodium-laden, and ready-to-eat foods were abundant. Casseroles were the number one food choice at the family dinner table. Cream-of-whatever soup thickly blanketed unidentifiable meats and vegetables which struggled to swim, floundering in a condensed sea of mediocrity. Jell-O molds were de rigueur with all sorts of unrecognizable food pieces artfully trapped in a quivering gelatinous mass.
Yet we still survived, in spite of everything.
See Recipes:
I think of the fifties as the casserole decade. Most household pantries were stocked with cans of condensed cream-of-whatever soups to envelop the ingredients in one happy, cohesive, gloppy mass.
The number one casserole appearing on a fifties table was the tuna casserole – basically canned tuna, cream of mushroom soup, canned peas, typically some type of noodle and cheese, all crowned with crushed potato chips. I’m deconstructing the tuna casserole of yore. I’m revamping that can of cream of mushroom soup by creating a mushroom bisque, and I’m preparing peppered tuna steaks with a lemon butter sauce. Nary a can in sight!
To deconstruct the tuna casserole, I took that era’s ubiquitous can of congealed condensed cream of mushroom soup, which served as the glue for many a casserole, and I’m making mushroom bisque. Accented with hints of truffle oil, this earthy soup gives you intense mushroom flavor and packs a powerful punch of umami.
Hope you enjoyed my deconstructed blast from the past. Remember, next time you reach for a can, don’t! ♦
Author: Rosie Hawthorne
Rosie Hawthorne is a blogger, gardener, wanderluster, and mother of three. She learned to cook by watching Julia Child every Saturday afternoon on her 11-inch black and white TV with legal pad and pen in hand. For the Hawthornes, every meal is a celebration of life.
