When I moved into my first apartment 30 years ago, fresh out of grad school, I had no furniture but eight large boxes of books. When my partner and I bought our first house 20 years ago I had some furniture and 24 boxes of books and when we moved into our current house five years ago we had accumulated a good bit of furniture and, together, we were up to 36 boxes of books. I remember thinking, “I’m not unpacking these books again,” and I put all the books into the guest room closet with the vague plan to unpack and organize them “sometime soon.”.
They stayed there, unpacked and disorganized, until last month when , in a burst of ambition, I decided we needed some extra closet space and that it would be easier to just get rid of the books. Accordingly, I set aside an entire Saturday to go through my books, vowing to keep “only a couple” of my favorites.
As it turned out, the first box I opened was a box of cookbooks I had inherited from my mother when she closed up her condo, and right on top I saw a well-worn volume called The Poor Man’s Cookbook, with a copyright of 1964.
Thumbing through the book as I sat cross legged on the floor, I was instantly transported back to my childhood and I vividly remember that several times a year my mother would decide we were poor and try to save money on household expenses. I remembered that if I came home from school and saw this book on the kitchen counter that dinner was not going to end well.
One of the first recipes I came across was a recipe for duck l’orange that was made with Tang. Really. Years later when I had duck l’orange in a restaurant I was surprised it tasted nothing like my mom’s recipe but I did not realize, until I opened The Poor Man’s Cookbook, that Mom’s duck l’orange was made with chicken.
Most of the recipes in this book were based on time-saving short cuts and low priced substitutions. This is why her recipe for “Poor man’s shrimp scampi” was made with canned tuna and her “Steak Tartare” was made with seasoned ground beef and served on a Ritz cracker.
It seemed like the majority of the recipes featured canned tuna or ground beef, but then I found her recipe for “Poor Man’s Surf and Turf” with was made with canned tuna AND ground beef, all mixed with cream of mushroom soup and served over rice. Next to the recipe, in my mom’s careful script was a note that read “Yum!” which was not remotely my recollection.
As vile as the Surf and Turf was, it could not hold a candle to “Chicken and Peas” which consisted of sautéed chicken mixed with canned peas and — well, that was pretty much the entire recipe. Next I came across a recipe for a “Poor Man’s Veal Cutlet” which was bread crumbs mixed with egg and deep-fried; in retrospect, it was pretty much the same as what our Southern neighbors called “hush puppies.”
How is it possible I forgot the recipe for “Meat Loaf Surprise:” a meat loaf studded with either whole bananas or hard cooked eggs and – on at least one memorable occasion – both. I’ll spare you the details of both the “Poor Man’s Liver with Onions” (made with boloney) and the “Poor Man’s Lasagna” made with Velveeta and mashed baked beans. And I’ll also spare you the description of the seven layers of the “Seven Layer Casserole” because you’d never believe me anyway.
I spent way longer going through this cookbook than I intended, and when I looked at the clock I was surprised it was already lunchtime. Sighing, I put the cookbook back into the box, sealed it up and closed the closet door. I’ll sort through the books some other time.