Today’s breadcrumb recipe comes from Betty Crocker’s Dinner Parties: A Contemporary Guide to Easy Entertaining, 1970.1971.

In the Greek Island Party, you find the recipe for Moussaka, joined by a lemon soup, olympian salad, greek bread, honey-almond tartlets and coffee.

1 medium eggplant (11/2 to 2 pounds)

2 tablespoons butter or margarine

1 pound ground lamb or beef

2 tablespoons instant onion

3 cans (8 ounces each) tomato sauce

1.2 cup red burgundy or beef broth

1 tablespoon parsley flakes

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1.4 teaspoon pepper

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

white sauce

1 egg

1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/2 cup dry bread crumbs

Cut unpared eggplant crosswise int 1/2 inch slices. Cook slices in small amount boiling salted water 5-8 minutes or until tender. Drain.

In large skillet, melt butter. Add meat and onion; cook and stir until meat is brown. Stir in 1 can of the tomato sauce, the wine, parsley flakes, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Cook uncovered over medium heat about 20 minutes or until half the liquid is absorbed. While meat mixture cooks, prepare white sauce.

Heat oven to 375. Beat egg until blended. Stir egg, 1/2 cup of the cheese and 1/4 cup of the bread crumbs into meat mixture, remove from heat. Grease baking dish, 11 1/2×71/2×11/2 or 9×9x2 inches; sprinkle remaining bread crumbs evenly in dish.

Arrange half the eggplant slices in dish; cover with meat mixture. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the cheese over meat and top with remaining eggplant slices. Pour white sauce over mixture and sprinkle remaining cheese over top. Bake uncovered 45 minutes. Allow casserole to stand 20 minutes before serving. Heat remaining cans tomato sauce. Cut Moussaka into squares, serve with tomato sauce.

6 servings

Note: Casserole can be prepared and baked up to 24 hours in advance. Heat in 375 degree oven 30 minutes; it is not necessary to cool 20 minutes before serving.

From Nini’s Recipe Box.

Nini, my very southern great grandmother had this recipe in her recipe box. (now mine.)

It came from a Mrs. R.R. Johnson and includes what may be mysterious: process cheese. This undoubtedly means American Cheese, but your basic cheddar should work fine. It makes a fine vegetarian main dish or a lovely, rich side dish.

Stuffed Zucchini
1 1/2 lb. small zucchini

1/2 c. grated process cheese

2 T. snipped parsley

1/8 Tsp. pepper

2 T. butter

1 1/2 c. fresh bread crumbs

1.4 c. minced onion

1 1/4 tsp. salt

2 eggs, beaten

1/4 c. grated process cheese

Scrub zucchini well. Cut off ends; do not pare. Cook whole with 1 tsp. salt in 1″ boiling water (covered) about 5-7 minutes. Start heating oven to 350 degrees F. Cut squash in halves lengthwise. With tip of spoon, carefully remove squash from shells. Chop into small pieces; then carefully combine with bread crumbs & rest of ingredients except butter & 1/4 c. cheese. Pile mixture lightly into zucchini shells; dot with butter. Sprinkle with 1/4 c. grated cheese. Arrange filled shells in large baking dish. Bake uncovered 30 minutes or until brown on top. Makes 4 servings.

The retro-food of the week: breadcrumbs.

No, not this kind: Home>category>Breadcrumb Post (breadcrumb navigation) (though I am a serious fan of breadcrumb navigation and believe in it highly)
Not this kind either: Breadcrumbs (cutie style)

This kind:

Plain old, ordinary breadcrumbs. Not those fancy-schmancy Panko breadcrumbs the foodies seem to have in abundance.

Egg & Egg Product Safety is important. Yes, your odds of getting food poisoning actually are higher with your average head of lettuce but don’t take that as a reason to handle eggs with less care.

Some learn to cook advice from a story in Apples of Gold: Stories for Boys and Girls,
a book by Susan Wixon, 1876.

If you ask me about egg salad, I am likely to tell you one of two stories. One is that my favorite egg salad in the world was made by the Hospital Auxillary Pink Ladies and served in the Anne Arundel County General Hospital gift shop (not the cafeteria). I have never been able to successfully duplicate it. Very simple, very plain, but perfect.

The other is this: one Easter, maybe more than one Easter, my mother used dyed hard-boiled eggs and a can of potted meat to make egg salad. I am sure she added pickle relish, maybe a smidge of mustard and of course, mayonaise. I instantly felt revulsion for this mixture. Why ruin good hard-boiled eggs like that? Plain hard-boiled eggs worked for me. Egg salad worked for me. But potted meat egg salad? Ummm no….but then the bite..the taste….mmmmmmmmmmmmmm…amazing.

Really. I can’t explain it. Quite tasty.

Tell me about your favorite egg salad. Pickles? No pickles? celery? celery salt? mustard? dry mustard?

ReadyMade Blog is offering the forever retro (and perhaps destined to stay that way) pickled egg recipe. Then, they made it look appealing. How is it that appealing sounding foods can be made appealing?

Anyone have a pickled egg story to tell?

This recipe was the “fancy” dish at my mother’s famous holiday brunches.

It comes from her Atlanta Cooks For Company cookbook, which her step-mother gave to her as a birthday gift. It is a well-loved cookbook as you see in the pictures. Pristine cookbooks in my house or my mother’s house means they were read and not used. Splotched, splattered, close to death…that means well-loved.

So, thanks to a Mrs. Joseph L. Lombardi, I have a caviar pie recipe to share with you.

Yield: 12 Servings

10 Hard-Cooked Eggs, Chopped

1/4 Cup Butter, Softened

1/2 Teaspoon Celery Salt

1/2 Teaspoon Dry Mustard

Salt and Pepper

1 tablespoon Onion, Minced

1 Cup Sour Cream

Caviar (red or black)

Snipped Parsley

1. Peel and chop hard-cooked eggs while hot. Mash and blend together with butter, celery salt, mustard, salt and pepper.
2. Press mixture into 8 inch pie pan that has been rinsed in cold water and chill.
3. Combine onion and sour cream and place on top of mixture in pie pan.
4. Garnish with caviar (red or black) and snipped parsley for a colorful treat!

My notes: I use both colors of caviar and alternate the dollops on top. I am not sure what it tastes like with good caviar, we always used the kind that Safeway sold in the 70s and 80s. Serve it with crackers or toast points. If you want to make ahead, stop after step 2. If you do the sour cream/onion and then caviar part too early it becomes a disgustingly ugly mess and you may have your teen’s boyfriend thinking it would be clever to make a yin/yang design in caviar on the top to cover up the messiness.

Cup-A-Cake Cupcake Container

CUP-A-CAKE was designed and patented by mothers to solve the age old problem of sending cupcakes to school or outings with their children.

Ok, cupcakes are not nearly the retro-food they were, back in the dark ages…maybe two years ago…when they were limited to kid food status.

Cupcakes also do not strike one as something you think of when you think eggs; unless of course you are making birthday party cupcakes at 10:30 at night to drop off at the school at 7:30 in the morning…and you don’t have eggs to make the cupcakes.
However, these cupcake holders take the cake for coolness. I am just wondering if I can get a bulk discount, so that I can send them to school, instead of feverishly wedging cupcakes into a box.

Eggs Benedict holds the place in my family as being the favorite part of Easter. Yes, really…even though one key member of the family won’t even try it. My father also was reluctant to try it back when newlywed with a strange southern wife in the kitchen. He tried it and liked it, thereby leaving us where we are today: the big deal meal in our house on Christmas and Easter is Eggs Benedict.

One of my children chooses to eat hers without the poached eggs at all. I poach my eggs hard, but the rest of the family go with normally poached eggs. If you hard-boil the eggs, chop up the canadian bacon, and stir together with the sauce, you can throw it in the crock-pot and use it for a brunch buffet, with toast points on the side.

Disclosure: the sauce in no way resembles “normal” hollandaise sauce. My mother calls it a “mock” hollandaise when describing to friends, but I always thought she said holiday sauce when she would instruct me to get things out of the fridge for her or to stir it. Eggs Benedict = Holiday breakfast, so holiday sauce must go on it.

Here goes:

Holiday Sauce

2 8 oz packages cream cheese

2 cups milk (whole milk works best, but any will work)

1 egg

1 lemon

Chop cream cheese up. Place milk and cream cheese in pot over medium heat stirring occassionally until cream cheese is melted. Wisk in egg. Once sauce thickens, add the juice of one lemon.

Split english muffins, spread with margarine, top with canadian bacon. Warm in oven while poaching eggs.

Top each english muffin/canadian bacon combo with a poached egg. Spoon sauce on top.