Authors probably aren’t supposed to have favorites among their books. I mean, I assume. I’m not very good at authoring. But today is the book birthday of Party Lines. Among the contemporary romances I’ve published…it’s my favorite. (Though the book I’m writing now is giving me major feels.)
To celebrate, I put together some text/image things with some of the best lines. You can see them all on the book’s Pinterest board.
I hope Lydia and Michael are celebrating with banter and bourbon!
Those heady of 60s food posts are over…except, well, they’re not. Today, we have my favorite Christmas cookies: butter crispies. This is a recipe given to me by my grandmother, and it’s sure to put a retro twist on your holiday baking.
Once I started with this 60s food thing, I found it hard it stop. You’ll note, for example, that this is actually the ninth recipe I’ve posted. Now you know why Gen and I are writing a series and not just a one-off.
The main source text I’ve used is Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook, which was first published in 1957. While she’s obscure now, as a professor and then as a chef at several prominent hotels and department stores, Corbitt shaped food ways in Texas between the 1940s and 1970s (you can read about her here and here). My mom and grandma still use her cookbook on a regular basis. When I ordered myself a used copy, I was surprised to find a dedication from Ms. Corbitt herself scrawled in the front cover and a recipe that she’d typed for the recipient on Neiman Marcus stationary. Clearly I had to make it.
Continue reading “Seven Days of 60s Food: Million-Dollar Fudge”
First things first, Star Dust is here! It’s available wherever fine ebooks are sold, including Amazon, iBooks, B&N, Google Play, and Kobo, and you can even order a paperback at Amazon. It’s a space-race rom-com about a divorcee looking to start a new chapter and an astronaut reaching for the stars. I truly love this book, and I’m not just saying this because Gen and I had so much fun writing and editing it (though we did). But if you’ve been enjoying these retro food posts, you should give it a try.
To celebrate Star Dust’s launch (I had to, y’all, I had to), here’s the one you’ve been waiting for: Grape Jello Salad.
This recipe is insane: the butter, the cheese, the carbs. It’s too much. It’s also delicious. And it’s Kit’s favorite way to eat potatoes in Star Dust.
Continue reading “Seven Days of 60s Food: Potatoes au Gratin”
Before we get to today’s recipe, have I mentioned that Star Dust has a new cover? And it’s very pretty? Also, if you’re a reviewer, Star Dust is now on NetGalley. For everyone else, it will be out on Wednesday. (So soon! Ahhhhhh!) But I’ll delay my panicking in order to get back to the 60s food.
My last attempt at appetizers was…lackluster. But the next attempt was fantastic. This Almond-Parmesan spread was one of my favorite things I made during this project.
Continue reading “Seven Days of 60s Food: Almond-Parmesan Spread”
I remember hearing a joke when I was a kid: Gracie Allen’s pot roast recipe calls for a large pot roast and a small one; she puts them both in the oven and when the small one burns, the large one is done. There’s a lot we could say about this joke in terms of mid-century food ways and sexism. But after I completely overcooked a pot roast in the name of research, I think Gracie Allen should have trod on George Burns’s foot every time he repeated it.
Again, I’ll give you the recipe and then tell you what happened and how I plan to avoid it in the future.
After the Jello disaster, I feel the need to emphasize that most of what I made in my exploration of 60s food was actually pretty good. Take, for example, this green bean side dish.
Continue reading “Seven Days of 60s Food: Spanish Green Beans”
“So what kind of Jello salad are you making?”
As soon as I announced this project, this was the question everyone asked. The dish people most closely associate with the 1960s seems to be Jello, preferably with lots of strange stuff in it.
The only problem was, well, I wasn’t finding many Jello recipes in the cookbooks. This leads me to a few hypotheses: one, I may have had too small a sample size and needed to do more research; two, Jello salad might have been a regional or folk thing where people developed and circulated their own recipes apart from the cookbook industry; and/or three, our historical memory about this might be off. I definitely didn’t put any Jello in Star Dust.
Regardless, the Internet filled in some blanks. If you’re interested in molding Jello, I would recommend that you read Elisabeth Lane’s post about a peach Jello mold, which was inspired by this recipe at The Kitchn, or dive into the deep end by reading the archives of The Jello Mold Mistress of Brooklyn. You’ll also need to peruse your local thrift store for some molds.
I ended up making two Jello recipes: a very weird one that did not work and a more modern one that did. You get the weird failure today.
Probably the most famous cookbook published in the 1960s is Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle. First published in 1961, it’s been intimidating home cooks for more than half a century. I’m confident that Anne-Marie would have owned a copy. And as soon as I took this project on, I knew I had to make something out of it.
I called my grandmother and asked about her memories Mastering the Art of French Cooking. What recipes had she actually used? She immediately began talking about Carbonnades a la Flamande, or beef carbonnades. So that’s what I picked.
Emma Barry 