By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – Best Of The Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 22). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
INGREDIENTS:
1 small onion – the size of an egg – sliced thin
6 cucumbers – unpeeled and sliced into 1/4-inch thick slices
Enough water to cover the slices in a plastic container
¼ cup Kosher salt
Combine [above ingredients] in an accommodating plastic container and allow to stand, uncovered, for at least 12 hours.
The Brine:
6 cups light vinegar
5 cups sugar
4 tablespoons mustard seed
2 teaspoons turmeric
4 teaspoons each: celery seed and celery salt
INSTRUCTIONS:
Combine the Brine ingredients in a large sauce pan and bring them to a gentle boil. Stir and simmer for 5 minutes. When sugar is completely dissolved, remove from heat and allow to cool to lukewarm or room temperature.
Drain the cukes and onions, but don’t rinse them. Pack them into a 1-gallon plastic or glass container and pour the brine mixture over them. They must be completely submerged in the Brine. If the cukes are especially large, you may have to increase the Brine recipe to accommodate this. Cover tightly and refrigerate immediately. Do not serve for at least 72 hours. They’ll keep refrigerated up to 3 months.
By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – Best Of The Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 17) [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
HAMBURGERS CAN BE seasoned as differently as there are restaurants to serve them. Some of my own favorites include a mixture like my Steak Tartare and Country Club Burgers in this chapter. But these are easier to put together – and much juicier! They are reminiscent, in fact, of a famous fast food restaurant!
INGREDIENTS:
5 pounds of lean ground beef
3 ½ ounce jar baby food, strained veal
3 ½ ounce jar baby food, strained beef
10 ½ ounce can Campbell’s Beef Broth
1 teaspoon each: onion salt and season salt
½ teaspoon each: lemon pepper and finely crushed, dry, minced onions
2 tablespoons of my Cup of Thoup Powder – Tomato Flavor (see the “Recipes” tab at TheRecipeDetective.com)
INSTRUCTIONS:
Mix all the ingredients together thoroughly, covering your hands with plastic food bags to knead it well. Or dig right in like Grandma did; remember that fingers were made before forks! Shape into patties by measuring out 2/3-cup of mixture for each and keeping them about 1/2-inch thick and square in shape (about the size of a graham cracker.) The mixture makes about 15 patties, which can be individually wrapped and frozen to use within 6 months, thawing for about 30 minutes at room temperature. Do not refrigerate for more than 2 days.
This is World Kindness Week, which is always the week of November 13th. While kindness should be practiced every day, world-wide, special attention is brought to it this week – whether you’re a giver or receiver, celebrate it!
The “giving season” has begun. Some kind-hearted people are once again paying for other people’s fast food orders, while sitting in line at the drive-thru. I’ve also seen multiple church groups pay for people’s gas at stations around the Detroit area. Kindness is in the air!
‘Happy is the person who has a good supply of the milk of human kindness and knows how to keep it from souring.’ – Gloria Pitzer
Wednesday is also celebrating, among other things, National Fast Food Day! Over 50 years ago, fast foods and junk foods were always getting a bad rap from the critics, regarding how unhealthy they were. But my mom figured out how to make those taboo foods at home – where she controlled the ingredients, taking the junk out of junk food.
Mom was a trailblazer in the 1970’s, when she carved a new niche in the food industry. She called her creations “copycat cookery” for “eating out at home”. The fact is, fast food recipes weren’t found in any cookbooks, back then. So Mom found ways to imitate our favorite fast foods at home, for less!
She looked forward, every day, to investigating all the possibilities there were to offer from this new platform! If it saved her household money, Mom wanted to share it with everyone, to help them save money too!
From 1974 to 2014, Mom shared her discoveries in her self-published cookbooks and newsletters, offering a free sampling (about 10-15) of her recipes, in exchange for a SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope), along with information on how to order her available cookbooks and subscribe to her newsletter.
The fast food recipes featured in her 1980 sample sheet are pictured above. You can also find them individually on the Recipes tab of this website. Mom wrote the following editorial about her humble beginnings with recipe requests and popular, fast-food, make-alike dishes.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
Excerpts by Gloria Pitzer, as seen in…
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; January 2018, 1st Printing)
[A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
A MEAL BY ANY OTHER NAME
FAST FOOD RECIPES were not published in the best-sellers – and these were the restaurants where families were apt to frequent if they wanted a meal that was affordable! [In the 1970s] Paul and I could take all 5 of the children to Capri’s, an Italian restaurant down the road from us, in Pearl Beach.
We could feed the whole family for less than $10, providing we ordered the large pizza with only pepperoni and cheese on it and one soft drink for each of us. It was not for substance that we ate out. It was for entertainment.
We could take the kids to McDonald’s, and it did the same thing for us that going to the movies did for our parents. It was an affordable pleasure. It was a diversion from meatloaf and pot roast and peas and carrots.
It was a treat. We looked forward to it. We felt good about the experience and even better after it was over. It carried us through a long week of paying the utilities, insurance, house payments and car payments and grocery expenses.
When we had to have our 10-year-old station wagon repaired, we had to skip eating out that week. If one of us had to see the dentist, it might be 2 or 3 weeks before we could afford to eat out again. We made do with what we had… (p. 295)
THE “ORIGINAL 200”
MY LIST OF ‘SECRET RECIPES’ had grown to 200 and we offered them, on 4×6-inch cards [that I printed on my mimeograph], at $.25 each or 5 for a dollar. It was quite a packaging process to fill the combinations of orders, so I put all those recipes into a book.
It was going to be our only book on the subject, since most of the recipes were fast foods – but, as it turned out, it was only the first in a series of five books. After ‘Book One’ took off and became a very good seller, I did a Bicentennial American Cookery book as a limited edition and was pleased when the Henry Ford Library at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan ordered copies for their Bicentennial collection. That was July 1976… (p. 296)
WE WANTED OUR CAKE AND WE WANTED TO EAT IT, TOO!
WE WANTED TO EAT OUT at a price we could afford; and, when we couldn’t afford to eat out, we wanted to dine-in as if we were eating out! At the time, there were few recipes for this kind of cooking.
We wanted to spend less time preparing the foods and less money on the ingredients and still serve a dish to those who shared our table…that would be equal to – if not better than – anything we could buy in a restaurant or from a supermarket.
For all of these reasons, I have pursued the investigations of the food industry with the greatest joy and the utmost care, translating into recipes, those secrets that I have been able to decipher. (p. 297)
Over the decades, Mom offered free samples of some of her most requested recipes, starting with her “Original 200” collection. As the years went on, she changed up the free sample recipes she offered, as some also came from her most popular requested recipes, during the radio interviews she did around the country.
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, p. 55)
THE SAMPLE RECIPES
SIGHT-UNSEEN WAS HARDLY appropriate to ask people to buy a publication that they could not first examine. I spent all of one day and most of the next, thinking about and trying out a single page description with a few sample recipes from the publication that I could send out to interested and perspective subscribers.
To this day [1989 – and continued through 2014], we still use the same procedure, and it has worked very well. We offer, for a self-addressed stamped envelope, 12-15 sample recipes and, on the other side of the page, all the [ordering] information on our books and newsletter.
Incidentally, Mom didn’t just investigate and develop imitations of popular restaurant dishes, fast food favorites, pantry-shelf products, etc. She was also a writer, and she filled her books and newsletters with almost as much food-for-thought editorials and food-for-the-soul inspirations as she did food-for-the-table recipes and kitchen tips.
Mom wanted her creations to be as much at home on the living room coffee table or on the bedside table as they were on the kitchen counter. Her books and newsletters were like no others, which put her writings in a unique position to be noticed – and that they were!
AGAIN, MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, p. 92)
PEOPLE EXPECT US TO BE BETTER
WHENEVER SOMEBODY HAS MENTIONED to me that they are surprised that the newsletter or the recipe books include non-recipe material, I usually replied, ‘I’m surprised that you’re surprised!’ Food for the table and food for thought should, and often do, go hand-in-hand.
In our publications there will always be room for the kind of material that is humorous and uplifting – as the case may be. I respond easily to the unusual, if it has a beneficial influence on others and find it a joy to share such information. The response is always encouraging.
I am still hearing good comments on the little book we sent out in the fall of 1988, entitled ‘Good Thoughts And Things To Smile About’; which we did not sell, but GAVE to those people we felt we should express appreciation for their kindness and attention, either, to our work or to our family.
The little acts of overcoming the annoyance, impatience, indifference, apathy, that sometimes seem to be so much a part of our day – can make an enormous difference in the quality of our lives. This may not always seem easy, but each false tendency can be detected and rejected because it is wholly without foundation. Genuine love, caring, alertness and patience replace annoyance, indifference, apathy and impatience.
LAST THOUGHTS…
RandomActsOfKindness.org is a great website that promotes doing random acts of kindness as part of our normal routine. They offer a lot of inspiring stories about such acts, as well as scientific health benefits. Check out The Science Of Kindness, which claims it fuels personal energy and self-esteem, makes you happier, and is good for your heart; all of which helps you live longer.
It’s said that “practice makes perfect”. Practice also creates habits that, in turn, become our “norm”. In addition, habits generally take about a week to form, thus, I want to re-recommend Chrystle Fiedler’s kindness challenge, from “Why Being Kind Makes You Healthier” (as seen at… StarTribune.com; July 24, 2019). Chrystle wrote:
‘Try the seven-day kindness challenge. That means, do at least one act of kindness every day for seven days. Ground rules: Do something different each day; push yourself out of your comfort zone at least once and be sure one of your acts of kindness is anonymous — no one should ever find out who did it.’
In honor of TODAY, being National Pickle Day, here’s Mom’s secret recipe for Bread And Butter Pickles; as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 22). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
Today is also… National Family PJ Day and National Spicy Guacamole Day! [NOTE: It’s also my birthday and the 48th anniversary (1974) of Mom’s first TV appearance – on “AM Detroit”, with host, Dennis Wholley; at WXYZ-TV, Channel 7, in Metro Detroit.]
Happy Monday! Personally, I’m grateful for Mondays because they are my 52 Chances each year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with all of you!
Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away! This is considered to be a “special” time of year, for giving thanks for all we have. Many people do that EVERY day but there’s even more of an emphasis put on it now, through New Year’s Eve, which is now less than seven weeks away!
I’m grateful for all of our “homemade holidays”, while I was growing up. Money was usually tight for our family of seven (nine, if you count the dog and cat!) Therefore, a lot of what we enjoyed during the holidays – be it costumes, toys, cards, food, gifts, decorations, clothes, etc. – was usually homemade, by Mom, with a lot of love.
That meant so much to me, so I often tried to make my own children’s holidays “homemade, with love”, too. Like Mom, it was partly necessary, to ease the household budget; but I also wanted to create special memories for their future, as Mom did for our family.
These days, through the internet, you can find instructions and videos for making just about anything and everything simply by typing a few key words into a search box. The knowledge of the world is, literally, at our finger tips! You don’t even have to be a super crafty person – some things are really so simple!
You really don’t need to be crafty to create anything homemade – from food to gifts to decorations and so much more. Barely more than a few decades ago, home computers were not a common thing – we didn’t have the endless ideas and concepts that are inundating the internet, like we have now.
My favorite inexpensive, homemade gifts and decorating ideas often use something as simple as canning jars! Any size or style you choose, these jars are so versatile – and reusable too! They can be filled with dry mix ingredients and a recipe card for making/baking the product.
They can also be filled with natural elements (like pine sprigs, cinnamon, etc.) for decorative potpourri to simmer in a pot of water on the stove. Likewise, they can be filled with homemade candles, soaps, or salves – there are so many “how to” sites on the web, from which to gather many inspirations and instructions.
Pinterest is one of my favorite search engines for homemade ideas that I can’t find in my Mom’s books, first. My own personal page at Pinterest, which I started many years ago, has a large eclectic collection of boards, as my interests are quite diverse.
The official Pinterest page of The Recipe DetectiveTM is another tribute I made for Mom, regarding her interests and talents. Keep in mind that I haven’t added much lately. I’m still building up boards for Mom’s page – so it’s a continuous work in progress, as is this website, too.
Everything Mom made was done so with love. I remember, when I was very young, Mom made my sisters and I a lot of “furniture” for our Barbie dolls’ “homes”, as well as their clothes and linens. She often made our own clothes and blankets, as well. Her attention to details in everything she created showed how much thought and love she put into her homemade endowments.
As I wrote in a blog post last month, Mom even used a crafty, homemade format in the designs of her newsletters and cookbooks. Much of her crafting talents were influenced, in part, by her favorite crafter, Carol Duvall; who had her own “Craft Letter” (as she called it), in the 1970s, to which Mom subscribed. Carol, likewise, subscribed to Mom’s newsletter and, when she retired her own “Craft Letter”, she recommended Mom’s newsletter to her subscribers.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
Gloria Pitzer’s Christmas Card Cook Book
(Gloria Pitzer’s Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1983, pp. 4-5)
BREAKING THROUGH THE BARRIERS of tradition, we find a spirited acceptance of new family values. Occasions have replaced celebrations. Getting together has been replaced by BEING together! Good food, comfortable conversation [and] warm hospitality have become more important to the family circle than reverence without reason, tolerance without tact, relatives without relationships!
The lovely part about Christmas for us, was always being together – with our friends, our good and dear neighbors and our relatives; in a series of activities that began with Thanksgiving and tapered off around the new year. It was hectic, but it was also many happy reunions, mixed well with spontaneous visitations that, had they been a part of the ordinary activities of the rest of the year, would not mean so much now!
The food was simple, but ample. The food, I feel, should never be more important than the guests for whom it is prepared…All of these preparations are a part of Christmas – but not the important part. The tokens only represent the real meaning – that of loving, of letting go of old grudges, of forgetting past hurts, of looking for something good (even though you don’t see it – until you do!)
Love, most philosophers conclude, is the highest level of thought. It is the logic of the heart. And no other season of the calendar year seems to reflect more of this feeling, this consolation to our woes, than the season of Christmas!
We reach out to others – and want them, in turn, to respond to us. Some of us do it with gifts that we buy or make and some of us do it with social gestures of food and hospitality. While all of these traditions are renewed at this particular time of the year, the critics complain and the cynics look for reasons to begrudge us the pleasure of loving the season, renewing the fellowship of it – with family, friends and neighbors.
But that’s not unusual and we shouldn’t be surprised by the criticisms that try to take some of the joy out of the holiday traditions we follow – or create for ourselves. There are always critics, unfortunately, for those occasions in our lives when we wish to be glad about something…
So, on with the celebration – whether we choose to keep it quietly in our own personal fashion of religious customs, or whether we choose to make it festive and pronounced with the traditions of gifts and food. The point is, we are celebrating the season of hope… It’s a time for loving – for expressing it [and] for offering it to others! How can something like that not be good!
Our own traditions have not been very elaborate in our family, during the Christmas season; but, the things we have always done to make the holiday more enjoyable, brought us pleasure. So, we have continued with them. Whether you choose to follow traditions or to create some of your own, the underlying meaning is still there to express joy and LOVE – that incredible, curious logic of the heart!
‘The divine principle of good cooking is not a secret! It is taking pleasure in the activity; in the information previously retained and called upon through the facilities of memory. The spirit of good cooking is individualistic. It is not shrouded in mystery – but in love, for what you are doing and for whom you are doing it!’ – Gloria Pitzer, ‘Gloria Pitzer’s Secret Recipes Newsletter’ (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Sep-Oct 1987, 128th Issue, p. 1).
Even when it wasn’t the holidays, our family-meal-times were especially fun when we were taste-testing some of Mom’s famous, homemade. make-alike dishes; such as KFC-style chicken, Arthur Treacher’s-style fish and chips, Win Schuler’s-style meatballs, Woolworth’s-style macaroni and cheese – you name it!
The “duds”, as we fondly referred to those samplings that weren’t quite right enough to make it into Mom’s newsletters or cookbooks, were still made with just as much love as the final products that did…and they all tasted wonderfully delicious!
From Mom making our family budget stretch by developing homemade imitations of what could be purchased to sharing those ideas with others came the “legend” that the public came to know as The Recipe DetectiveTM! Mom loved to imitate famous foods from famous places so we could all enjoy eating out – right at home – and at less of a cost!
Homemade fast foods and junk foods – who would’ve thought it would become so popular when all the critics warned against consuming such things, for all kinds of health reasons from heart disease to diabetes. But Mom found that making homemade imitations puts the cook in charge of the ingredients, thereby, taking the junk out of junk food!
LAST THOUGHTS…
I really LOVE the old-fashioned (and priceless) homemade holidays of my childhood. When my own children were growing up and money was tight for our family, we always had homemade holidays, as well. I still have (and treasure) all the artwork and ceramic/clay creations that my kids made for me every holiday, when they were young.
Likewise, I remember Mom’s homemade gifts, from my own childhood, more often than any of the store-bought ones. My all-time favorite was a “rag” doll she made for me from scraps of material, yarn, ribbons and buttons. Oh, how I wish I still had it! Now, in hind-sight, I realize just how much love Mom poured into all of our homemade holidays.
Of course, nowadays, with the internet (and enough money), we can order just about anything we want, from just about anywhere in the world, and have it all delivered to our doorsteps. But sometimes, to me, making and receiving something homemade, with love, is priceless!
Since tomorrow is National Fast Food Day, here is Mom’s copycat recipe for Wednesday’s Hot & Juicy Hamburgers; as seen in her last book… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 17). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
Today is National Fast Food Day! What a spectacular day to celebrate! Mom wrote, illustrated and self-published about 40 cookbooks (+/-) and hundreds of newsletter issues, on the subject of imitating fast food and junk food, as well as other restaurant offerings and grocery products at home. How appropriate, now, especially for this year’s Covid-19 restrictions!
In a time, not unlike what we are in now – with political upheaval, low wages and high costs of living – Mom found a niche that people wanted! “Eating out at home”, she called it – as she investigated how to imitate fast food, junk food, & restaurant dishes at home; as well as, shelf-stable grocery items. If it saved her household money, she wanted to share it with others to help them save money too.
Mom was reportedly included in the 1976 Guinness Book of World Records for being the first to recreate “fast foods” at home. The people from ‘Guinness’ were particularly interested in Mom’s copycat recipes for “The Colonel’s” secret spices, McDonald’s-style “special sauce” and Arthur Treacher’s-style fish batter. Those are only a few of the hundreds of recipes that are among Mom’s original imitations of “fast food”, starting back in the early 1970s.
Mom’s collection of recipes, from over almost half of a century of developing and collecting, were in the thousands! I’m still working on a master index of all of her recipes and writings for this website. You’ll find copies of those recipes, mentioned above, under the “Blog” tab, in some of my other blog posts; as well as under the “Recipes” tab, which I am continuing to update as well.
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 6-7)
IT ALL STARTED WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN
DEAR FRIENDS,
I DO, WITH RECIPES, WHAT RICH LITTLE DOES WITH VOICES! Imitating the ‘Secret Recipes’ of the food industry has been an exciting experience for me. The critics felt that ‘fast foods’ and restaurant dishes were not worth the effort to duplicate at home, when you can just as easily buy the products already prepared!
The critics who contend that ‘fast foods’ are ‘junk foods’ and not good for us, have probably never prepared these foods themselves. Certainly, they have no access to the closely guarded recipes from the food companies that created these dishes, as there are only a few people in each operation that are permitted the privilege of such information! So, 99% of the critics’ speculations are based on their own opinions.
To know what these dishes contained, they’d have to be better [home-chemists] than I; as I have tested over 20,000 recipes with only the finished product as my guide to determine what each contained. ‘Fast foods’ are not ‘junk foods’ unless they’re not properly prepared. Any food that is poorly prepared (and just as badly presented) is junk!
Unfortunately, ‘fast food’ has carried a reputation, by default, of containing ingredients that are ‘harmful’ to us. Yet, they contain the same ingredients as those foods served in the ‘finer’ restaurants with wine stewards, linen tablecloths, candlelight, coat-check attendants, and parking valets; which separate the plastic palaces of ‘fast food’ from the expensive dining establishments.
One ‘eats’ at McDonald’s, but ‘dines’ at The Four Seasons. Steak and potato or hamburger and French fries – the ingredients are practically the same. How they are prepared makes the difference!
In the early ‘70s, I was trying to juggle marriage, motherhood, homemaking and a newspaper column syndicated through Columbia Features, when it seemed obvious to me that there wasn’t a single cookbook on the market that could help me take the monotony out of mealtime. There was not a single recipe in the newspaper’s food section that did not smack of down-home dullness!
‘Okay,’ they said at the newspaper I worked for, ‘YOU write the column on foods and recipes that YOU think would really excite the readers and make them happy!’ I did, but that didn’t make the Editors happy, because it made their [food industry] advertisers miserable.
When I was told that I’d have to go back to monotonous meatloaf and uninteresting side-dishes that made mealtime a ritual rather than a celebration or ‘pick up my check’, I told them to ‘MAIL it to me!’ I went home to start my own paper!
‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’– Seneca (Philosopher, mid-1st century, AD)
It was probably a dumb thing to do, amid an economic recession with the highest rate of unemployment I had ever experienced, but it was worth the risk. I was a dedicated writer that knew someone had to give homemakers something more than what they were being given in the colored glossy magazines, where a bowl of library paste could even be photographed to look appetizing!
There had to be more to mealtime than Lima beans and macaroni and cheese with Spam and parsley garnishes. There also had to be more to desserts than chocolate cake recipes that came right off the cocoa can. The food industry gave us more appealing products than did the cookbooks we trusted.
THEY LAUGHED! THEY DOUBTED! They even tried to take me to court when some famous food companies insisted that I stop giving away their secrets. They couldn’t believe me when I said that I did NOT know, nor did I want to know, what they put in their so-called secret recipes.
[However,] I did know that there are very few recipes that can’t be duplicated or imitated at home. And we could do them for much less than purchasing the original product. I proved…it can be and should be done!
FAMOUS FOODS FROM FAMOUS PLACES have intrigued good cooks for a long time – even before fast foods of the 1950’s were a curiosity. When cookbooks offer us a sampling of good foods, they seldom devote themselves to the dishes of famous restaurants. There is speculation among the critics as to the virtues of re-creating, at home, the foods that you can buy ‘eating out’, such as the fast food fares of the popular franchise restaurants. To each, his own!
Who would want to imitate ‘fast food’ at home? I found that over a million people who saw me demonstrate replicating some famous fast food products on The Phil Donahue Show (July 7, 1981) DID – and their letters poured in at a rate of over 15,000 a day for months on end!
And while I have investigated the recipes, dishes, and cooking techniques of ‘fine’ dining rooms around the world, I received more requests from people who wanted to know how to make things like McDonald’s Special Sauce or General Foods Shake-N-Bake coating mix or White Castle’s hamburgers than I received for those things like Club 21’s Coq Au Vin.
A cookbook should be as exciting as a good mystery! Most are drably written by well-meaning cooks who might know how to put together a good dish but know nothing about making the reader feel as if they’re right there, in the kitchen with them, peeling, cutting, chopping, stirring, sifting and all the other interesting things one does when preparing food.
It is my intention, in [my] book of the food industry’s ‘Secret Recipes’, to make you feel at home in my kitchen, just as if we’re preparing the dishes together…to later enjoy with those who share our tables with us…
Fast food and junk food recipes weren’t found in any of the cookbooks offered back then – and these were the types of restaurants that struggling, middle class families would frequent when they wanted an affordable meal out. What were they going to do when they couldn’t afford to take their family out for such a treat? Mom knew! Make it at home! And she went to work, investigating all the possibilities there were to offer from this new platform; which grew exponentially!
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 306)
AFTERTHOUGHTS ON BETTER COOKERY
IF THE GOOD LORD HAD INTENDED FOR ME to be a gourmet cook, I would’ve been born with Teflon hands! Don’t misunderstand – I like to cook! But I do not wish to spend more time in the preparations than is necessary.
NO ONE APPRECIATES good food as much as I do. Don’t ask me how I know – I just do. It does not concern me how a dish has been prepared, if it tastes great and looks good on the table! A gourmet cook would never agree with this philosophy.
However, anyone can become a gourmet cook, that is, if that is what you wish. All you need are numerous ingredients of good quality, a lot of time and patience and twice as much money – not to mention, and unblushing candor for admitting without modesty you are a ‘gourmet’ cook. This admission will intimidate many people just as easily as being faced with the admission that somebody is a terrific dancer, a great singer or an exceptional parent.
Illustration by Gloria Pitzer
And while it is perfectly acceptable and not the least bit conceited to say one is a ‘gourmet’ cook, there is still a tendency to back off from them because you know how many failures you have experienced and how skilled you would like to be in the kitchen, if only you had the time and the energy – and a generous allowance with which to buy all the right ingredients.
BETTER COOKERY is my answer to the ‘gourmets’, who insist that ‘fast food’ tastes like cardboard – and, sometimes, the various menu selections really do! But there are many family-type restaurants within the division of the ‘fast food’ industry that turn out exceptional meals for very reasonable prices, even giving senior citizens discounts and paying careful attention to how children are serviced.
When you’re a gourmet cook, you naturally have a throbbing desire to enjoy perfection with every dish, whether you’re preparing it, or someone else! To a gourmet cook, compliments go with the territory – failures don’t! They expect EVERY dish to be perfect enough to warrant a complement!
By the way – who isn’t grateful that they can still get their fast food fix during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions – whether by drive-thru or curbside pick-up or delivery service or making it at home, ourselves?
Saturday, Nov. 21st, is World Television Day! Thus, next Monday, I’ll share with you more memories of Mom’s 20 years of experiences on television – from 1974 through 1993 – including our own local Detroit (and Ontario, Canada) area programs, as well as national shows like ‘CNN News’, the ‘Phil Donahue Show’ and ABC’s ‘Home Show’!
The whole month of November is also celebrating National Fun with Fondue Month! There are three main types of fondue – cheese, oil, and chocolate. With a little imagination, each type has an endless variety of possible options to change it up from the basic fondue sauce. Mom was a master at taking a basic recipe and turning it into an imitation of one of our favorite restaurant offerings, fast foods, junk foods, or grocery store products.
In honor of #FunWithFondueMonth, below are two versions of Mom’s “secret recipe” for imitating #BarCheeseLikeWinSchuler’s product; as seen in Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 275). Mom’s was imitating many of Win Schuler’s products from the very beginning of her Secret RecipesTM legacy. These will be great for the coming holiday celebrations!
Happy Monday to one and all! Today is also the eve of National Junk Food Day! And as always, #TGIM – since I continually look forward to Mondays as my #52Chances per year to share these MEMORIES OF MY MOM with all of you!
Mom wrote, illustrated, published and promoted all of her 40+ cookbooks (and her newsletter, which ran 1974 through 2000) – mainly by herself but she incorporated our whole family into it in one way or another. It was a cottage-style, dining room table operation. Her cookbooks and newsletters were all quite unique and special in presentation and content!.
My mom built most of her recipe collection (starting in the early 1970s) on the taboo subjects of fast foods and junk foods, when all the food critics were warning the public to stay away from these things, lecturing about how bad they were for our health. That may be so, but as Robert Redford once said, “Health food may raise my consciousness, but Oreos taste better!” – a quote that Mom personally loved and, thus, put it on the first page of her cookbook, Eating Out at Home (Nat’l Home News, St. Clair, MI; Sept. 1978).
[Note: See the “Recipes” tab on this for Mom’s imitation of the Oreo-Style sandwich cookies. Mom calls her version “Gloreo’s”.]
Junk is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, Mom found a way to have her cake and eat it too, by TAKING THE JUNK OUT OF JUNK FOOD, making her own imitations at home, where she controlled the ingredients. It was a break-through that had many food companies, like Stouffers, Hostess, Sarah Lee, and many others up in arms! The idea that someone could possibly duplicate their products at home and then share these secrets with the public was as troublesome, if not more, than the competition they faced in the food industry, itself.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES
As seen in…
Eating Out at Home (Nat’l Home News, St. Clair, MI; Sep. 1978, p. 2-3)
SECRET RECIPES
YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW exactly how the original dish was prepared by the commercial food chains. All you need is a basic recipe to which you will add that ‘special seasoning’ or that ‘secret method of preparation’ that sets one famous secret recipe apart from those similar to it…
When I work to duplicate a recipe so that the finished product is as good as (if not better than) a famous restaurant dish, I begin by asking myself a series of questions: I want to know what color the finished dish has…[and] was it achieved by baking, frying or refrigeration?…What specific flavors can I identify?… and about how much of each may have been used…
Similar tests are used in chemistry…[to]…break down the components of an unknown substance and try to rebuild it. So the cook must work like a chemist (and not like a gourmet; who, most of the time, never uses a recipe – but, rather, creates one.)
The most remarkable part of the duplication of famous recipes is that you can accept the challenge to ‘try’ to match their [dish or product]. Sometimes, you will be successful. Sometimes you will fail in the attempt. But, at least, it can be done [‘practice makes perfect’], and it certainly takes the monotony out of mealtime when, for reasons of financial inadequacy, we cannot always eat out…even if we could afford to eat at all or most of our meals away from home, wouldn’t that become monotonous in time?
Stop cheating yourself of the pleasure of good food. Eat what you enjoy, but DON’T OVER eat…This is what really causes the problems of obesity and bad health – rather than believing the propaganda of the experts that ‘fast food’ is ‘junk food’…It is not! Poorly prepared food, whether it is from a fast-service restaurant or a [$20-plate in a] gourmet dining room, is ‘junk’, no matter how you look at it…if it is not properly prepared.
TO DEBUNK THE JUNK…don’t think of Hostess Twinkies as junk dessert but, rather, the very same cake ingredients prepared in the Waldorf Astoria kitchens as the basis for their “Flaming Cherries Supreme”. All we did [to imitate the product] was shape the cake differently, adding a little body to the filling and putting it INSIDE the cake, rather than on top, as the Waldorf did!
National Junk Food Day is celebrated every year on July 21st, and it is all about indulging in your favorite junk foods – from the grocery store shelves to every “plastic palace” drive-thru – for one day, without guilt. However, keep in mind, National Junk Food Day is not to be confused with National Fast Food Day, which is celebrated on November 16th.
More times than not, “fast food” is considered to be synonymous with “junk food”. But nowadays, a lot of “fast food” places (which Mom called “plastic palaces”) are trying to change up their offerings and some are actually considered to be healthy. According to an article I read at MDLinx.com, “Healthiest Fast Food Options”, some of the “healthy fast food” nominations go to Chick-fil-A’s grilled nuggets, Wendy’s grilled chicken wrap, Taco Bell’s grilled steak soft taco, Subway’s tuna salad sub, and Chipotle’s steak burrito bowl – just to name a few.
In other words, one can say with some certainty that not all fast food is junk food AND not all junk food is fast food! By general definition, “junk foods” are considered to be those foods that are heavily processed; typically containing high amounts of either trans fats, sugar, corn syrup, fructose, or salt (or a combination of any of those). Additionally, junk foods are high in calories. Beware – they are also very high in luscious, tasty delightfulness!
NOTE: Next time you push your cart up and down the aisles of your favorite grocery store, keep in mind that if the food is in a can, box, plastic wrap/package, or the like; it is most likely “junk food”. A lot of grocery store “convenience” foods contain highly processed ingredients.
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES
As seen in…
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 6)
I DO, WITH RECIPES, WHAT RICH LITTLE DOES WITH VOICES!
Imitating the ‘Secret Recipes’ of the food industry has been an exciting experience for me. The critics felt that ‘fast foods’ and restaurant dishes were not worth the effort to duplicate at home, when you can just as easily buy the products already prepared!
The critics who contend that ‘fast foods’ are ‘junk foods’ and not good for us, have probably never prepared these foods themselves. Certainly, they have no access to the closely guarded recipes from the food companies that created these dishes, as there are only a few people in each operation that are permitted the privilege of such information! So, 99% of the critics’ speculations are based on their own opinions.
To know what these dishes contained, they’d have to be better chemists than I, as I have tested over 20,000 recipes with only the finished product as my guide to determine what each contained. ‘Fast foods’ are not ‘junk foods’ unless they’re not properly prepared. Any food that is poorly prepared (and just as badly presented) is junk!
Unfortunately, ‘fast food’ has carried a reputation, by default, of containing ingredients that are ‘harmful’ to us. Yet, they contain the same ingredients as those foods served in the ‘finer’ restaurants with wine stewards, linen tablecloths, candlelight, coat-check attendants, and parking valets; which separate the plastic palaces of ‘fast food’ from the expensive dining establishments.
One ‘eats’ at McDonald’s, but ‘dines’ at The Four Seasons. Steak and potato or hamburger and French fries – the ingredients are practically the same. How they are prepared makes the difference!
AGAIN, MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
The Second Helping of Secret Recipes (Nat’l Homemakers Newsletter, Pearl Beach, MI; July 1977, p. 1)
DE-BUNKING THE JUNK
What’s the truth about junk foods? Food experts have been referring to many snack foods and fast food products as ‘junk’ in an attempt to disqualify their value when compared to foods containing high amounts of proteins and vitamins.
No one has confirmed a definition of the expression ‘junk food’. Yet, the public has been conditioned to accept any snack foods, sweets, candies, confections, baked goods and even many beverages as being a member of the junk food family; when, in reality, these are not without nutritional value.
The junk food paradox has caused school systems and other public institutions to ban the sale of any foods we would consider ‘snack’ items, making it illegal, in fact, in the state of Michigan (and some others) if such items are sold to children through vending machines on the premises.
This is infuriating to the good cooks and the more intelligent food chemists among us who know that JUNK FOOD is any food, which is poorly prepared. All food has nutritional value. Some just seem to have more than others. But, in the final analysis, it is purely personal taste that will determine the popularity of one food over another. The fast food industry has been the most successful of any phase in the business. Their success depending largely on the fact that their recipes are all closely guarded secrets!
Junk foods and fast foods are also considered “comfort foods”. Science has shown, time and time again, that emotions and food are very much linked together. It’s widely believed that, in times of stress, “comfort foods” will often make you feel better. These foods provide a nostalgic or sentimental value but have very little nutritional value, if any at all. Cooking is also a great source of heart-and-soul happiness. Between the cooking AND the eating, I get to happily enjoy food twice as much!
For some of us, every day is “Junk Food Day” but for the rest of us National Junk Food Day is a special opportunity to eat our favorite junk foods – supposedly without the guilt. Speaking for myself, as a “junk food junkie”, they’re ALL my favorites and it’s very hard to choose; so I would most likely ravish myself on everything!
DISCLAIMER NOTE: Junk food may be hazardous to your health! Thus, indulge at your own risk! To me, that’s like telling a former smoker or an alcoholic or a compulsive gambler to “indulge responsibly” in whatever their “crutch” may be – after all, it’s just for a day.
According to TimeAndDate.com: “Studies have shown that consuming junk food ONCE-IN-A-WHILE does not have a negative effect on health – it is only when one eats junk food for a majority of their meals that their diet can be considered unhealthy. Consuming large amounts of foods considered to be ‘junk’, can lead to several health problems, including a high risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart issues.”
On a side note regarding junk food, I’d like to add that You Tube has a really good video called “Junk Food Junkie”, by Larry Groce (1976) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLiVeRJTtqo. I also found a lot of information and ideas for celebrating this awesome event tomorrow at Chiff.com.
In honor of National Junk Food Day, here is Mom’s copycat recipe for an 8-inch fudge cake like Aunt Jenny’s, as seen in her cookbook, The Original 200 Plus Secret Recipes (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; June 1997, p. 4). Enjoy!
P.S. Food-for-thought until we meet again, next Monday…
My next visit on the “Good Neighbor” show, with Kathy Keene, is next week. Be sure to tune in – Monday, July 27th around 11am (CDST)/12noon (EDST) – as we’ll be talking about one of most Americans’ favorite junk foods… COOKIES!
