Worried That Big Food Is Deciding What You Eat?
Take heart then, as I do, from this little book that I picked up in a small secondhand store in the south of Mexico City.
A Campbell’s Recipe Book
Cooking with Soups
Roasts, sauces, broths, stovetop dishes, baked dishes, soups and seasoning combinations
It was published in 1973. A little more than two decades earlier in 1952 Cooking with Condensed Soup had propelled tuna casserole, green bean casserole and all kinds of other dishes using condensed soup as a sauce to previously unimagined popularity.
Campbell’s, which had been in Mexico since 1959, had published 55,000 copies, a really huge print run for Mexico.
The classics are there: atún y tallarines al horno (tuna and noodles baked in the oven) on p.110; molde de ejotes (mold of green beans) on p. 75. And there are some 400 other recipes including macaroni and cheese, stroganoff with mushroom soup, meat loaf with tomato soup, and a series of cakes to which “tomato soup imparts a mysterious flavor of je ne sais quoi (“la sopa de tomate imparte un misterioso sabor de un ‘no-sé-que.'”)
On left. Super simple vegetables à la crème.
On right. Tuna casserole with potato chips
Pork chops in cream sauce.
Net result on Mexican cooking. That I can see, zilch, nothing, nada.
Unaccustomed to cream sauces, unaccustomed to using cook books, the middle class housewives that this book targeted went their traditional ways. In all my years in Mexico, I never saw another copy of this book, never heard a housewife who used condensed soups to make sauces, never saw condensed soup sauce recipes in magazines or books.
Which isn’t to say that housewives don’t buy the popular crema de chile poblano and crema de elote (corn) or that they don’t use the beef broth for tortilla soup. They do.
But just as American housewives never budged on adding a soup course to the evening meal, Mexican housewives were never persuaded to eat tuna casserole with mushroom soup. They stuck to empanadas de atún.
There’s only so much a housewife will take.
- Do Emigrants Create National (or Regional) Cuisines?
- Do Those Who Cultivate Rice Paddies Think Holistically and Lag Industrially?
Well, I confess to have successfully pulled off some form of chicken risotto (that is, cooked white rice and cooked chunks of chicken breast) mixed with a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup, then baked in the oven for 10 min. Emergency dinner that landed me a third or fourth date with my now (foodie) husband.
Vivette, how dare you, my friend, undercut what I say? But seriously, where did you get that idea? Because I don’t think it’s common. And it sheds a whole new light on you and Juan. Was it your resourcefulness or the taste that beguiled him? Anyway, we shall expect tuna casserole with potato chips when we’re back in Mexico.
I’m reminded of the Dalda cookbook which was very widely disseminated in India by Hindustan Lever, the Indian arm of Lever Brothers. Dalda was hydrogenated vegetable fat, called vanaspati in India and sold as an alternative to ghee (sometimes it was called vegetable ghee) and in its time it was one of the biggest brands in India.
It was possibly the first really mass market branded product created for India. Prakash Tandon, who would become the first Indian head of Hindustan Lever and who wrote a very vivid trilogy of memoirs that has become an excellent social history resource, describes to campaigns to sell the product, the battles fought with the Gandhians who hated the idea of an industrialised fat and the way they established and built the market in the midst of the end of British empire and Partition.
The Dalda cookbook was an important tool in their marketing. I’m not sure when the last was published, but Dalda was an important brand into the ’70s and the early ’80s. Today, while vanaspati is still around, Levers has sold the brand to Bunge and one hardly encounters it in shops, and the Dalda cookbook is a period item. The Gandhians would be pleased, though not happy at the very dubious “olive oils” that have replaced vanaspati as an aspirational Indian cooking fat.
Vikram, fascinating. I’m going to post this.