Haricots Verts with Fatback. Photograph: Ryan Adams.

If it's Friday, it must be Offal of the Week! Brought to you by Ryan Adams, author of the blog Nose to Tail at Home, each week we highlight a different part of the animal that you've always wanted to work with, but were afraid to ask your butcher for. This week: Some offal-driven Thanksgiving recipes.

Last week we looked at a few ideas of what to do with the bag of turkey giblets and neck that you've most likely neglected year after year. This week, some more offal-driven Thanksgiving recipes! First up, Haricots Verts with Fatback, a side dish that incorporates fatback in such a sneaky way that you'll be able to place it right next to the turkey and no one but you will be the wiser. For the day after (or whenever you wake up from your tryptophan coma), Dirty Turkey Rice is an easy, deeply flavorful way to use up the contents of the giblet baggie and some of the leftover turkey meat.

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Photograph: Stephanie Butler / Eat Me Daily

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Clam Chowder Pie.

Cake or pie? It's the eternal question. Fortunately, Nancy Fair McIntyre's 1969 cookbook It's A Picnic! (Amazon) is here to provide us with an answer. Because while clam chowder cake is disgusting and wrong, McIntyre's Clam Chowder Pie recipe is somehow so very, very right.

Not a traditional clam chowder, or even a traditional pie, the Clam Chowder Pie seems to straddle a no man's land between pot pie and casserole. The chowder itself is thicker than a normal one: the consistency of a thick stew instead of a soup. And it isn't bound by a normal piecrust, or baked in a pie plate, but is instead topped with a generous sprinkling of Saltine crumbs.

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Photos: Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week we take a look at preparations from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Blushing Snowballs.

The 50s were a true boom time for evocative recipe names. A salad of lemon Jell-o, green beans , pimiento, and broccoli flowerets sounds so much more chic as "Winter Garden Loaf". Yearning for a cute, new word for "baked potatoes"? How do "Foiled Spuds" strike you? But sometimes you run across a recipe that takes creative naming to entirely new heights. Like Blushing Snowballs. Is it an obscure twee pop band? An as-yet-undiscovered sex position? Nope, none of the above. It's just apples cooked in cinnamon syrup and rolled in coconut.

But to dismiss Blushing Snowballs as just another apple dish really doesn't do them justice. The cinnamon syrup has a very special secret ingredient that helps to make it, in my mind, a quintessential crazy 50s recipe: marshmallows. Yes, this syrup contains 18 large jet-puffed marshmallows, as well as a fair amount of sugar and 1/3 a cup of red hot candies. It's an easy way to leach every nutritive element from an apple and send unsuspecting guests into diabetic comas.

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Photo: Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week we take a look at preparations from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Hungry Jack Weinerollas.

It's fall, which means football season is once again upon us. High schoolers tramp through leaves to the homecoming game, tailgate parties spring up in stadium parking lots, and somewhere a harried columnist is rolling hot dogs in crescent rolls and crushed potato chips for your enlightenment and amusement. This week's recipe comes from 1970's Pillsbury's Meat Cook Book (buy at Amazon) — yet another in Pillsbury's extensive cookbook library that doubles as, if nothing else, a cautionary tale for the baking company to never, ever, try their flour-dusted hands at meat cookery again. At the very least they need a new art director, because in classic mid-century cookbook style, this stuff looks pretty disgusting in the accompanying photos.

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Photo: Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week we take a look at preparations from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week, Edward Harris Heth's Spareribs and Rutabagas.

With September nearly gone, those decorative squash with all usefulness bred out of them are back on grocery shelves, and hot apple cider no longer seems like a crazy idea. To celebrate fall, let's highlight once again Edward Harris Heth's forgotten seasonal cooking gem The Wonderful World Of Cooking (buy on Amazon). Stew lovers, rejoice: Heth's spareribs and rutabagas will warm hearts and bellies alike.

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Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week we take a look at preparations from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week we turn our focus not to one recipe, but to an entire book: The Wonderful World of Cooking by Edward Harris Heth, from 1956.

I found a wonderful book a month or two ago. It was a hot day at the flea market, with kids running around on the blacktop dripping ice cream onto their sneakers. I hadn't come across anything too interesting that day, apart from a wood-framed clock showing Canada geese in flight that for $10, I had to have. My friend and I were about ready to take off when I saw an old cardboard packing box filled with books, with a hand-lettered $1 sign on the front. Being constitutionally unable to pass up such a deal, I stopped to check out the box. There were a few cookbooks scattered in the mix, but one popped out. It had a corny title and a hokey colored graphic of some farm girls on the dust jacket. I had to have it.

On the subway ride home, I dug into Edward Harris Heth's The Wonderful World of Cooking (buy at Amazon). It was as if I'd found some kind of holy grail, the link between the continental-focused writings of Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher and the America-centric works of James Beard, Clementine Paddleford, and Craig Claiborne. Heth's book isn't a cookbook as much as it is a collection of food memories, tied together with an obvious love for his Wisconsin home and seasonal eating.

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Photos: Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Chilled Tomato Soup.

With Labor Day over and fall almost upon us, it's time for a Retro Recipe that celebrates the end of summer with a big soupy bang. Blight be damned, we haven't yet showcased the glories of the tomato in this column (with the exception of the ill-fated tomato soupshake, of which we will not speak again), and what better dish for it than an end-of-summer, picnic ready cold soup? This one features curry powder, sour cream, and lime, making it a refreshing alternative to your standard gazpacho.

The recipe for this chilled delight comes from a rather nondescript little hardback book from a Midwestern thrift store. It's A Picnic! (buy at Amazon) by Nancy Fair McIntyre, is the kind of book that time tends to forget. Published in 1969 and very much of the era, it features perfectly functional, appetizing recipes, but lacks the distinction and imagination that set good cookbooks apart from great ones. Still, books like this play an important part in charting American culinary history. There's quite a few casserole recipes, sure, but there's also soupe au pistou, tabouli, carnitas, and an Indonesia pork sate that I want to try for my next party. And just the inclusion of exotic dishes like these in a book obviously geared towards everyday use notes the strides made in American eating since ham logs and clam puffs.

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Photos: Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week, 1951 Pillsbury Bake-Off winner Starlight Double Delight Cake.

Long ago, before the days of hipster Jell-o parties and cupcake cookoffs, the Pillsbury Bake-Off reigned supreme in the world of competitive cooking. Started originally to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Pillsbury brand, the competition proved so popular that it became an annual event. Housewives labored over stoves in search of the winning recipe; after all, the first prize check was for a whopping $50,000. Recently I came into possession of a 60th anniversary copy of the original Bake-Off cookbook (buy on Amazon), with recipes from the first ten years of the competition.

The only mandatory ingredient back in the early days of the competition was Pillsbury brand flour, so the book is heavy on recipes for breads, coffee cakes, and every form of layer cake, pie, or cookie you could possibly hope to taste. Pineapple pie? Got it. Jonquil chiffon cake? Look no further. Want a chocolate mint cake to impress your nearest and dearest? We've got the Starlight Double-Delight cake, the grand prize winner from 1951, from the kitchen of Mrs. Helen Weston in La Jolla, California.

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Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Rumaki.

As you might expect from someone who has a serious fetish for vintage cookbooks, pencil skirts, and the music of Sergio Mendes, I'm all aflutter for the recently-premiered third season of Mad Men. For me, the major plotlines take a backseat to the details of dresses, cocktails, and the staggering amount of cigarettes smoked (In an office! At lunch! While pregnant!) by the leading players. How can I concentrate on Pete's marital woes when Joan is in the same room? Why should I care about Bobbie Barrett when Don looks so great in a suit? And how can I really appreciate the depth of Betty's humiliation over her dinner party when I can only think about how much I'd like to recreate her menu?

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Photos by Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week, a double whammy: Tomato Soupshake and Cucumber Soup.

Summer is a time for simple pleasures. A glass of iced tea on a screened porch, for example, or a ballgame on the radio and a cold beer in your hand. Then there's always the old classic Tomato Soupshake. With a whole raw egg in it, for "extra protein." Because what's summer without a little extra protein?

I found this gazpacho/bodybuilding-shake hybrid in the 1963 edition of Better Homes and Gardens' Snacks and Refreshments (buy at Amazon), part of their Creative Cooking Library. The Soupshake is billed as a "chilly, yet filling" summer lunch, and hostesses are urged to keep a container "on tap in the fridge" — just in case, one assumes, a Campbell's sponsored weightlifting team stops by for tea.

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Photos by Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Titty Sauce Yams.

Well, folks, it's happened again. St. Vincent himself smiles down upon me, because a truly inspiring thrift store cookbook find has fallen in my lap. A good friend recently went home to Wisconsin for a visit, and started sending me texts like, "I have bought you the best present ever" and "Spinach mother of god". She returned home with a thin book bound in a gold cover, with an impressive family crest on the front. Ladies and gents, may I present Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices (buy at Amazon), by the illustrious Mr. George Leonard Herter of Waseca, Minnesota. It's impossible to improve upon or even accurately convey the passionate prose of Mr. Herter, so I'll let him take it away. From the third paragraph:

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Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Tagliarini.

As I look back on these Retro Recipes, I see a disappointing lack of that most vilified and clichéd of retro dishes: the casserole. Every family from 1950 onwards seems to have a standard casserole recipe, ready to be whipped out for church banquets, last minute company suppers, and family reunions. Whether it involves cream of mushroom or cream of chicken, celery or pineapple, these recipes were passed along through the years, perhaps with a few notes scribbled in margins: "Add a can of bamboo shoots!" "Needs more vinegar!". My own family is no different, which is why I am here today to bring you the secret behind the storied success of the Morat/Secchi/Butler clan: tagliarini.

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Photographs by Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Mabelle's Snickerdoodles.

You can take your chocolate chips, your turtles, humbugs, your oatmeal raisins. Ginger drops, snowballs, thumbprints: they are all sawdust in my mouth. My heart belongs to the snickerdoodle. The benefits of a sugar cookie with the chewiness of a ranger cookie, all dressed up with plenty of cinnamon sugar, a true snickerdoodle is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. So when I saw a recipe for Mabelle's Snickerdoodle in James Beard's Fireside Cookbook (buy on Amazon), I stopped short.

Mabelle's Snickerdoodle recipe isn't filed in the Cookies section of the book; it's nestled among the Quick Breads squarely between Corn Meal Spoon Bread and French Pancakes. This is because, per Beard (or Mabelle), this particular snickerdoodle is a bread — the recipe calls to be spread in a baking pan, not scooped or rolled out and cut. It sounded like it had the potential to be a great cinnamon breakfast bread, so I decided to see what Mabelle was about and take her for a test spin.

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Photographs by Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Prune Lemonade Bars.

For this week’s Retro Recipe, I decided to try an old reliable cookbook, one that’s been on America’s shelves since 1963: Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book. Long the go-to tome for busy moms in need of a sugar fix for kids, this cookbook features classic cookie recipes we all know and love, plus some that are a little more, shall we say, out there. Chocolate Chips I understand, but Prune Lemonade Bars? Out of all the cookies in this book (and there’s 450 of them, all illustrated in vibrant Technicolor photos), I figured these bars would be the best test to see how well Betty’s kitchen held up. If Prune Lemonade Bars can still throw down, even 50 years later, then this is truly a vintage cookbook worth its salt.

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All photos by Stephanie Butler

It's time for Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Hearty-Har Crab.

Every once in a while, the thrift store gods look down from their mothball-scented lounge chairs and reveal a vintage cookbook find so wonderful, so terrifying, that it renews my faith in God and Spam. I had one of those experiences recently. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Favorite Mormon Recipes: Meats (buy at Amazon). Featuring over two thousand recipes packed into 380 pages, this is indeed a find for the ages, enough to make Joseph Smith himself Eggplant Roll-a-tini over in his grave.

Part of the joy of this book are the chapter titles, which are painfully detailed. There are separate sections for "Baked Chicken With Rice" and "Baked Chicken With Noodles." "Combination Meat Ball Dishes" take up five full pages. There’s a chapter of "Quantity Meat Dishes," just in case you ever need to make Turkey Tetrazzini for forty people. And I’ve never seen a cookbook with more evocative recipe titles. "Jackpot Hamburger Meal" involves canned soup, egg noodles, and a healthy skepticism about what the runner-up has to eat. My own personal favorite is "Elk Boarding House Mystery," which is not a casserole as much as it is an unpublished Lovecraft story. Being unexcusedly short on elk meat myself, I decided to try my hand at Hearty-Har Crab, on the basis that this recipe would allow me to both dress like a 50s housewife and indulge my need to talk like a pirate.

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All photos by Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Hot Dogie-Burgers.

Summer is here, and the eternal question is once again raised at the barbecue: hamburger or hot dog? It seems appropriate to try a cookout recipe at this time of year — one that breaks boundaries, unites the masses, and stops other barbecue recipes dead in their tracks. It’s time to break out the big guns: it’s time for Hot Dogie-burgers.

I've seen recipes for hot dogs wrapped in hamburger before, but this version — to me, the definitive one — comes from the 1963 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens Barbecues and Picnics cookbook. (Given that this book also contains a recipe for Barbecued Bologna, I think I got off pretty easy.) The extent of my hot dog-wrapping culinary experience is pigs in blankets, so this recipe would involve entering some seriously new territory. I also wasn’t certain that the recipe would work: with nothing to stick the meat to the dog, what's to keep the hamburger from falling off and meeting a hot, charcoaled death?

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Photo by Stephanie Butler

It's time for Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Peanut Bread.

After turning my stomach for the past few weeks, I wanted this Retro Recipe to be something, anything, that would give me an appetizing end result. In the course of my search, it became clear to me that time has been much kinder to breakfasts and desserts than it’s been to vegetables and main courses. Our greater access to fresh vegetables renders the canned veggie recipes of yore almost laughable, and changing tastes means a significant decrease in the amount of bologna, codfish, and prime rib that the average American family wants to consume. A random selection of main course recipes from Meta Given’s 1953 tome The Modern Family Cookbook reveals a litany of meats that are anything but modern: ham and lima bean casserole, Piquant Cheeseburgers, the intriguingly named Lamb Scallop.

But even if a recipe is over 50 years old, it'll be easier to digest if it's for cake, pie, bread, or their ilk — it’s hard to find someone who will turn down a slice of a Chocolate Jelly Roll or Pineapple Upside Down Cake. And so I turned to the “Bread” chapter of The Modern Family Cookbook to find a recipe that would satisfy my needs. I found that recipe in Peanut Bread.

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Photo by Stephanie Butler

It's time for Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Cherry Mallow Salad.

As this is a column dedicated to culinary misfires of years past, it was only a matter of time before we got around to Jell-O. Since the 1920s, Jell-O has been molded into sweet desserts, savory side dishes, and pretty much everything in between. Enter Cherry Mallow Salad: this recipe from the Better Homes And Gardens cookbook (the final one we'll look at after our earlier adventures with clam puffs and ham logs) encapsulates everything we love to hate about the jiggly product. This dessert contains not only Jell-O, but two different canned fruits, marshmallows, cream cheese, and whipped cream.

Cherry Mallow Salad is not for the faint of heart. What really sold me on the salad was the multi-layered process. You start with the RED LAYER (caps are theirs, not mine), chilling raspberry Jell-O and various fillings until firm. Then you add the FLUFFY GREEN LAYER and let the whole thing set. Any food with a FLUFFY GREEN LAYER is good by me, so I stocked up on canned fruit and mini marshmallows and began to get acquainted with America’s Favorite Dessert.

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Photo by Stephanie Butler

Welcome to Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week revisits a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. This week: Ham Logs.

“Come on over, we’re having ham logs!” is an invitation that, even in the heady late 60s, was unlikely draw the crowds to your dinner table. Perhaps that’s why it's fallen by the culinary wayside: the word “logs” right there in the name is enough to send even the most intrepid taster dialing for delivery. This recipe comes from the old standby Better Homes And Gardens cookbook, one of many recipes designed around the masking of common proteins in sauces, bread crumbs, and layers of cheese. The meats of choice here are ground pork and ground ham, mixed together like a meatloaf. Binding agents are added, the mixture gets shaped and baked, and covered with a sweet and sour raisin sauce (because nothing says “classy” like hot raisin sauce).

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Welcome to our new feature, Retro Recipes! Brought to you from the capable kitchen of Eat Me Daily's Stephanie Butler, each week we'll revisit a preparation from the past that straddles the line between ingenious and absurd. Inaugurally: The Clam Puff.

The 1966 edition of America's Favorite Recipes from Better Homes and Gardens is a tour de force of Johnson-era culinary abominations. The product of cultural trickledown from high society's mid-60s obsession with all things French (think Mastering the Art Of French Cooking, La Cote Basque, Le Pavilion), the spirit of French cuisine collided with the concerns of the convenience-oriented housewife to produce such horrors as powdered Hollandaise, Spam en croute, and pineapple chocolate chiffon.

Perhaps no example from America's Favorite Recipes is more egregious in its half-breed construction than The Clam Puff, which combines the glamour of a soufflé with the stark utilitarianism of canned mollusks. The editors of Better Homes thoughtfully included a small, black and white photo of a finished Clam Puff next to the recipe: it’s a beautiful cloud of eggy pastry, from the raised top to the little cracks along the crown. Seashells strewn on the tablecloth underneath help give the whole thing a classy, party look. Clearly, a Clam Puff at your table in 1966 meant that you had Arrived.

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