Red mangoes

Everybody loves macaroni. The macaroni section of Archie’s recipes includes a classic macaroni and cheese (complete with no-name Velveeta™), as well as macaroni loaf, and a go-to meat sauce for macaroni . Today when we hear “macaroni” we almost always think of elbow macaroni (maybe that comes in a blue box), but the term refers to the type of flour used not to the shape of the noodle. The macaroni and ham escallop recipe calls for “18 sticks” of macaroni. I can only assume that means 18 big, fat noodles. If I were attempting this recipe, I’d use lasagna noodles.

Pickles begin on page 63 with dill, onion, and sweet varieties. An orphaned recipe for sweet green tomato pickles is cross referenced here, but it lives with the sauces on page 66.

Tomato ketchup gets its own mention in the index and shares a page with sauerkraut and a recipe for cucumbers which looks suspiciously like another pickle recipe. The ketchup recipe calls for “red mangoes” which threw me. Mangoes? In Tennessee? In ketchup? How exotic. It turns out that the word “mango” became associated with anything pickled (mangoes first came to the United States pickled). A pickled concoction of bell pepper and cabbage was very popular and the word “mango” became associated with peppers.

The sauces section, beginning on page 65, includes a “Mexene” barbecue sauce. Mexene is the brand name of a chili powder mix you can still buy today. The barbecue sauce is vinegar based (the way god intended) but uses this Texan stye spice mix. I like to think of it as a great diplomatic outreach to other forms of barbecue.

The sauces finish off with a hollandaise made with “oleo” - generic slang for margarine. I guess you have to make do with what you have. (The technique is interesting, though.)