It is officially school time again! Alex will be headed back to pre-school soon, and I am sure most of the kids out there are already back in school. And to help your little ones concentrate and be their best, I’ve dug out some mid-century lunches for you to whip up for them! Here is the first of three fab fun lunches that I threw together to celebrate school!
We have a bologna and prune baby food sandwich on brown bread, Chocolate Dreams, some celery and cheese and an apple.
Yum!
AuthorRetroRuth
From 101 Quick Lunches With Oscar Mayer, 1958
Tested Recipe!
[cooked-sharing]
Blend together prunes and bologna, spread on one slice of bread and cover with another slice of bread.
(Note - It has been mentioned by several readers that "Blend" might mean in the blender, like a sandwich spread. If you are brave enough to give that a try, go for it. Tell us how it goes!)
Ingredients
Directions
Blend together prunes and bologna, spread on one slice of bread and cover with another slice of bread.
(Note - It has been mentioned by several readers that "Blend" might mean in the blender, like a sandwich spread. If you are brave enough to give that a try, go for it. Tell us how it goes!)
Notes
This recipe comes from 101 Quick Lunches With Oscar Mayer from 1958, Sandwiches to Tote, Variation One. There are lots and lots of crazy sandwich combos, but this one really caught my eye.
Plus, since I have a baby, I have some extra prune baby food kicking around.
Now, this recipe also calls for Boston brown bread, which is a quick bread made with whole wheat and molasses that is steamed, usually in a coffee can. I could (and probably should) have made my own, but I happened to know that my local Kroger carried this kind of bread.
In a can.
Yep, this bread comes canned. Unfortunately, they only had the raisin variety, but I figured since there was already baby food prunes on the bologna, a few raisins probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
De-canned bread!
Now, according to some hasty internet research, this bread is usually served for Saturday night supper with baked beans and sausages. (If this isn’t right, someone chime in here.) Suddenly, the light at the end of the tunnel was visible. Since this is normally served with sausage, it should work with bologna. Right? Right?
And, just as suddenly, the light is snuffed out.
This smelled so bad together. I felt sorry for the bread.
Welp, here’s hoping!
“Now, try to pretend that the bread doesn’t have raisins in it.”
“Okay. Can I also pretend that the bologna doesn’t have prunes in it?”
“It’s that bad, huh?”
“This is the wrong combination of everything.”
The Verdict: Wrong
From The Tasting Notes –
Usually we try to temper our criticism of what we are eating with sprinkles of praise, but we just couldn’t for this one. None of this went together. While we can take ownership of the fact that there were raisins in the brown bread, the absolute worst of this was the prunes and bologna. Baby food prunes do not go with bologna. Baby food prunes do NOT go with bologna. I thought perhaps this just might work, since I have had meat dishes before with prunes and cinnamon in them, but no. No. Nope. No. No. When you took a bite, it was pretty much sweet, sweet, slimey, sweet. No flavors worked together on this one. At all.
Oh wait, I do have one bit of praise: I actually liked the canned bread. It had a strong molasses flavor that I enjoyed, and it was moist. That is all.
I live in New England and yes, we ate canned Brown bread with baked beans and hot dogs every Saturday at noon growing up. Actually the ones with raisins were a special treat. Open both ends, using one of the ends to push the bread out of the can while slicing off 1″ slices, then toast in the oven and slather with butter. Nothing better.
We always had B&M Brown bread but Friends baked beans. Now the shelves are taken over by Bush’s beans which are a pale imitation of the goodness of Friends or B&M even with all those fancy add-ons (to cover the taste, I suspect).
The rating is actually for the write up and pictures… ROTFL.
Anyway, I, too, have partaken of the canned Boston Brown Bread. B+M, with raisins (and butter), which was given to me in childhood by my Aunt Mae. Technically, she was my grandmother’s Aunt Mae, and she did not toast the bread, but she _did_ let us use actual midcentury plates. These plates were considered “quite new” by the owner even though they were over twenty years old at the time.
I also concur with Devon Raisins on the unfortunate ubiquity of Bush’s baked beans in much of New England.
I really dont get the hysteria over canned brown bread,with raisin or without. Its a molassses flavored quick bread, just baked in a can, It’s delicious and not at all worthy of all this hoo-hah. You can make it at home and it tastes pretty darn good making it at home, too – Cream cheese in between slices is a lovely tea-time sandwich.
The best way to fix bologna is to fry it (no oil needed – it will curl unless you put cuts around the edges) and serve on “NON-Boston Brown Bread”! We used white bread with mayo (or mustard) but other non-sweet breads would work too. It can be cut thin or thicker as you prefer. (get at the deli) We used to buy it in rolls in the 50’s/60’s and slice it ourselves.
Dad liked it on a sandwich without frying it but not my preference.
If two people, things or ideas are incompatible, you could say they go together like prunes and bologna. Like, “I had to get rid of my roommate. We go together like prunes and bologna.”