It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means! It’s time for this week’s Mid-Century Menu, where I crack open one of my many, many mid-century cookbooks and look for the most unappetizing meal I can find. I cook it and serve it for dinner to my husband, who always chokes down the worst food possible with a smile. And why do I torture the poor man?

Because he likes it.

In any case, this weeks fabulous dish comes from this cute book, Good Housekeeping’s Meat Cook Book, published in 1958 by the editors of Good Housekeeping Magazine.  Now those editors must have been mighty busy cooking up their flavor melding magic, because there are some doozy’s in this one, but I thought I would get the most entertaining one first, which I found towards the back of the book.

Ahh…the canned meat section. What would I do without you?  You bring me so much disgusting joy.

I didn’t have to look hard for my recipe.  It practically slapped me in the face.

It is barely even a recipe.  It doesn’t even have an ingredients list.  And yet…it intrigued me the way no other actual meat recipe did. Canned peaches crammed into the crevices of canned meat, studded with cloves, slathered with peach syrup then baked. Oh, you had better believe it is on.

The ingredients gather together for their final picture before their doom. And yes, that is generic Spam.  It was on sale this week, so I thought I would give it a try.

By the way, I am pretty sure my mom once made a spamloaf and put cloves in it like a ham.  For some reason that is a childhood memory that sticks with me.

Brick of spam about to be sliced.  I don’t know why I took this picture.  Probably because the brick looks so very disgusting.  And look at the goo!!

Artfully placed peaches.  It may not look like the most appetizing thing out there, but god help me, I tried. 

As a side note, all three cats were circling by this point, trying to snag a piece of canned meat. Around the outside of the cat circle and the most aggressive by far, was Hubs. “That actually smells pretty good,” he said, which I knew meant he was angling for a handout.

I ignored him.

Studded with cloves and covered with a brown sugar/peach syrup mix. Just in case it wasn’t sugary enough.

So, I popped it into the oven and basted it every 10 minutes to make sure it really got enough of the peach syrup. And when the time was up, we had our dinner.

Mmmmm…sacrelicious.

So, we divided up the slices and sat down for dinner. It didn’t smell horrible, which is always a good sign.  I always  hate having to force myself to take that first bite, though even if it doesn’t smell. I waited for Hubs to take a bite, and when he had the second one in his mouth, I finally raised my fork to my lips and….holy salt! I dropped my fork.

“This is so salty!” I crammed a peach slice into my mouth to try and temper the taste. It didn’t help much, all I could taste was salty sugar.

“It’s pretty good, huh?”  Hubs was smiling and eating his second slice.

The verdict: Salty

Not sure if I just never noticed it before, but baked Spam is SALTY.  I ate my portion, but had about three glasses of water throughout the rest of the night trying to dilute the salt sludge running through my veins. Hubs said it was fine with him, we have eaten worse.

I guess I can’t argue with that one.

Thanks for reading this week’s Mid-Century Menu!  If you have a nasty recipe to share or if you want to be a guest blogger and make a mid-century horror, email me at rkehm at hotmail.com!