Welcome, all! It is time for another Mid-Century Menu, the feature on my blog where I find the most unusual, strange, experimental or questionable recipe from my vintage cookbook collection, cook it up and serve it for dinner. Sometimes the results are pretty tasty, but most of the time they are pretty bad.

If you missed it, last week was a first in Mid-Century Menu history!  The feature about the None-Such Ham Loaf was published in the Midland Daily News Food Section, which was really, really exciting!  If you haven’t seen the newspaper article yet, head on over to their website and check it out!  Also, if you like what you read, please leave a rating on the page.  My continued contribution to the paper hinges on the popularity of the article!

In any case, the recipe this week comes from Sunday Night Suppers, a cookbook published in 1956 by the Culinary Arts Institute in Chicago. This book was done by the “Staff Home Economists” at the institute and it is different from other Mid-Century Menu books in that it isn’t complied by a corportation to sell a product. Which is a good thing, because it means they won’t have a product jumping through hoops into territory it isn’t supposed to go. Like sauerkraut in cake, or Squirt in coleslaw.

Oh wait…did I let the cat out of the bag for what is coming up this month?  🙂 Shh….don’t tell!

Anyway, for this week we decided to pick something fun that wouldn’t be too difficult to prepare.

Sounds fun, right? I have always secretly liked braunschweiger, or liver sausage, in sandwiches since I have been a little kid.  It helped that I grew up in Fort Atkinson, the headquarters of Jones Dairy Farm, who always has amazing meat products. When I was little my mom used to give us smushy white bread smeared with liver sausage and mayo, and I always liked the taste, even if I didn’t dig the texture.  As I got older I discovered how to make the sandwiches with toast, then the fact that liver sausage could come sliced (no nasty smearing!), then, and this is the mother of them all, liver sausage tastes fantastic with cream cheese rather than mayo!

Since this recipe called for the liver sausage to be cooked, I was intrigued.  I had never had liver sausage cooked before, so it was a new one for me. I had high hopes for this one.

On with the show!

All the ingredients assembled for…er…assembly. 🙂  Notice the giant chunk of meat next to the mustard.  That would be the liver sausage roll. Tom got a little excited when he went to the local meat market and just bought whatever they had left because he didn’t want to run out of meat.  Well, now there is no question of that!

The slices of sausage down on the board and dosed with mustard.  I like the little dollops, so I took a picture before I spread it out.

Here is a close-up of the mustard-spread liver sausage hunk so you can see properly secured bacon placement. It was stressed in the recipe that you want to secure the bacon. Wouldn’t want that bacon to take off and wreck up your kitchen. It has always been a trouble-maker.

Securely wrapped liver sausage, all snuggly in the dish.

Here I am adding some paprika on top of the carefully placed onion slices. Placement is crucial to assure a “sky-high” tower, and not one that just slides onto its side.

Careful tomato placement.

I forgot to butter the mushrooms before starting the recipe, so I am trying to quickly butter them here while stacking the towers. Tom was nice enough to take over photo duties for this one, because we were hungry and wanted to get it in the oven fast!

Placing the buttered mushrooms on top of the tower.  It said in the recipe to use just mushroom caps, which I think would have given this a more balanced appearance, but I had portabellas, so that is what I used!

The towers are secured with more toothpicks.

Tom was looking worriedly over my shoulder. “Make sure we get those all out before we start eating. I don’t want to get stabbed by a toothpick.”

I wasn’t too worried. There were more toothpicks in the Bologna Papooses, and that turned out just fine.

I mixed up the horseradish butter while the towers were baking.  It smelled good, so I was excited. Out of the frame of this shot, Tom is toasting the hamburger buns.

Voila! The finished towers!  Look at them towering….awwww…..

As a side note, I left them in the oven for abut 10 minutes longer than the recipe called for to make sure the bacon was cooked.  I can’t stand slimy bacon!

Hubs taking the first bite of the tower.  And yes, all toothpicks had been safely removed.

And here is a shot after a few bites. It was a success! The sandwiches, while being salty, were actually really good. They didn’t really taste overpoweringly of anything, except maybe the onion.  That was good, because I thought the mustard would be pretty strong, but it faded into the background and was a good compliment to the sandwich.  The liver sausage ended up tasting…cooked. Which wasn’t bad, it was just a different flavor than I was used to liver sausage having.

The Verdict:  Good!

I was pleased this one turned out so well.  Last week’s meal was a disappointment, so I was glad we could come out ahead on this one.   The only thing that we changed at the end was that we couldn’t handle the towers open-faced, so we slapped buns on the top and just ate them like sandwiches in the end. I only could eat one, but Tom put three away.

Oh, and if you don’t like liver sausage, you could probably use any thickly sliced sausage or lunch meat with this sandwich. If you make the recipe, don’t forget to take pictures and send them to me!

This post has been submitted to Colorado Lady’s Vintage Thingie Thursdays! Head over there to check out the vintage goodness!