Mid-Century Meals: Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #24

24. Snacky Snackables April 19 - May 2

Who doesn’t love a snack? Make something meant to be consumed in between meals, on the go, or late at night when you’re scrounging for munchies!

Snacks!!! One of the basic food groups!!! Right up there with chocolate and coffee! No? Well, probably not, but we all love those little special treats. Eating between meals and keeping our internal motors fueled is also healthy for us, I'm told, rather than eating large meals during the day. Patrick and I eat a large breakfast and a large mid-day meal, snack throughout the day, but keep the evening meals light. Light, that is, unless we are dining with friends. I truly believe there are no calories in food you share with friends or between November 20th and January 1st. Agree?

For this Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #24 (can you believe we are almost at the end of the year of Challenges), we found a fun recipe in the January, February, March, 1951 CBS Homemakers Exchange Recipes booklet.

The recipe is for Fried Potato Logs which sounds very close to one of our favorite snacks, French fries. There is nothing like a large sweet tea and a large French fries from McDonald's to make a road trip happier!

The fun part of this recipe is a slip of paper that was inside the booklet. It reads "Tried pot. logs Mon., July 28th Very gd. accord. to harry! Chill before frying" Monday, July 28th did not occur in the year of our recipe booklet. It did occur in 1952, again in 1958, in 1969, and 1975. With that kind of endorsement, we had to give them a try and see if Harry had the same taste as we do in whatever year he ate them!

Our process:

Ingredients gathered.

Potatoes cut and boiled. I like to leave the skins on for nutritional value and color and also because today I'm feeling a bit lazy.

Cooled potatoes ready for mashing and the ingredients.

Potatoes mashed, butter and salt and pepper added.

Egg yoke and grated onion added and logs rolled. You can see that as the potatoes warm they are more difficult to handle. I think that is why our mystery note writer suggested chilling the potatoes before frying.

Potato logs ready to be floured, dipped in egg/water, and rolled in bread crumbs.

The frying begins!

The frying continues until golden brown.

Plated and served with a side of catsup and Ranch dressing.

Heavenly! Mild onion flavor, crunchy outside, soft inside, and wonderful!

We're late with this Challenge for a very good reason. We had a glorious time at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina with 28 of the most incredible people! I had arranged a costumer's dream weekend filled with events and some amazing food! We started with an Historic Trolley ride with snacks prepared by the Biltmore Chef: