Food Journal | Vintage recipes with Irina D. Mihalache: the era of canned soup

This week, we continue exploring the dishes of the past with Irina D. Mihalache, an expert on food and museums. Last week Mihalache shared with us the back story and recipe to what used to be a Canadian staple in the 1940s: stuffed Maple Leaf weiners. This week we turn to a favourite of the 1950s: green rice casserole.   

 

“While the idea of making a green rice dish sounds in tune with the healthy discourses in our contemporary culinary landscape, a second read of the recipe might trouble that first impression,” says Mihalache. This dish asked for significant amounts of grated cheese, milk and two different types of canned cream soups, she says. 

 

Chatelaine was full of ads for canned soup at the time, says Mihalache. “They made cooking easier at a time when more women entered the work force (changes in the time spent in the kitchen to "feed" the family),” she says. “It was also part of a trend – cream soups were popular on their own and part of casseroles - versatile, tasty, new and modern.

 

“You got it? The fifties is the decade of Campbell’s cream soups – mushroom, chicken, celery, or asparagus – integrated into numerous casseroles,” says Mihalache. “This recipe was sent to Chatelaine in 1956 by Miss Ruth Simmons, from Summerside, PEI, to be considered for the magazine’s Fifty Favorite Family Recipes annual contest, and was the winner in the Supper Dishes category. More than 5,000 recipes arrived from ‘files of housewives all across Canada’, according to Marie Holmes, director of Chatelaine Institute. As we are celebrating Canada 150, what better time than now to bring back such a classic?”

 

Ready to give the recipe a whirl? 

 

2 cups cooked rice

1 ½ cups grated cheese

1 cup milk

2 eggs (yolks and egg whites beaten separately) ½ cup melted butter ½ cup finely chopped parsley

3 small onions, chopped

1 tablespoon minced green pepper

 

Mix all ingredients, folding in egg whites last. Bake 45 minutes at 350ºF. Serve with the sauce below. 

 

1 can cream of chicken soup

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 cup milk

2 tablespoons melted butter

2 table spoons cornstarch 

 

Melt butter, blend in cornstarch, add milk gradually and cook until thickened. Add soups and heat. 

 

Serves: eight people.

 

(Source: Fifty Favorite Family Recipes, Chatelaine, March 1956; available in print at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library).

 

Food Journal is a limited series exploring our stories and histories around food. You can read the series in The Bulletin Brief: a news digest about the University of Toronto. Subscribe to the brief here.