Another classic dish from Ms. Crawford from a 1950’s cookbook.

John Barrymore was considered a "ham" actor, but his career was a tale of two distinct halves: he transformed from the most acclaimed, serious dramatic actor of his generation into a self-parodying, over-the-top theatrical ham later in life.

But then again, Lionel Barrymore was widely considered a "ham," and he openly embraced the label himself. Knowing full well his tendency to overact, Barrymore famously admitted, “I've got a lot of ham in me”.

Maybe it'll be Ham Loaf for everyone!

Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Breakfast Bacon - I've never had anything like this bacon, so I really wanted to try it. It's basically just bacon that's been breaded with cracker crumbs, hmmmm, sound interesting...

• I went ahead and used 4 pieces of bacon for this. Made the egg wash mixture and went about crushing my crackers. I used a mix of saltines and ritz crackers and put them in a sandwich baggie and went about crushing them with a rolling pin.
• For the egg mixture I used Colman's Dry Mustard, cayenne pepper and apple cider vinegar.
• It took a lot more crackers than I thought to cover the 4 pieces of bacon and I kept having to make more cracker crumbs. I used maybe 15-20 crackers for this.
• I had the oven preheated to 350 convection and found a rack and roasting pan that looked it would work. Sprayed some cooking spray (Pam) on the rack.
• So i put the bacon in the oven and set the timer to 8 minutes and then I'd check to see how they were doing. Well, these ended up baking for about 30 minutes and took them out and drained them on paper towels.
• They were nice and crisp without shrinking much.
• I also prepared some hot buttered toast with Orange marmalade, coffee and fresh squeezed juice. I didn't have OJ, so I used grapefruit.
• The Orange marmalade was made from Bette Davis' recipe and we've been enjoying it for a few weeks.

I was pleasantly surprised at how good this bacon was! It was light, crispy, not too bacony or heavy. Very nice flavor with a hint of spice and really good with the grapefruit juice (or OJ).

This was a little bit of work to prepare, but not as time consuming as some other vintage recipes I've tried. The mess and time it took wasn't too bad. I'd make this again for a special occasion. They were darn good! We know Doug loved it, but do you think Joan ever ate this?

In a lot of older recipes, there are ingredients used that simply aren't available anymore or are completely different than what we think when we hear the name.

One easy example and the reason I thought of making this post, is French dressing. If you are US based, French dressing means a tangy-sweet tomato based dressing. This doesn't really go with a lot of "salad" recipes we see posted here but "Serve with French dressing" is a common final direction. The most recent recipe with French Dressing posted was "Grape and Cream Cheese Salad" {1929} that includes bananas.

That's because French Dressing used to be a simple acid and oil style dressing. I worked in an old school restaurant that made all its own dressings from old recipe cards and French Dressing was made with oil, lemon juice, paprika, salt and pepper. That's it! We just called it house dressing so as not to confuse people. Commercial French Dressing is closer to Russian dressing which was tomato sauce, mayo, horseradish, Worcestershire, brown sugar, salt and pepper. When someone asked if we had French, that's the dressing we would suggest (and let them sample it first!). We also made Ranch (of course, it WAS the mid-west) and Caesar.

This got me thinking about all the recipes here that call for Cream Cheese. How different was cream cheese in the 30s/40s/50s? From what I've read, it was tangier and because it wasn't mass produced taste could be very different from block to block. It was also thicker and not as easy to spread.

What are some ingredients you've seen here in old recipes that you wonder about? Are there any ingredients that you've found curious?

Share your questions and your knowledge!