"If you have passed a joint around before dinner..."

I recently looked at my cookbook shelf and realized it needed pruning: not all the cookbooks fit on the shelf, so they're in a bunch of miscellaneous piles. I hate miscellaneous piles. Something had to go. The question was, what? Clearly I must keep the Gourmet cookbook and the Santa Monica Farmers Market cookbook; I use those all the time. Clearly I must also keep the Betty Crocker cookbook from the '40s because where else can you get two-tone sketches of wasp-waisted women in shirt-dresses & heels, cooking enormous turkeys while pondering whether a story about a kitten up a tree is appropriate for mealtime discussion? The Joy of Cooking is a staple and I learned to cook from the New Vegetarian Epicure, so those both had to stay. When I want something particularly interesting I turn to the Turtle Bay or one of several New Mexico cookbooks, so those had to stay too. 

Eventually I spotted the original Vegetarian Epicure. Once upon a time I bought this because I liked the New Vegetarian Epicure so much - but I have never actually made anything out of the original Vegetarian Epicure (except for cornbread, and that was in college). It seemed like a reasonable candidate. I took it into the backyard to read through it and consider whether my cooking repertoire would be seriously hampered by its disappearance. And that's when I ran across the quote that forms the title of this post: 

"If you have passed a joint around before dinner to sharpen gustatory perceptions, you most likely will pass another one after dinner, and everyone knows what that will do - the blind munchies may strike at any time."

This is embedded deep within the otherwise-completely-serious chapter on how to design menus. It forms the backbone of the author's argument for why you need to have a two-hours-after-dinner course in case anyone gets hungry again. 

Not only that, but about half the soup recipes call for 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream. And there's a Roquefort Mousse that lists the ingredients as "2 envelops gelatin | 1 cup light cream | 3 eggs | 10 oz Roquefort cheese | 1/2 cup heavy cream." 

I think the '70s must have been much, much, MUCH stranger than any of us born too late to remember them clearly realize.* 

* Yes, I know, I was born in the '70s, but my focus was more on my sandbox and blocks at that point, so it doesn't count for purposes of this post.