Throwback of the House: Reel Him in With Cheemato Soufflé

Have you been despondent since last week's post? Worried about eating sea pie and dying alone? It's time to find you a man with 1952's Date Bait: The Younger Set's Picture Cook Book by Robert H. Loeb, Jr., which was loaned to me by Kelly of Sounding My Barbaric Gulp.

I don't have to bait a date. My husband Brian and I will mark ten years of wedded bliss in a few weeks. I didn't even have to make a Cheemato Soufflé to win his heart.

Pasta and putting out did the trick and was a hell of a lot easier.

First, interpret Loeb's recipe. As he explains in the introduction, regular recipes are too gosh-darn hard to understand, what with their words and numbers. Thus, the picture book format, which either means that women who needed help baiting a date were too dumb to read, or that girls were encouraged to start building their date-baiting skills in first grade.

Second, heat canned tomato soup with quick tapioca and water until it boils. Remove from heat and stir in a pound of American cheese. Eventually, the mixture became so hard to stir that I had to get my big, strong husband to do the task, sacrificing any baiting.

It's done when the man of the house starts complaining that stirring hurts his shoulder.