Cookbook #195: Seal-A-Meal I, Recipe and Instruction Book, Dazey Products Company, 1976.

I bought a “seal-a-meal” by Dazey sometime way back in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I still have it! And it still works. It’s an inexpensive little unit, with a heating bar and a way to hold and press bags over the bar.

Note the two pegs in the above photo, the white one on the left and the black one on the right. Special bags, or “pouches”, were sold that had holes along the side to latch on to the bags. I have a small roll of this type of this bag material – as you can see in the photo below. See the little round hole in the bottom right corner of the photo?

I searched and searched, but to my knowledge, this type of bag (with holes along the sides) is no longer sold. The Seal-a-Meal® brand now owned by Sunbeam Products (doing business as Jarden Consumer Solutions). The bag sealer units of today use vacuum to remove the air from the bag filled with food, and then heat seal them. Both approaches result in an air-tight, sealed bag, a bag that can be put in a freezer or in boiling water.

There are zillions of reasons to have food or other things in an air-tight bag, or pouch. “Ideas, ideas, ideas” on pages 12-15 of Seal-A-Meal I suggest pouch-sealing food such as tomatoes, vegetables, fruits, eggs, dough for rolls, coffee, even sandwiches. Sportsmen can seal survival kits and fishing gear. Mothers of babies and toddlers can freeze formula and baby foods, and put anything that children shouldn’t touch in seal-a-meal bags. Picknickers can mix up martinis, seal in pouches, and put in the cooler. Seamstresses can store delicate laces and sequins. Teenagers can make water pillows. One can store polished silver in sealed bags.

I contribute this idea: buy meat or fish on sale and seal in the seal-a-meal then freeze; this prevents freezer burn.

How have I used my seal-a-meal? Mostly for short backpacking or car camping trips. I’d make a batch of chile or spaghetti sauce, pouch-seal and freeze it. The meal would go into one of the adult backpacks, while we watched our kids scamper up the trail. The frozen meal acted like an ice block to keep items like cheese cool in the pack. After we reached our campground and set up camp, we’d heat the pouch of food over a camp stove. And enjoy a great meal, with the wind blowing softly in the pine trees, the stars coming out over the Rocky Mountains.

My Seal-A-Meal I booklet includes a handful of recipes for cooking foods directly in the bag, like poached eggs and or “Fussless Fudge Sauce”. Another handful of recipes are for main dishes like stew, spaghetti sauce, and chile: you prepare ahead (or prepare a double recipe) and freeze in a seal-a-meal bag for later.

For this blog, I decide to cook a batch of stew meat to “demonstrate” the seal-a-meal process. For a change, I am not going to give you a formal recipe for my stew. Unlike this blog, much of my cooking is done sans recipe. Here goes:

Stew Meat Base

Cut up a chuck cross rib roast – one or two inch chunks – about 3 or 4 pounds of meat (or use pre-packaged stew meat). Toss away any big chunks of fat. Turn on an electric pressure cooker to “brown”, then add about half the meat. Oil in the pan is optional. I found that the first half of the meat I put in the pan browned well and most of the liquid evaporated –  I should have removed it and browned the other half, but I looked at the clock and was running late, so I just tossed in the rest of the meat. In a few minutes, the splattering pile of meat still had a lot of liquid in it, but what the heck, time is ticking. Add a roughly chopped onion and carrot, and maybe 4 chopped garlic cloves. And some salt and pepper. Open a bottle of red wine and pour in a good dollop. Add maybe a cup of water. Cover and seal the pressure cooker, set to “high pressure” for 22 minutes, then let the pressure come down on its own. Well, I let it come down until it was time to leave, when I released the pressure totally and unplugged the unit. I came back maybe 6 hours later. And it was perfect!

This made enough cooked stew meat for 3 meals for 2 people. I divided it in thirds, and put one portion in a pan on the stove top. I mushed up the cooked carrots and onions with a fork: they are there just for flavor. I added chopped carrots, celery, and potatoes, more water, and cooked until veggies were done. Then I thickened with a little cornstarch mixed in a bit of water. It was one of the best stews I have ever made!

I took the other two portions of stew meat base and pouch-sealed. I used two recently-purchased vacuum style seal-a-meal bags and filled each with stew. (I lost the EZ fill gadget that makes it easy to fill bags without getting food on the sides of the upper portion of the bag so there was a bit of food on the edge I wanted to seal – I forged ahead anyway.)

I heated the seal-a-meal unit for 3 minutes, placed the top of the bag on the hot bar, pressed out most of the air, closed the top, and said “one seal-a-meal, two seal-a-meal, three seal-a-meal, four seal-a-meal”, then it was sealed. It sizzled a bit because there was a bit of food in the sealing area, but it still formed an air-tight seal.

The filled bags are now in my freezer, ready for a couple quick meals.

Comments on food storage, 2017 style

As I used my seal-a-meal this week, I did find the it to be a good method to seal foods for storage. The frozen pouches take up little space in the freezer (compared to a plastic lidded container). The drawback is the time involved (maybe 5 minutes to find and heat the unit and to fill the bag) and the messiness of filling a bag with a wet food like a stew.

Since the advent of seal-a-meal units in the 1970s, plastic bags with nearly air-tight “zip” type seals entered the American marketplace (Hefty and Ziplock brands). Although I wouldn’t freeze something like stew in these bags, I do use them for fresh meats that I’ve bought in bulk; cooked hamburger and sausage; tomatoes, fruits, nuts . . . I use these ziplock-style bags all the time. The advantage over seal-a-meal is that they are quick and easy to fill. Also, I often re-use these bags by rinsing with water.

For leftovers like pasta sauce and chile, I use reuseable, lidded solid plastic containers like Tupperware® or Rubbermaid®. Most of my Tupperware is ancient (they don’t make it now as well as they used to!). Recently, Rubbermaid has come out with a line of “easy find lid” containers that I like a lot because many of the lids are interchangeable between container sizes and the lids are easy to find and the containers stackable. I like them too because they are reusable and thus better for the environment.

And nerdy me, I keep a list of what’s currently in my freezers in Evernote, accessible from my computer, iPhone, and iPad. I have two freezers, one with the refrigerator and one huge one down in the basement. We are 6 miles from the nearest town, and 20 miles from a big supermarket, and I hate to run out of something and have to drive out to a store. Plus I can take advantage of sales. Plus when I was working, I could cook for a whole week on Sundays and store the meals in the freezer.

Cookbook #194: Mexican Cookery for American Homes, Gebhardt’s, San Antonio, 1935.

I am not sure how I acquired this cookbook, maybe it was Grandmother’s, or maybe it came from the Ruth C. Vandenhoudt house. One recipe – Chili Meat Loaf – has a handwritten note, but I’m not sure whose writing it is.

Mexican Cookery for American Homes was produced by the manufacturer of a chile powder: Gebhardt. Almost every recipe calls for either Gebhardt’s chili powder or Gebhardt’s canned chili.

An earlier version (c1923) of Mexican Cookery for American Homes is available in full text on the Hathi Trust web site. An even earlier version is now available as a reprint. The back cover of this 2005 reprint, compiled by Andrew F. Smith, a teacher of culinery history, reads:

“The Gebhardt Chili Powder Company was founded by William Gebhardt, a German, who migrated about 1885 to New Braunfels, Texas. Gebhardt opened a café, which served chilis imported from Mexico. To preserve them, he dried and crushed them into powder. He began bottling his powder, and in 1890, he opened a factory to San Antonio. Six years later he trademarked the name “Gebhardt’s Eagle Brand Chili Powder.” The powder became an important ingredient to such an extent that recipes in Texas cookbooks specifically recommended its use. When Gebhardt began marketing chili powder to a wider audience beyond Texas, he ran into a very serious problem-consumers not familiar with Tex-Mex cookery had little idea what to do with it. To help cooks understand Tex-Mex cookery, Gebhardt produced a small 32-page cookery pamphlet. This cookbooklet was originally published about 1908. As such, it was the first English-language booklet published in the United States that focused on Mexican-American cookery. It proved so successful that new editions of it were regularly published through the 1950s. In 1911, Gebhardt sold his company to his brothers-in-law, who expanded their product line to include beans and tamales. During the 1920s, they introduced to the tourist trade Gebhardt’s Original Mexican Dinner Package, consisting of cans of chili con carne, Mexican Style Beans, shuck-wrapped Tamales, Deviled Chili Meat, and a bottle of Chili Powder-all for one dollar. By the 1930s, Gebhardt products were sold throughout the United States and Mexico. The company survived until 1960 when it was purchased by Beatrice Foods, which in turn was acquired by ConAgra in 1990.” (From Amazon description accessed 2017.)

My 1935 edition of Mexican Cookery for American Homes reflects the culture of America at the time – women were the home cooks. I’ve addressed the issue of women-in-the-kitchen many times in this blog, most recently in this post. The foreword (below) to Mexican Cookery for American Homes states in the last paragraph: “Earlier editions of ‘Mexican Cookery for American Homes’ have been welcomed by countless thousands of women.”

I found a post about Mexican Cookery for American Homes on a website by another affectionado of old cookbooks, Wendi. The blog is called “Resurrected Recipes, this is your grandma’s cooking“. Wendi has the same version of Mexican Cookery for American Homes that I do. I like her discussion of the recipes, recipes quite different from the Mexican foods we have today, or even the recipes in the 1950-60s era of cookbooks. She calls some of them silly! Like this recipe for “Gebhardt’s Tamales and Chili with Meat”:

Yup, you put two cans – unopened – in boiling water for 20 minutes! Silly indeed.

I decide to make “Enchiladas, Mexican Style for this blog”. It’s the middle recipe in the scan below – I included the other recipes for curiousity’s sake.

Note that the Mexican style of enchilada is served on flat – not rolled – tortillas. And, you put fried eggs on top. Another twist! I’ve put poached eggs on tortillas and beans to make Huevos Rancheros and we’ve always like them.

This enchilada recipe calls for Chili Sauce on page 36:

I’ll make these pretty much as the recipe reads. Except, I do not want to fry the tortillas, instead I’ll soften them in the microwave. I don’t have Gebhardt’s chili powder, but I have some great chili powder from Savory Seasonings.

Enchiladas with Eggs
serves 2 for dinner

• 1 small onion, diced
• 1/4 bell pepper, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon hot chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup chopped tomaotes (fresh or canned)
• 1 cup beef stock (or water)
• 6 corn tortillas
• 1/2 to 1 cup grated cheese (I used cheddar cheese)
• a few diced onions, if desired
• 1-2 eggs, fried or poached

To make the sauce, cook the diced onion, bell pepper, and garlic in a little oil until soft. Combine the flour, chili powder, and salt, then add to the cooked onion mixture and stir until smooth. Slowly stir in the tomatoes and beef stock (or water) and simmer about 20 minutes.

On each plate, layer 3 tortillas with a little sauce and cheese between each layer. Microwave on high until the cheese and sauce are bubbly – probably less than a minute. Top with fried egg(s) and serve.

I served these enchiladas with a little lettuce, rice, tomatoes in a balsamic vinaigrette, and chayote. (More on chayote below.) This meal was a success! I really enjoyed the mixture of egg, tortillas, cheese and seasonings – a different taste for dinner. Hubby said he’d prefer it with refried beans, more like traditional huevos rancheros. Maybe next time.

Chayote

Chayote is a member of the gourd (squash) family, as I learned when I read my 1928 Salads, Vegetables and the Market Basket. Chayote is common in Latin American cooking, but is not listed in Mexican Cookery for American Homes. Last week I was at my favorite Asian Seafood Market and found a chayote in the fresh produce area. I brought it home because it looked so interesting! I served it with a mixture of tomatoes and balsamic vinegar:

Here’s the sliced, peeled chayote. It tastes like something between an apple and a pear, crunchy and interesting. My tomato vinaigrette is a modification of a recipe for “Spicy Balsamic Tomato Salad” that I found on allrecipes.com.