The other six of us do successive rounds of emails refining the list of dishes to be prepared and organizing them into courses.  Our task is to be as authentic to the theme as possible.

French Indo-China 1920s to 1930s was probably our most narrow theme.  Others have included, for example, Summer in Provence, Winter in Friuli, Along the Silk Road, Persia (not Iran but Persia), Comfort Food, and Things You Can Cook in a Wood-Burning Oven (for which the entire meal was cooked in our outdoor wood-burning oven).

The only meal we’ve had which strayed from the basic plan was Timballo.  Timballo is a (typically large) pastry-encased and baked dish of layered pasta, hardboiled eggs, cheese, meatballs, and other meats, all moistened with tomato sauce.  Each of the cooks was assigned one or more components of the timballo to make at home.  We got together to assemble and bake the final dish.  This was a multi-hour process, even with all the prep work done in advance.

To help pass the time, Frank and Doug devised a blind wine-tasting in which we had to try to identify the varietal and provenance of each wine.  I believe the eight of us tasted six bottles of wine.  After we finished those, we opened some more.  This was the dinner at which we decided the theme of French Indo-China 1920s to 1930s.  You may notice a correlation between alcohol intake and unusual dinner themes!

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Earlier this year, our theme was Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, first edition, published in 1950.  Every dish had to come from the cookbook with no changes, substitutions or updating unless absolutely necessary.  One of the appetizers was anchovies rolled around cornichons!

The food was actually surprisingly good.  I suspect part of that was related to how each of us selected our dish or dishes (Becky, who did appetizers selected three!).  The wines were, undoubtedly, fabulous.  In the United States, if you were drinking wine in the 1950s you were likely drinking French wine, and good French wine, at that!  On that night, so were we!

I made a Maraschino Cherry Cake with Almond Crème Filling and Maraschino Boiled Frosting.  Though if I were making the cake again, I would probably substitute my recipe for Italian Pastry Cream for Betty’s Crème Filling, I really wouldn’t make any other changes.

Here’s the recipe directly from the first edition of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook with a few minor adaptions of the technique by me.  For you bakers out there, I’m providing the original sea-level measurements as published in the cookbook.  Since I baked this at nearly 8000 feet in elevation, I followed Betty’s recommendations for adjusting for high altitude.