"LUBY" (Favorite Lebanese Dish) by Connie Lamb - from "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971)

RECIPE

1-1/2 to 2 lbs. ground lamb or ground beef

2 onions

2 cans tomatoes (regular size)

1 small can tomato puree

2 cans tomato paste

2 lbs. fresh green beans or fresh yellow beans

1.tsp. cinnamon

garlic salt, salt, pepper

Add onions to meat and brown.

Add garlic salt and drain off and drain off meat juices.

Add tomatoes, tomato puree, salt, pepper, cinnamon, tomato paste and water (fill tomato paste can twice) to mixture.

Wash and snap beans, and add to mixture.  Stir, cover pan and let simmer until the beans are tender.

Serve over portions of minute rice.

Especially delicious if served with a tossed salad and Syrian bread.

Among all the entries in the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates cookbook, the one from John Lamb stands out for several reasons.

First off, John who?  Lamb spent parts of only three seasons on the Pirates' major league roster as a relief pitcher.  His career numbers are 66.1 innings pitched over 47 games, all in relief.  Zero wins, two losses, and a 4.07 ERA with five saves.  Sadly, he didn't stick around long enough for Topps to deem him worthy of a baseball card in 1971.

Much more amusing is the fact that Lamb's recipe is for lamb.  

Best of all, he dishes out an exotic middle eastern stew that stands out from most of the mid-century dinner table fare that can be found in the surrounding pages.

Luby is an Anglicized take on Lubiyeh, which is Arabic for green beans.  In this recipe, the beans are added to a thick, tomatoey lamb stew.

This is an easy one-pot recipe that basically asks you to keep adding ingredients until you run out of ingredients, then cover and simmer everything until it is thick and delicious.  As recommended, it went well with rice.  It freezes well, giving you something to look forward to when you need a break from the kitchen.  Simply thaw, reheat and enjoy.

John Lamb!  They may have left you off the '71 World Series roster, but you just might have served up the best dish in this cookbook.  Let this expiate!

Nut Bread by Paula Ellis - from "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971)

RECIPE

1 cup sugar

shortening the size of a walnut

1 well-beaten egg

1 tsp. salt

4 tsp. baking powder

3 cups flour

1 cup sweet milk

1 cup chopped nut meats

Pour into buttered pan.  Let stand 20 minutes before baking.

Bake slowly 40-60 minutes, at 350F.

Baking is not my thing. 

A lurking fear always grips me that one tiny error in measurements will destroy everything. The mismeasured ingredients will collapse upon themselves, destroying the cake or tart.  The overburdened baking dish will break the rack and slam to the bottom of the oven with a thud, destroying the oven.  The tiles under the oven will crack and open a hole in the floor, destroying the floor. The floor will crumble and implode the entire building, destroying the building. Who knows where the destruction might end.

Haunted by fantasy cataclysms, I approach recipes like this one with some trepidation.

Prepping to make Paula Ellis' Nut Bread recipe, my nerves were set on edge almost immediately by the inclusion of "sweet milk" in the list of ingredients. Gripping my phone and staggering to the fainting couch, I flopped down and did some Googling. Turns out, sweet milk is just plain whole milk. Back in the day, it was sometimes referred to as sweet milk to differentiate it from buttermilk or skim milk. Confusion sorted, I forged ahead.

It appears that Paula Ellis expected people to know exactly what to do once the ingredients were assembled. I made the effort to set everything out in advance, within arms reach. I also creamed the first two ingredients because that seems like a thing one does. The rest of the items fell into the bowl without problem, and soon enough the loaf of sweet dough went into the oven.

I may have overmixed everything. After almost an hour of baking, the bread that emerged was more like a bread-shaped cake. Dense and weighty but also sweet and nutty. 

Kept in a bag in the fridge, it lasted days and each morning I sawed off a slab for breakfast. As bread-shaped cakes go, it turned out great so I'll take the W thank you.

As for the man on the card, Dock Ellis is usually remembered as the man who pitched a no-hitter during an acid trip. It's a wild story and has been retold in a variety of media, but after his career ended, Dock acknowledged that he had a substance abuse problem. He cleaned up his life and spent his final years as a substance abuse counselor. He died, way too soon, in 2008.

Beef Stew by Dolores Stargell - from "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971)

RECIPE

1 lb. beef stew chunks or 1 lb. ground steak 

1/2 cup flour

salt, pepper, garlic salt

1 small onion

2 green onions

1 envelope Lipton's Beef Flavor Gravy Soup

1/2 cup cooking oil

1/2 small bell pepper

1 1/2 cups water

*rice or noodles, as suggested below

Flour and season meat with spices, then brown meat with cooking oil at medium high heat in skillet.

Pour off almost all oil and add dry soup and water.  Add chopped onions and bell pepper.  Simmer until meat is tender about 1-1/2 hours.

Serve over rice or noodles.

Wilver Stargell, aka Willie, aka Pops, a Pittsburgh Pirates legend.

In 1971, Stargell was approaching the midpoint of his 21-year career, all of it played in the Burgh. He led the NL in home runs with 48, and was named NL Player-of-the-Month twice as he led his club to the division title and World Series.

By decade's end, Stargell would be one of the faces of the franchise.  He was the clubhouse leader who introduced the "Stargell Stars" that were awarded after a good game or key play.  These stars can be seen on most Pirate players' caps in the late 70s.

Here we have one of the dishes that gave Pops his pop.  

This beef stew is warm and comforting, and I served it over some wide egg noodles as suggested by Dolores Stargell.  Coating the meat with flour before browning elevates the comfort level.  As you can see, the recipe is flat-out simple and the only thing that takes time is the simmering.

I wasn't able to find an exact envelope of "Lipton's Beef Flavor Gravy Soup" but any powdered gravy mix will do.  The end result was delicious.  

Hang a Stargell Star on this one!

Mystery Pie by Shirley Virdon - from "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971)

 

RECIPE

Mix together:

20 Ritz Crackers (rolled very fine)

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup chopped nuts

Then:

beat 3 egg whites very stiff

add 1/2 cup sugar and

3/4 tsp. vanilla

Fold in other ingredients.

Place in buttered 9" pie pan.  Bake in 350F oven for 35 minutes.  Cool.

Topping:

whip 1/2 pint whipping cream

add 3 tsp. powdered sugar

Spread on cooled pie shell.  Top with slivered chocolate (optional).  Chill for 2 hours before serving.

NOTE: Pie shell may be made 24 hours before serving.

It's a mystery! / C'est un mystère!

Crumbly on the outside, gooey on the inside.

This recipe was provided by Shirley Virdon, whose husband Bill was a longtime Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder and one of the coaches of the 1971 team. (The following season, he would succeed Danny Murtaugh as manager.)

This is one of those vintage recipes that probably appeared in magazines and community cookbooks for decades.  The ingredients are all items that would have been found in most households, and the preparation is simple.

Funny enough, the finished pie did not have any of that buttery Ritz flavour to it.  Like I said, it was very crumbly on the outside -- the photo above shows my desperate effort to get a clean slice onto a plate.  Inside however, it's all sweet and gooey with a bit of texture provided by the nuts.

Would I serve this to guests today?  Oh gosh no.  This is one of those desserts that should be trapped in time like an artifact, something to be appreciated but not really something for the present day.  There are better things to do with Ritz crackers anyway.

Lobster Vinaigrette by Delia Pagán - from "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971)

 

RECIPE

1 lb. lobster tail

1/2 cup olive oil

1/3 cup vinegar

1 tsp. salt

1 small onion - chopped

4 hard boiled eggs - diced

1 green cayenne pepper - diced

Boil 2 cups of water and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt.  Add lobster.  Let stand 5 minutes.

Remove and cut into chunks.

Mix olive oil, vinegar, salt, onion, pepper and eggs.  Pour over lobster chunks.

Refrigerate and serve chilled.

Puerto Rican infielder José Pagán played 15 seasons in the majors, starting with the San Francisco Giants in 1959, then moving to Pittsburgh in a trade in 1965.

Pagán was the hero of the 1971 World Series against Baltimore.  In the eighth inning of Game 7, he doubled to drive in the game-winning RBI and secure a place in Pirates lore.

After one more season in the Burgh, he signed as a free agent with the Philadelphia Phillies for one season, and retired in 1973.

There are two approaches you could take to preparing this appetizer. Either get ahold of genuine lobster tails as directed in the recipe, or find some packages of lobster meat already scooped from the tail (it's cheaper and the meat is ready to use). Another substitution I made was to use a shallot instead of a small onion, just because I had shallots in the fridge.

The hot green pepper definitely adds some zip to this dish. If you don't have or don't want to use something that fiery, you can leave it out and splash the prepared dish with a few drops your favourite hot sauce instead. Delia Pagán's recipe definitely calls for something to balance out the mellowness of the lobster and eggs.

José Pagán came through for the Pirates at the end of the World Series, but here he leads off with a hit.

Bookshelf - "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971) by the Pittsburgh Pirates

32 pp. paperback

33 recipes from the wives of players, coaches and management

The year 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Pirates' fourth World Series championship. 

Those Pirates have been referred to as the team that changed baseball, because they were the first championship team to be fully integrated. Half of the players on the roster were either African American or Latin American.

In 1971 the club also published A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes, the slim volume pictured above. This cookbook has quickly become one of my favourites. Even though it contains fewer than three dozen recipes, they definitely reflect the multicultural makeup of the ballclub.

There are fancy appetizers and desserts, lots of soulful comfort food from popular American and Latin American cuisine, and some scary Jello-based salads too.

Over the course of the next 12 months I'll be preparing a bunch of these recipes and posting the results here. The lineup includes dishes from the kitchens of the Stargell, Ellis, Clemente, Blass, Oliver, Sanguillen and Grant families, and many more. Check out the food that fuelled the Pirates fifty years ago.

Pepper Steak by Barbara Allen - from "Phillies' Fillies Cookbook" (1976)

 

RECIPE

1 lb. top of the round steak

1 lb. mushrooms

3 bell peppers

3 med. onions

1 clove of garlic

salt and pepper

Saute mushrooms, peppers and onions. Remove from pan. Cut top of round into 2" squares. Add steak and clove of garlic to pan, and brown on both sides. Then add mushrooms, peppers and onions, and simmer for approximately ten minutes.

This might be one of the baseball cookbook recipes I have made more than any other.  It's simple, it's comforting, and it's very filling.  I can imagine Dick Allen sitting down to dinner with a mountain of beef and veggies on the plate before him.  He pounds down the entire dish, then works some of it off by going outside and bench pressing his neighbour's house or something.

Dick Allen passed away earlier this month. He was one of my baseball heroes. As a young man he excelled in many sports, ultimately deciding on baseball as his career goal. In the early sixties he was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies, a team notable for dragging its feet when it came to integrating black players. He was assigned to their minor league affiliate in Arkansas and went through hell in the deep south, dealing with racism and personal threats on a regular basis when all he wanted to do was play baseball.

He made it to the majors and became a beloved figure in more than one city. Rookie of the Year in Philadelphia. MVP in Chicago.  I have lost track of how many times I have read someone recount a memory of a Dick Allen home run.  How he came to the plate carrying a 40-ounce bat that looked like a tree trunk.  How he would study pitchers and know exactly when to pounce. How his home runs would start off as line drives, blazing over the infield, over the outfield, and continuing to rise as they soared into space. He hit home runs into the no man's land of centerfield in Comiskey Park.  He hit home runs over the roof of Comiskey Park.  He hit home runs of such velocity that they cleared the outfield fence, went through one of the windows at the back of Comiskey Park, and ended up in a field across the street from the stadium.

That Dick was excluded from the Hall of Fame while alive was just one more injustice he had to face. He didn't kiss enough asses to earn a Hall of Fame invitation while still alive, but that was his style. He never railed, never moaned. Wherever he went he let his bat and his record to all the talking.

Back to this recipe. Like I said, it's simple. After sauteeing the veggies and removing them from the pan, I crank the heat up a couple of notches, add a few more drops of oil and then sear the hell out of the steak on both sides.  After dumping the veggies back in, I give it a quick stir and it's done. If you like your steak rare or medium, there's no need to let it sit there for 10 minutes.  It's done.  Enjoy!