Saturday Night: '30s Dinner Party

The overall menu (the first dinner menu from my grandmother's 1943 edition of Joy of Cooking) was:
Ham loaf with cooked ham
Green beans with cheese sauce
Potato boats (Cati made these)
Sour-milk (buttermilk) muffins (Cati made these)
Applesauce pudding
Soft molasses cookies (Jamshid made these)

Comments about the dishes:

1. I liked the ham loaf, which was a bit odd. Due to the natural sweetness of the ham and the amount of carrots added, it ended up being sweeter than I expect a main dish to be. This is unlikely to become a regular feature of our dinner rotation, however I may well add ground ham to future meatloaf recipes,
2. It's hard to find objections to green beans in a cheese sauce. If I hadn't been following recipes slavishly as part of the theme, I would have added some pimenton to the sauce.
3. The potato boats are standard re-stuffed baked potatoes. They're good, but it turned out to be tricky to get the contents light and airy.
4. I thought the muffins were fabulous; I was more or less alone in this opinion.
5. The applesauce pudding tasted really, really good, but it didn't set up like a pudding at all. So it was basically applesauce texture. I liked the flavor enough that I'm going to spend some time playing with this to try and find quantities that will thicken. Last night's extra cooking (in ramekins) helped a bit, but more work is required.
6. The cookies were good, even if I'm not such a big fan of soft cookies.

We also made some cocktails from the old version of Joy, both of which turned out well:

1. Rickeys (with lime and bourbon)
2. Whiskey sour (with lemon)