All Kinds of Salads, Sandwiches, and Snacks (Kroger's, 1960's)

Good morning!

This weekend, spoiler alert, I bought a really neat mail carrier type thingamado to put on my baker's rack. Previously, there was a small, black file piece, maybe six inches long by two wide, that held all the paid bills, stamps, invitations to weddings, drawings made in the margins of grocery lists, coupons, and similar flotsam/jetsam that rate hanging on to but defy categorization. It was, needless to say, and due to my lack of editing skills, ALWAYS overflowing with stuff, so when I found a prim and neat little forties' mail holder with a lithograph of a castle on it, I decided, ah, let's redo this. In doing so, I had to disrupt the twenty-ish cookbooks and cookbook pamphlets that were nesting just to the right of the microwave, and this gem-dandy fell out of a Better Homes and Gardens Barbecue book from the sixties'. AND I LOVE IT. Isn't it great to find stuff you forgot you had hidden in other things you forgot you had, all in the luxury of your own home? (#borderlinehoarderthoughts)

Item one: how many of you forget that stores like Kroger (or whatever your local, dominant big box food retailer may be) has been around forever? I have a stack of pamphlets from the forties' that I found in a moldering estate sale shoebox containing wartime rationing tricks and tips from Kroger, and was struck by the idea that they existed before, say, the fifties'. Note to self: trying to build up a massive conglomerate chain of grocery stores might prove difficult when 90% of your competition has been in business since the 1880's (this is probably why the inside of the no-longer-family-owned H.G. Hills on Dickerson Rd holds very little over a Circle K convenience store in terms of product availability). I think this book is probably from the later fifties' or early sixties', and my, doesn't it show in the most marvelous ways.

Item two: THE ILLUSTRATIONS. IN THIS BOOK. ARE MAGNIFICENT. I always hungrily snap open frayed booklets and cookbooks at estate sales and thrift stores looking for JUST these kind of atomic age doodles, and many is the time I've been disappointed. With this one, NO SIR. The mint green with black and white color scheme is something I'd like to see repeated in my own house, much less in this cookbook's illustrations. While I'm on super-particular-no-eggs-no-dairy-no-meat right now (I eat air, obviously, in answer to your question-- and a LOT of soy or tofu products), I nonetheless think fondly on dips and dunks and crabmeat delights of days past, and honestly just trill with delight over the pictures. Maybe I can vegan-ize some of these crazy concoctions? Does vegan Jello taste anything like real Jello? Did I mention that the cover describes the recipes là-dedans with my new favorite one-two combo punch statement of "Some are hearty. Some are party." I die.

Until I was typing, I didn't notice that the center of this snack plate is a poor little frog toothpick holder with practically marks of Calvary all over him. Why have they speared him thus? Did they make toothpick holders in other shapes that I need to know about? Whenever I've done this kind of spread in the past, also, I've never been keen on making a huge variety of things-- as a hostess, hard-won experience dictates that whether you put out taste perfect matzoh balls or an elegantly carved rack of lamb or a pizza you ordered from Domino's, people are just going to eat them. While I love whimsical presentation and artistic expression through food, honestly, I'd rather have a hundred of a mid-grade level effort item that tastes good and is pretty, than twenty of a hand-crafted, oh my God I spent all afternoon folding the dough for this, thing-that-is-eaten-and-gone-by-the-time-half-the-revelers-show-up. Running out of food, in my Southern-bred little heart and mind, is probably the most terror-striking thought I can have in the middle of running an event, and when it takes three hours to assemble the finely sliced olives on tiny snack crackers, well, FORGET IT.

OH. MY. GOD. GREEN. JELLO. Never, never does it cease to amaze me, the number of non-sweet, non-dessert gelatin based items that were made in the midcentury. Yes, it is scientifically possible to suspend radishes and cucumbers and all kinds of other crisp vegetables in gelatin...BUT WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO. I love their look and shudder to think what they must have tasted like. The one below has pears and grapes in it, but I'm still not completely convinced because it also has cream cheese and milk and VINEGAR in it, for goodness sake. Next.

Salads! Minus the anchovy fillets and egg, I could get behind this celebrated Caesar Salad. Check out the six-inch circumference of the flirty-eyed homemaker's checked dress. Yeeks!

"A salad to make you famous" is what every woman looks for in a cookbook, and I am no exception. Look at the girl and her ma eating a single serving jello mold. Elegance itself. I love their matching dresses and hairbows!

Oh look, they return together! Mother and daughter, and AMAZINGLY LARGE JAR OF MAYO. Look, if you're going to make sixties' salads, you're going to need a whoooooole lotta mayo. From what I understand on the Wikipedia history page, Kroger was one of the first grocery stores to try and do generic products-- where they can't hold a candle to Publix's generics (I am a generic connoisseur, haha), they've actually gotten pretty good with their Private Selection stuff.

More cute illustrations, more jello:

Fruit salads, green salads...we gotcher salads right here!

Frosted party sandwiches: never not weird. Never. And yet what could be more sixties'? I am torn:

"Man Bait Salad" (the secret's in the...stuffed olives? Canned shrimp? I couldn't tell you) is on tyhe same page as Mac Salmon Salad, which for some reason, I find hilarious. Also, it's cute that the homemaker is barbecuing a potato. You get it, girl!

Peanut-butter toastwiches involve the following ingredients (OH. MY. GOD.):

• Bread
• Butter
• Peanut Butter
• Dill Pickles
• Potato Chips

I thought this was a recipe, but then I realized that the pickles and chips are to be served alongside rather than in the sandwich (which would have made it the most pregnant-lady food request sounding sandwich ever). Still, do you really need both butter AND peanut butter? This is grandma-watching-the-kids-and-cooking-for-them at its finest/worst.

Last but not least AH! "Too tart! Ah...Just right!" might be my favorite illustration in the book:

Found any good vintage cookbooks lately? Tried any insane midcentury recipes? Which one of these cutest-girl-in-the-world illustrations is your favorite? Let us know!

That's all for today; see you kids tomorrow! :)

Dining Delights (1948, R.T. French Company)

 Good morning!

I'm late out of the gate with posting this morning! I thought today I would share a French's (you know, the mustard/onion rings/everything else in the baking aisle kings) recipe pamphlet from year of out Lord 1948. Post wartime rationing, back-in-the-swing-of-things Americans were ready to eat GOOD again, and you can tell from the deliciously decadent and devil-may-care-caloric-count of most of the recipes in this book.

First, take a look at the wide arrange of products French's made in that year. Hint: two of these things you DO NOT want to put in your pantry for possible inclusion in the recipes, but aw heck, put them in the group picture so they feel like they're part of the product family. Can you spot 'em?

The cookbook starts out with a greeting from "Carol French", the spokesperson for the R.T. French Company and alleged author of these recipes. Like Betty Crocker before her, however, Carol is a fictitious homemaker created to represent the thoughts and cooking concoctions of her company's test kitchen. Too bad! Look at the woman in the illustration's clear, probably blue eyes and widow's peak. She looks reliable and picturesque to boot. 

I have to use the word "men-folk" more often. It just reminds me of Jimmy Stewart in chaps for some reason. 

Below are some of the finished cooking projects and gee, don't they look a peach. The only puzzling entry to me is in the middle of the cheerful yellow plate at left. MASHED. POTATOES. SPREAD. ON. HALVED. FRANKFURTERS. This, truly, is innovation! Beside the stuffed broiled tomatoes (remember how I told you I'm impressed by hollowed-out anything?), you've got a hot dog, split in half, and then covered with mashed potatoes. While this dish probably tastes great and appeals to the "men-folk" of the introduction (I can hear Matthew licking his chops like a cartoon wolf as we speak), I don't think it's a very dainty main dish to be paired with the tomatoes, asparagus, and tulip apples (see the blue plate? A baked apple in a pie crust tulip sprinkled in cinammon....a DREAM!). But who am I to question Carol French?

At right, the kooky cute fish plate displays cod fish cakes (significantly better than its name twin, cod liver oil), carrots, and chocolate cake. I've been hankering to make a cake for no reason lately, so I might actually try the recipe in this one to see if French's is up to snuff with their culinary creations.

So many...creamy things. Do you ever notice in old cookbooks or in your parents/grandparents cooking, the living presence of cream sauces and gooey mayonnaise concoctions? I guess the advent of "Nutrition Facts" sounded the first peals of a death dirge for "creamy macaroni salad", but doggone it, this looks good to me. Not so much whatever is in those octoganal serving bowls, but the potato salad at right and the salmon and hardboiled egg salad at left are welcome at my table any time. That said, also look at how bulbous the burgers look! They remind me of cookouts where you'd get a burger about two inches thick in the middle and wafer thin at the outside edges...completely charred on the surface with a still breathing interior raw as life. French's! C'mon! You can do better than that!

I added the picture below on the sole virtue that I think those Coke bottles are wearing some kind of cozies. Does anyone have real world experience with glass bottle aprons? I want to become one of the people that does, at any rate-- they look like they're ready to flip the burgers from the previous photo! (as a Coke bottle pipes up from the table, in the general direction of the grill) CB: "How's it comin' there, pal?" Me: "Pretty good, Coke bottle, and thank you for asking." CB: "Need any help?" Me: "Nah, I'm flyin' this one solo...but I'll let you know if I need an assist." Magic. Beverage personification is just a tiny cloth apron away.

And last but not least, I think this is the prettiest spread in the whole book! Those ice tea classes with the classy little coasters beneath, those deep green coffee cups and saucers, the lillies just draped across the table...I am in! Who's even looking at the food when the set dressing is so gorgeous?

If you feel like trying out some of the recipes, here are some thumbnails of the files. Click any to see its full-size counterpart appear, suddenly, before your very eyes.

Which recipe do you think looks the most tempting? Had any good cookbook or cooking pamphlet finds lately? Do tell, do tell.

That's all for today; see you guys tomorrow!

Avocado, Avocado! (1956-1961)

Good morning!

From the same utility room pile that yielded yesterday's Hollywood Sewing Patterns post, I found a stack of sequential Pillsbury Bake-off Cookbooks-- which were cute because the woman who collected them carefully annotated each cover to reflect the year the Bake-off had taken place (Pillsbury had only thought to title each "First Annual", "Second Annual", "Third Annual", and so on) in looping black felt tip pen. The sixth annual (1956) book I opened at random, and out fluttered this leaflet on Calavo Avocados and their uses.

"How many ways do you serve this many-purpose fruit?" asked the cover. "Um...sometimes I buy them on sale and just eat slices as I go? Or, uhhh...on a sandwich? Sometimes?" was probably not the answer the 1954 Calavo Growers of California writers were looking for, so I skimmed through the recipes inside and started thinking about how I had no idea people used avocados in variant ways as far back as the fifties'. Avocado dip, of course, but as the avocado had never, never been part of my household grocery list growing up (I mean, not even guacamole), and as I had first eaten one on a sandwich as a thirteen year old on a visit to Provence Breads with my theater-people great-Uncle George, I figured the rest of the world shared my ignorance. I was wrong! Take a look:

Things I learned from Wikipedia and/or the California Avocado Commission's website:

• Avocado grow on trees, in orchards (I don't know why this seems so weird to me)
• In China, an avocado is known as what directly translates to an "alligator pear" or a "butter pear", owing to their scaly outerskin and rich fruit.
• In Brazil, they add avocados to ice cream (what?!); in the Phillipines, they puree avocados, sugar, and milk into a dessert drink (what?!!).
• An average avocado has a serving size of 1/5 the entire fruit (so-o-o-o, eating it whole is a bad thing. Dang it), with 50 calories per serving (35 of which is fat...no wonder it's called the butter pear).
• Avocado trees were first brought to America in 1871 by Santa Barbarian (haha) Judge R.B. Ord.

Most of the suggestions in this pamphlet are pretty tame...Calavo and Tomato, Calavo stuffed with a creamy meat salad of your choice (which sounds way worse now that I'm typing it than it did in my head...). I'm always interested with the party idea of filling one hollowed out thing with another. It seems the height of sophistication to my poor little peasant brain to see crab meat salad in a whole-tomato shell, or baked cinammon sweet potatoes and marshmellows inside an orange shell..."special" serving indeed!

Here's where the avocado should be truly welcomed in a culinary setting-- on a salad or a sandwich! BLT with A in the place of the T? Sign me up! I do wonder about the regional availability of avocados...while it said that they shipped twenty-three varieties out of California by the time this pamphlet would have come out, did they ship a lot to the Southeastern United States? My mom, a fifth generation Nashvillian, pointed out once that she hadn't eaten a whole artichoke until she was well into her twenties', and I don't know if that's because of the market or because of the unadventurous nature of her palate.

The next series of scans are from Ebony magazine in 1961, which featured a column called "Date with a Dish" (get it? Get it? Another word for a pretty girl is a dish, except this is an actual food dish? I crack up all over again). This installment highlight the avocado as a "native American exotic fruit" (um, not true, but we'll go on) and usable in a variety of dishes. Which the magazine goes on to show you.

OH MY GOD WHAT ABOMINATION IS THIS. WHAT. WHAT IS HAPPENING. WHY ARE THEY SPREADING MASHED AVOCADO ON HOT CORN. WHAT IS LIFE.

Have you ever heard of this before? I guess I shouldn't knock it before I try it, but I was honestly surprised to see what is essentially guacamole spread on AN EAR OF CORN. To the right, a slightly more palatable dish of fruit cocktail interspersed with avocados. Calm. Calm. Wash the night vision of the corn out of your eyes, Lisa...

I really like this accordion salad-- like the hollowed out food cups I mentioned earlier, it's another mark of sophistication to take pieces of things that don't match and arrange them with each other in a way that makes them of one whole-- at a party two weeks ago, I re-assembled a coffee cake ring into ring formation from several different flavored slices, resulting in this huge, round, accordion-varied MULTIFLAVOR ring. I was very impressed with myself. Again, the avocado and bacon looks delicious, but do you really want to add butter to the butter fruit?

 
The recipe on the left is just a recipe for barbecued steak, but then they add avocados as garnish, which I think is cheating in a list of "avocado" recipes. To the right, shrimp curry in avocado equals YES! YES! YES!

Do you remember the first avocado ya ever et? Am I just a hillbilly or did you yourself ever run into a situation where a strange, foreign food presented itself in a dish you were about to eat, and you either loved or hated it?

Hope you're in the process of having a great Tuesday; I'll see you tomorrow!

Kitchenology (1931)

Good morning! How was everybody's Monday?

I picked up this copy of Kitchenology with Principia Friends at a sale a week or two ago, blatantly disregarding the self-imposed embargo that has been placed on cookbooks in my house. Second only to etiquette/manners manuals, cookbooks are one of my top estate sale foibles. You show me handwritten recipes in the front, and if the price is right (usually under $2), I'm a sucker for a book full of mid-century or earlier foodstuffs. Plus look at this cover!

This copy of Kitchenology was literally falling apart at the seams, having been lashed back together with Scotch tape at a time sufficiently long ago for the adhesive to have all but disintegrated-- some of these scans are not my best work, but I was concerned about the daddurn thing falling to pieces before I could give you a chance to get a look at it! To say the least, it was well loved, and there are plenty of written-in and stuck in on notecards recipes. On the title page and its facing page alone, we have recipes for such diverse course offerings as "Julie Child's [sic] Crepes Batter", "My Divinity", "Teriyaki Sauce", and "Pumpkin Bread". Warning: do not try these together. 

Click on any of the images for a full-size version:

This book is a total cutie for the reminds me of Carole Lombard movie title cards...urbane, cosmopolitan, and still somehow adorable. "Principia Friends" refers to the Principia Mothers' Club, who organized and published the cookbook to raise funds for the Principia School. What's the Principia School, you ask? A school for Christian Scientists in Missouri (and later Illinois, and then back in Missouri, in the same town Matthew's Memaw lived for thirty years! How crazy!). You can read all about their school's history (since 1898!) here. I don't know much about Christian Scientists, but they turn out p-r-e-t-t-y cute cookbook.

Here, the owner has added "Famous White Pound Cake", "Blue Cheese Buttermilk Salad Dressing", "Swedish Pecans", "Pralines", and "1 2 3 4 Cake Polly Ring". Not sure what the last one is, but it sounds good! I like the emphatic underlining on the pecans recipe. ONE STICK OF BUTTER! No more, no less!

Pound cake, bran muffins, and more pecan recipes. This lady must've had a pecan tree?

Jeannette Mann's Apple Cake recipe shares a page with Canapes and Cocktails. I MISS BOTH CANAPES AND COCKTAILS. It seems like it's well nigh impossible to reintroduce these to modern Americans without the goofiness factor of our declassé twenty-first century factoring into it and, as it so often does, ruins the whole blamed thing. I would LOVE to throw a party where everyone hangs at the edges of sofas, eating aspic and sipping strong vermouth, in slinky bias cut gowns and dinner attire, but you know someone would show up wacky shorts and a cardboard top hat, and I would be so disillusioned with the whole process as to give up on it entirely. Why won't people in our generation "play the game"?

One of the interesting aspects of the cookbook is the contribution of several recipes by Mrs. Tatsuo Takaki and  Mrs. Miyo Matsukata of Tokyo, Japan. On this above page, you can see their recipes for "Tamago-Toji" (a Japanese soup) and Tamago Tofu, respectively . While the book seems to be pretty much a basic cookbook, there are a few exotic recipes from authentic sources (including curry, later in the chapter)-- imagine how exotic Japanese food would seem to the average midwesterner in 1931! There's also a (crookedly scanned, my bad) section on meat substitutes. Was Christian Science popular in Japan? Is there something about being a Christian Scientist that might encourage meat substitution (though there are meat recipes in the book) or are they just particularly foward thinking with regard to vegetarianism? I don't know! You decide.

More adorable illustrations. Each chapter is begun with a quote in verse, and the one for entrees reads:

After the fish, before the fowl, 
One has respite in a way
When he may pause and catch his breath
And dally with the suave entree.


Well! You didn't know they were poets as well as cooks, did you? Kitchenologists, excuse me...I meant kitchenologists. Aren't the entries here so-o-o-o 1930's? "Macaroni and roundsteak"  and "chicken loaf" especially. I'm glad there's no calorie count! When contributors give their own names, rather than their married names with their husband's name listed, I can gawk at names like "Nellie Lou Broom" and "Verna Holmquist" and do I love to gawk at old names. Can Nellie Lou Broom be my stage name?

Some recipes for sandwiches. I really think these are an underutilized party food option. The book that changed my culinary life, Square Meals by Jane and Michael Stern, taught me how to make these mango chutney and cheese sandwiches, and another that was raisins and jam and something else, that were the star attraction of a party I had shortly there after. Do you know how cheap bread is compared to 90% of ingredients you would throw together for a menu? Also, cut into little stars and hearts with crusts discarded, they look so hi-tone. If you're planning a bash soon, consider sandwiches! How Wallis Simpson would dainty watercress and cucumber sandwiches be? Thought so!

Last but not least, the front and back inside covers are decorated with this, a literal interpretation of the title, in which our dainty, Mary Astor-looking homemaker consults her telescope to a constellation of cookery! Look at the little baby chef in the big dipper. I'm in love all over again.

Do you have any dogeared or heirloom cookbooks, yours or ones you've picked up, at home? Do you have any particular vintage recipes you wish people would bring back in fashion? All you at-home chefs out there, chime in! :)

See you tomorrow!

Sealtest Ice Cream (late 1950's)

Good morning!

I was doing my routine run through mid century Life magazines, a particularly cute one with by beloved Kim Novak on the cover, when these OH MY GOODNESS adorable little guys caught my eye in an ad for Sealtest Ice Cream. We got 'cher mountain-like blob of sherbet, check! We got your pink and lime green color scheme, check! And best of all, little fifities' bunnies gallivanting arround the scene exhorting us to "Dig this crazy mixed up ice cream!" Yeah, man! YEAH! Let's take a look:



Hi, bunnies! What's that? You want me to eat raspberry/vanilla/orange-pineapple ice cream? How did you know that was my heart's fondest wish? Ice cream for breakfast? If it was good enough for Mabel Normand, it's good enough for me! I had dry toast and coffee and man am I regretting my decision. Bab, let's stock the freezer with these bad boys! The Polynesian exoticism of the flavor combination sold me even before Bunny #2 yelled "It's the greatest!" and Bunny #3 added, "Man, it's real cool!"

I can't lie, I was even more excited when I realized the bunnies seeam to be made of strawberry-flavored cake mix. Or possibly strawberry-flavored cookie dough mix? I hope such a thing exists, because I just got R-E-A-L-L-Y hungry for some. "Here it is again!" says the rabbit, and I'm reading a little resignedness into the heel-clicking he's doing.

Sealtest Ice Cream's company history was surprisingly hard to look up. From what I understand, it was owned by National Dairy Products Corporation (which later became KRAFT Foods), and it was delicious. And people miss it! Unilever (who also owns Breyers') bought the rights to the company in 1993, but based on the number of Google results that include the words "demolished in" and "does anyone remember", I don't think it survived into the millennium. What a shame...seeing as I am all kinds of Sealtest ice-cream craving right now.

Like a lot of novelty fifties' food advertisements, I was interested to see how many weird (and wonderful) flavor combinations there were at one time. Vanilla fudge royale, butter almond, cherry vanilla...check out this graphic for "sunkissed peach"!

"MWWWWWWAH!"

In spite of the sun-on-peach lip lock, I love that most of the ads in the fifties' are bright, colorful bids at grabbing children's attention. Because, really, as much as we love ice cream as adults, do you remember what it was like to love ice cream as kid? Before you quite understood what calories were? Here are some buttons from a 1956 Sealtest-sponsored TV show "Big Top" advertisement. The copy invites you to head for the Sealtest "Cone-vention" at the Sealtest fountain. So I think there were soda fountains that were exclusively Sealtest-stocked? There was one at Disney World in the sixties', but that's as far as I could get with that one, too. My Google research skills are really failing me today.

Which one do you want? I'll take the seal and the chimpanzee.

In 1957, Sealtest held a contest in which one lucky winner would end up with a year's supply of ice cream (can you even imagine!) for re-naming the accurately yet awkwardly named "Banana-Strawberry" combination. I'm not a fan of banana practically at all (except maybe in oatmeal or by itself), but I was intrigued by their little mascot at the bottom left hand corner:

Banana Strawberry man! You remind me so much of Art Clokey's style. I love you. I hope they found a name for you, because I sure couldn't find the results of the contest online. Folks, I am batting zero.

 

"Gay 90's Toffee Fudge" is another already-combined-ice-cream-combination I wish was still around. See the beautiful milk glass dishes these revelled little ice cream concoctions are being served in. How am I even going to make it to lunch looking at all this goodness? I love the pink gingham of the box and the little 1890's soda shop men. Why wouldn't I?

I just want a huge print of this hanging over my sofa:

I like the idea of a "try-pack" in which you could give each of these ice cream flavors a shot without committing to a full carton. Not a huge fan of orange, but maybe with the pineapple? And raspberry, a thousand times raspberry! My grandaddy used to call Neapolitan ice cream "Napoleon" ice cream or, even better, would holler out the door before my grandma and I departed for Kroger's "HAZEL! GET ME SOMMA THAT THREE-WAY ICE CREAM!" I wish I'd written down half of what he used to say, he really had the most endearingly insane way of talking. I miss hearin' him.

 

Last but not least, the craziest thing I've ever heard of:

"Plum Nuts" is the flavor here. You take plums, you add nuts, and you get this completely ill-advised ice cream flavor. Has anyone ever had something like this? Because if I'm wrong, I'm wrong...but somehow I doubt it. I applaud the adorable wire figure man with almonds for eyes and plum nose, but I just can't get behind this aberration of wholesome taste.

Had any good ice cream lately? Do YOU remember Sealtest brand? Is it still around? Wanna go get some? :)

I've got to go find somewhere in the downtown area that serves ice cream ((hangs head guiltily)) . I'll see you tomorrow!