T he worst recipe I think I’ve ever seen fell out at me from a drawer one day as I cleaned out my late mother-in-law’s kitchen in Los Angeles.
It came from a 1950s cocktail-party manual, and showed how to make a fake pineapple out of a mound of processed cheese spread covered with pimento-stuffed green olive slices, with pickle spears sprouting from the top.
This, it turned out, was but the tip of a glorious iceberg, as further investigation revealed cookbooks and recipes dating back to the 1890s.
Generations of women in my mother-in-law’s family had clung to every pamphlet that crossed their countertop, from the 10-cent “Lytona Baking Powder Cook Book,” compiled by “Well-Known Teachers of Cookery for Rumford Chemical Works,” to “Vegex and the American Housewife,” with recipes featuring “the first food made from microscopic plants.”
Holding the crumbling brown pages in my hands, I was able to trace the history of the United States from a seat at our national dinner table. The recipes ran the gamut from the lavish inaugural luncheon of President Grover Cleveland, to the frugal meals of the Depression, and the fussy ’50s, with their molded, processed foods.
As expected, the informal archive revealed that what we have chosen to eat across the decades has changed with the prevailing social mores and the state of the economy. At the same time, the recipes revealed some timeless passions that define us as American.
Diet and health are threaded throughout the collection, in titles featuring the words “vitality,” “energy” and the ever-popular but ill-defined “wholesome.” And there is an undeniable and enduring preoccupation with constipation.
The underlying, and unacknowledged, cause of this nationwide blight can be found in the recipes, in which fresh vegetables put in only a late appearance after a centurylong romance with sugar and starch.
The suggested remedy varied with the era – from the “cathartics” recommended in 1887 to the 1937 promotion of bran (or as we’d call it today, ‘fiber’) as the secret to a perfect complexion and quick weight loss.
Bread, now spurned as a dreaded “carb,” was hailed during the 1930s as “Our Outstanding Energy Food” and promoted in booklets featuring letters by movie stars addressed to Betty Crocker.
“Dear Betty,” Claudette Colbert wrote while promoting her role in Cecil B. DeMille’s “Cleopatra”:
“You can’t imagine the strain of film work. Without plenty of vitality, a person simply can’t make a go of it.” Bread was her salvation, the svelte actress confessed: “I eat it three times a day.”
Purity was big during the 1920s, when Maude Marie Costello, “One of America’s Foremost Authorities on Scientific Cooking and Pure Foods,” hawked recipes that featured Calumet Baking Powder (“pure and wholesome in every particular, and further, nothing injurious is left in the food”).
Creativity supplanted purity as a selling point during the next decade. In 1936, a local utility offered housewives the opportunity to “Be an Artist at the Gas Range” with a free cookbook of “Successful Recipes by the Mystery Chef.”
Artistry was still in vogue in 1949, the archive revealed, as fresh produce made its first appearance in my mother-in-law’s collection via a clipping from “The Spartan News.”
The feature appears in the tabloid-size newspaper directly under a photograph of actresses in a Hollywood unemployment line captioned “Cinema Cuties Collect Compensation.” It’s titled “Be a Salad-Artist” and advises home cooks that “Your salad plate is your ‘canvas,’ the lettuce or other salad green is your picture ‘frame’ and your ‘palette’ is the whole range of lovely colors to be found in our salad ingredients.”
Of all my discoveries, however, by far the most valuable was a crumbling copy of “The White House Cook Book,” originally published in 1887. Several versions remain in print today, and no wonder.
Who could resist a recipe for “Snow Birds” (white doves) that advises the reader to take “One dozen thoroughly cleaned birds; stuff each with an oyster (and) put them into a yellow dish”?
And where else can you learn that squirrels “are cooked similar to rabbits,” as well as gophers and chipmunks?
The book, co-authored by a Mrs. F.L. Gillette and a White House steward claiming prior employment by “Prince Napoleon” of France, intersperses homey recipes with state dinner menus and helpful hints such as how to remove fingerprints from black silk.
An entire chapter is devoted to “Health-Suggestions.” The last entry, “Medicinal Foods,” instructs that “spinach has a direct effect upon complaints of the kidneys, asparagus purifies the blood, tomatoes act upon the liver and celery acts admirably upon the entire nervous system.”
The first entry, “How Colds Are Caught” asserts that, “Let a man go home, tired or exhausted, eat a full supper of starchy and vegetable food, occupy his mind intently for a while, go to bed in a warm, close room, and if he doesn’t have a cold in the morning it will be a wonder.”
Happily, relief is just a swallow away, the authors say, as “A drink of whisky or a glass or two of beer before supper will facilitate matters very much.”
And should the patient prefer spirits of a gentler nature, “The White House Cook Book” includes recipes for making raisin wine, blackberry cordial, cherry bounce or Florida orange wine.
The National Live Stock and Meat Board published this recipe in 1928 as part of its suggestions for “Balanced Menus in Table Form.”
1flank steak
1teaspoon salt
1/8teaspoon pepper
1/8teaspoon ginger
3tablespoons fat drippings
1cup bread crumbs
1tablespoon grated onion
1teaspoon chopped parsley
1slice boiled ham, chopped
1pint boiling water
Wipe flank steak and season with salt, pepper and ginger. Heat fat in frying pan, add bread crumbs and the rest of the ingredients, and spread evenly over the steak. Roll and sew the edges together with coarse thread. Place the “duck” in heavy kettle or frying pan with a little fat. Sprinkle well with flour, let brown, add 1 pint boiling water, cover closely and let simmer about 2 hours, or until tender.
Remove strings and serve.
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