Oh me, oh my: LOVE Aunt Jenny's Pie! (and it's made with SPRY!)

 

I just don't know what to say about all of this. I was compelled to post these incredible Norman Rockwell-esque images after seeing them on a Facebook page which features a new vintage recipe book every week. This one was a humdinger, folks! But after about the twentieth image, I get a little sick of looking at "Aunt Jenny" and her eternal bushy-tailed grin and her "bakin' and broilin'" - as if she can't get her brain around an "ing" ending to save her bustling, ever-useful life. This is a character which has been invented, built from the ground up by some Madison Avenue team not unlike the Mad Men crew, with guys in suits sitting around a boardroom table sipping bourbon, smoking Luckies and loudly arguing over who the characters should be in this little domestic drama. "Maybe the husband should be, oh, let's see - Ralph?" "No! Calvin, like Calvin Coolidge." The distant echo of Calvinism and all its prudery is likely not a coincidence. This is Middle America, folks, in the middle of the 20th century. These are good, decent, God-fearin' people, and let's not forget it.

Calvin is such a wag, asking his wife "c'n I lick the spoon?" when she makes her Spry frosting for her Spry cake, praising her chicken (fried in Spry) and her strawberry shortcake (made with Spry) with a rapturous, slightly stoned expression glued on his face, and generally acting just like those menfolk always act, all thumbs in the kitchen, just helpless and needing to be constantly tended to and fed. 

And let's not forget Aunt Jenny's role as matriarch of the community (I left out an INTOLERABLE image of her sewing circle chattering away about frying things in SPRY), "starting brides off right", which means breaking them in to a life of servitude over a hot stove for the next forty years. No wonder young women were so keen to get married.

Then there's Grandpa Briggs up at the Old Soldiers Home ("Old soldiers never die", remember? They just go to live up at the Home) who'll eat any kind of pie so long's it's "aye-pull" (which is the way you KNOW this fictional Aunt Anybody character would pronounce it). And as Aunt Jenny keeps  hammering on about, foods cooked the SPRY way are DIGESTIBLE - in fact, that seems to be one of its main virtues, so that even children and old people can somehow ingest it without becoming violently ill. 

But the really weird thing is this. If you take a good look at the folksy, g-dropping, ever-grinning Jenny, she doesn't really look grandmotherly at all. She's an actress who is probably in her thirties and made up to look "old", which translates to a grey wig, a print housedress and glasses (which in those days automatically spelled "biddy"). This is character-invention in the nature of Irene Ryan as "Granny" on the Beverley Hillbillies, who was maybe 45 when she played the role, and even the Italian Mama on Golden Girls - whatever her name was, I don't want to look it up - who was actually a couple of years younger than that dinosaur Bea Arthur and all the rest of them. (The same Bea Arthur who got pregnant and had an abortion on Maude when she was pushing SIXTY.) And oh yes, the same deal as on Mama's Family, in which Vicki Lawrence played Mama even though she was 15 years younger than Carol Burnett. 

So we have this little well-greased domestic universe (and don't ask how Jenny and Calvin survived their wedding night with so little sexual experience - perhaps that tin of Spry next to their bed tells the whole story). We have the daughter Sylvia, who never really makes an appearance here (I left some of these out, though even at that, they seem to go on and on and ON until you want to smash Calvin in the face with one of those famous "paaahhhhs"), and even two "bachelors" (gay men had to call themselves that in the "good old days"), Ebenezer Todd and Hank Parsons, who frequently hang out together "down by the depot" but never seem to get a decent meal there. Aunt Jenny seems to have adopted these two social strays as a sort of missionary work.

 

And even though this whole thing smacks of a rural setting, it's odd how formally-dressed everyone is, particularly the men. They're wearing white shirts, ties, even suits when they sit at the table, so it's unclear to me what the exact social stratum is in this scenario. These aren't farmers, they aren't blue collar working stiffs, in fact, I have no idea WHAT they do except sit in the kitchen and eat with a fatuous look of joy on their faces.

This whole thing was cooked up, baked up, dreamed up, by Madison Avenue to further the cozy domestic dreams of housewives in the '40s and '50s, to present an ideal setting with a good plain country cook who speaks no nonsense and always welcomes you into her comforting circle. But there was no Aunt Jenny, no Calvin, not even a Grandpa Briggs up at the home or those two poor old sods down by the depot. She didn't actually exist except as a 30-year-old supply model who did glamourless magazine spreads for a living and sold buckets of grease with a promise of domestic Paradise, in which no one fights, no one fucks (well, not much), and everything is soaked in bubbling rivers of SPRY.