Most Godawful Cookbook of All Time?

 

I apologize in advance for the quality of the mages in this post - but this was the only form I could find these horrendous recipes in (lifted from a Facebook page which features Godawful cookbooks from the past 100 years or so).

This is the kind of thing women were told to do in the 1950s, and - as we too often forget - well into the '60s. To "keep your man" (i. e. not allow him to stray sexually), you had to satisfy "that other appetite" - an idea as old as Betty Crocker herself. Just the assumption that you "caught" him in the first place is insulting - implying trickery, false pregnancies, and all sorts of promises that are never kept. Treachery.

This freaking thing came out only FIVE YEARS BEFORE I GOT MARRIED. I have nothing to add to that.

"It might be food" (part 486)

 

Indeed it might, but probably not. 

Why food needed to be encased in brownish jelly made from boiled-down hoofs and hides, we will never know. Nor will we know if people actually ate such things. Perhaps it was a way to hide rancid leftovers in a festive casing that disguised the fact these were actually WAR RATIONS merely designed to keep you alive.

Anyway! As Blogger changes over into something I cannot even recognize, and as I struggle to master a system which is in no way an improvement over the old one which I've happily used for ten years, I hereby present the actual recipes that match up to. . . well, none of these pictures actually. But they're so lyrically awful that they form a kind of bizarre poetry. Or I think they do. I don't know, tonight I feel as if maybe I DO have COVID after all and will soon die. If so, so long, it's been good to know you. And so long, Blogger, the way I knew you in those precious times of the ancient technological past.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Convenience Fish

Campsite Quickie

You must keep in mind, as these pathetic high-school-cafeteria delights pass before your eyes, that this represents their best possible presentation. They'd never look anywhere near this good if you made them yourself. The fact people thought they WERE good - these recycled war rations, most made of glistening processed meat that looked as if it slid out of an Alpo can - only adds to the sense of incredulity. I mean - Green Bean Bunwiches? Chipped Beef in Popovers? Frank-Bean Bake? Hot-in-a-Bun for 48? End of the Trail? Who thought up these names - some dyspeptic ad executive in a boardroom, a la Mad Men? 

I just keep finding these, there seems to be no end to them. Hundreds. Thousands. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to trying out these recipes, actually cooking them and attempting to eat them. Army chow, to be bolted without thinking about it very much. Mess hall fare. Grub. Cooking wasn't a devotion or a pleasure back then so much as a utilitarian process, a necessity to be gotten over with, then the results quickly swallowed, tolerated like a dental appointment or bad sex.  

It might be food (but probably not)

And here is the latest edition of "it might be food". You have probably noticed (or not!) that one of my recurrent obsessions is "bad old food": specifically, horrendous recipes from the post-War era that people must actually have prepared and eaten. In some cases, it's almost understandable: food rationing was a reality, giving rise to such monstrosities as "apple pie" made entirely of Ritz crackers, and "mock duck" (cheap chuck beef pounded thin and wrapped around bread stuffing, tied with string, and baked.) Real meat was almost nonexistent, except for the canned/processed variety made of lips and ears and other floor-sweepings. 

Gelatinous things abound. Molds seem to be an obsession. My mother had an entire set of copper jelly molds hanging on her kitchen wall. I confess to you right now: I have a jelly mold (they're never called Jell-o molds, though that's all you do with them). It's shaped like a strawberry and it's hanging on my kitchen wall. I just thought I should have one to have a proper kitchen. I sent away for it, I remember, to the Jell-o Corporation, sending boxtops or whatever, and two dollars. I also have a very nice recipe box made of blonde wood, which I also sent away for, God-knows-how-many years ago. It has an image of a giant cartoon Chip-it burned into the front, causing me to cover it with stickers which I have to replace every few years because they peel off. These days I use those nice free ones from the Humane Society.

I wonder if this sending-away stuff hearkens back to my childhood, when I had to send so many box tops to Battle Creek, Michigan, to receive my swell plastic submarine (operated with baking soda to make it go up and down) from the Kellogg Corporation.

Old things stick, they stick around. Or they did. I don't know if they do now or not. I'm too old to know what younger people do. We look back at these recipes, and - ugh, they seem horrendous, but I did eat similar things back then: creamed chipped beef on toast; fried bread; pork hocks (jellied pigs' trotters); and Jell-o molds of all kinds, usually with cottage cheese heaped in the middle (which no one ate) and pointless sprigs of parsley that were always thrown away. 

There IS a good Jell-o mold called Sunshine Salad, not very sweet, but you have to like pineapple and grated carrot, which I do. The gelatine is tart and contains nuts.

My gif slideshow maker, which has been working overtime lately, doesn't like these recipe things because they are all different shapes and sizes. So long as the ratio is the same (i. e. if they're all 8 x 10 or 4 x 6), it's cool. These were wildly different, so I had to put up with white borders, but the hell with it, it's Friday and who has the time or the inclination to try to get everything to be the same ratio? I've done a couple of these presentations - cuz I like doing them - and in this case, I really tried to pick recipes I haven't included before. That isn't too difficult, because the list seems to be endless.

By the bye-bye, if you like this sort of thing, you'll probably love the YouTube channel below, which is entirely dedicated to testing (and eating, or trying to eat) vintage recipes. I just discovered it in the last two minutes and plan to explore it further.

https://www.youtube.com/user/GlamorousHousewife

It might be food: Director's Cut

It might be food: Weight Watchers recipe cards, 1974

How to Make St. Patrick's Day Lucky Charms Cheesecakes!

On the other hand. . . don't.

How Jell-o saved the free world

How great it is to live in the age of the internet, so that you no longer have to go out and buy books of vintage recipe ads. They just keep popping up on Facebook, unbidden. An astounding number of them feature Jell-o. This Lime Cheese Salad has some sort of indescribable brown stuff inside the mold. Most of these recipes call for at least one cup of mayonnaise.

This thing just frightens me. It's a huge bell of sorts, full of "stuff" like a strange quivering aquarium. You'd never get it to stay up. And how would you ever serve it? Stick a spoon in this, and it'd explode.

There are no details of the ingredients here, so we must use our imaginations. Macerated ham, perhaps? Some sort of bread with the crusts cut off, or (shudder) cake? A layer of Cheez Whiz to form a sort of glue? I do love the clever touch of the olive in the centre, a sort of cyclops effect.

Combining the two deadliest foods in the world in one dish has a certain mad genius about it. That way you can get it all over with at once. 

The candle on the right is really a banana. Perhaps it also vibrates.

This astonishing scene features a sort of igloo jammed to the rafters with a solid brown material. It is topped by a thick layer of what looks like molten Velveeta. No Inuit or any other human being could ever live there. In the background there appears to be yet another jell-o mold, making one wonder if anyone ever ate a meal back then without one. There is a blob of white stuff (mayonnaise?) on top of it.  The red dessert material appears to be more Jell-o.

No, no! I mean it, sincerely - this was considered food! This appeared in recipe books and in advertisements for products, which means housewives must have actually prepared it! Green nauseating slop with pink nauseating slop in the middle, plus a lemon curl.

YES - I want to be happy when company comes. So bring on the Hellman's! Bring on a rectangular brick of overprocessed meat with a cubic green filling of unknown origin!

My feeling is that this is post-war stuff and people still had a rationing mentality. My own mother frequently served creamed chipped beef on toast, the chipped beef coming in a JAR and having the consistency of thin, stretchy leather. She did frequently make jell-o molds, though not monstrosities like these. Creamed salmon. Fried bread n' gravy. Corned beef and boiled cabbage. These were the foods I was raised on. They had a sort of primitive glory to them.

This makes me shudder, because it is an ad for beef suet. I thought beef suet was the stuff my mother asked for at the butcher shop, which she was given for free because she was such a good customer, and which she threw out on the snow for the birds to eat to get through the winter. It was white, crumbly, hard as rock, and unfit for human consumption. "Atora" is called The Good Beef Suet. I can't imagine what The Bad Beef Suet would be like.

You know that crazy guy who did the paintings of cats, the ones with the staring eyes and bristling fur?  I think I've said enough.

This was once, apparently, a salmon, but it suffered a bad fate, its gob crammed with parsley, an olive for an eye (and olives seemed to be one of the four food groups back then), surrounded by masses of brussels sprouts (another food I gagged on). There are brown 'n serve rolls back there, and on either side, two boatlike structures full of - oh God, I can't go on any more.

And yet, I could not resist doing a blow-up (or is that throw-up?) of this rectangular-meat thingie to try to figure out what it is. Let's see if the other half of it is legible. . .

Transcription: SUPPER FOR SIX

Cream of Tomato Soup     

Celery     

Crackers     

SUPER SALAD LOAF    

Corn Sticks      

Nucoa        

Fresh Pineapple Mint Cup       

Ginger Cookies       

Coffee

Recipe: SUPER SALAD LOAF

Scoop out center of a 1 1/2 pound piece of bologna, leaving a shell. Soak 1 tbsp. plain gelatin in 2 tbsp. cold water and dissolve over hot water. Mix 1 1/4 cups cooked mashed peas with 1 tbsp. Real Mayonnaise, 2 tsp. minced onion, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. pepper. Add dissolved gelatine and pack into bologna shell. Chill thoroughly. Place on platter on salad greens. Heap with Real Mayonnaise. Garnish with radish roses, parsley and onion rings, as illustrated. *NOTE: Use left-over bologna in sandwich fillings for next day's lunches.

But hist! What's this I see at the bottom, in that little white box?

Grow More in '44 FOOD (with an odd little symbol that looks like a hand carrying a wicker basket.) It also says, I think, "fights" and something else. A reference to war rationing, undoubtedly. It may pertain to maintaining a victory garden to help the cause.

And part of the blurb about Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise reads:

Real Nutrition! This Real Mayonnaise is rich in food energy. . . provides almost exactly the same amount, spoonful for spoonful, as vitaminized margarine, or butter. Good for many of the same uses, too - to help you keep wartime rationed menus up to your own proud "taste good" standard.

So now I get it. There's a war on, we can't manage much more than a rectangle of bologna for supper, so let's hollow out the middle and fill it with gelatinized mashed peas to dress it up, then call it a "salad". Not only that: bologna and mashed peas was a special "company's coming" dinner, not just an everyday meal.  It seems sad to us, but it's what they had to do.

As for the actual product, the mayonnaise, all that emphasis on "real" must reflect the abundance of fake products, such as off-grade margarine and lard disguised as butter, and anxiety about the family not getting enough calories and nutrition to grow and thrive. Kids in wartime Britain often grew up runty and unhealthy, and never did achieve a normal stature.

Sad, but they did get through, didn't they?

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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Amazon.com

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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