the good old days

For snarky humor aimed at the clumsy advertising of yesteryear, Kitchen Retro is always good for a laugh.

What 1936 Betty Crocker advised us: Men are incompetent housekeepers who transition from mooching off their mother to mooching off their wife, and of course are never satisfied with the cooking of the wife.

Which, if you think about it, means that cooking skills are quantitatively getting worse with every generation. In another few centuries, we’ll all be putting dirt on plates and sobbing apologies for not being able to get the worms “just like mother used to make”.

Maybe I should stop thinking about it.

Anyway, the biscuit-loving husband picture is a riot. Can’t say it much better than Lidian did…

Check him out, holding up the Bisquick biscuit and grinning. Getting to be a swell cook? Getting to be? How many goddamn batches of biscuits does a person have to make and shove down his throat before he coughs up an unadulterated compliment!

Gee, isn’t that swell?

I totally want to throw a groaning party if I ever have another child. (It’s a million times more cool than eating a placenta, which is, um, really disgusting and weird. Not even the new-ageiest of my birth class buddies was able to go through with that.)

…the visitors and attendants might also be offered groaning cake, groaning pie, groaning bread or groaning cheese, depending on local tradition. In some areas a groaning cake would be offered to the groaning woman (as if she would be interested!)…. Another variation of tradition was that when the woman was going to be ‘churched’ after the birth (to be ceremonially ‘cleansed’ and welcomed back to the flock) she carried a piece of the groaning cake to give to the first person that she met along the way.

I’m not actually going to throw this party while I’m in labor, of course. Not only is that probably a breach of etiquette, but really, the last thing on my mind would be “has everybody had enough cake”? But it’d be great fun to be thrown one, perhaps a few days after the kid arrives. Better than a baby shower in which you’re given goofy, cute, useless chachkes — instead you get cake/pie/cheese and all the women can complain about childbirth!

And writing that, I realize that female bonding can be incredibly weird…

Thanks to The Old Foodie for the inspiration

Grandma knew how to be thrifty. She used everything. None of this modern wasteful throwing away of, for example, calf’s heads.

Calf’s Head Surprised

And the dish set before them,–O dish well devised!–
Was what Old Mother Glasse calls “a calf’s head surprised.”
—MOORE.

Instructions: Clean and blanch a calf’s head, boil it till the bones will come out easily, then bone and press it between two dishes, so as to give it a headlong form; beat it with the yolks of four eggs, a little melted butter, pepper and salt. Divide the head when cold, and brush it all over with the beaten eggs, and strew over it grated bread, which is put over one half; a good quantity of finely minced parsley should be mixed; place the head upon a dish, and bake it of a nice brown color. Serve it with a sauce of parsley and butter, and with one of good gravy, mixed with the brains, which have been previously boiled, chopped, and seasoned with a little cayenne and salt.

Of course, this is from an 1864 cookbook, so it isn’t really grandma, it’s great-great-great-grandma. And she was probably chided by great-great-great-great-grandma for wasting the skullbones. You can make … uh … calf bone stew with that.

Of course, I’m sure you’re all wondering how the hell you’d carve a calf’s head, right?

Commence by making long slices from end to end of the cheek, cutting quite through… With each of these slices serve a cut of what is called the throat sweet-bread, which lies at the fleshy part of the neck end…. A little of the tongue is usually placed on each plate, and about a spoonful of the brains…. Many persons consider the palate a dainty, and it should always be offered at table to the guests or members of the family.

In the 1930’s…

Skippy Peanut Butter
Improved by HYDROGENATION

Hydrogenation? What’s that? Sounds scientifickal!

Since partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are cheaper than animal source fats, are available in a wide range of consistencies, and have other desirable characteristics (e.g., increased oxidative stability (longer shelf life))…

Improved by making it cheaper, smoother, and longer-lasting, I guess, but also full of tasty trans fats.

Originally seen at Serious Eats

Uh, ok, so there isn’t really that much of an age-old problem of fake food. However, in 1934, Van Olkon and Arthur Cohler (two names you’ll probably never hear again) solved the problem of melty fake food.

In typically over-the-top Modern Mechanix literary style, the article waxes (ha ha!) poetic about the delectable treats that can be made with this process…

Green peppers filled with gleaming macaroni, and topped with rich yellow cheese, turkeys roasted and fairly dripping with delicious gravies, and even chocolate candy are duplicated in wax with a naturalness that is unbelievable.

The chocolate candy would be the easiest of those foods to make.

But anyway, the process of simply casting a turkey (or whatever food) in wax to make it look realistic is cheating. It’s like if Michaelangelo had covered a guy named David in plaster and used that as a mold for the statue, instead of sculpting from marble. Quite realistic, but not particularly impressive — especially since David would have probably had a rather horrified expression on his face while being smothered in plaster.

I suppose you don’t care much about artistry when you want durable fake food for your display window, though.

I really like “friendship bread.” I think it’s delicious. My mother had a starter of this when I was growing up, and we ate it for years. After a while, we got a bit tired of it (and got more busy, as my brother and I went through adolescence), and gave up. Now, fifteen years later, I got a chance to get another starter. Great, I thought, I can have this again! Fits in well with my fairly-new tendency to make things from scratch, and it means I’ll have a delicious cakey bread every ten days but not too often.

I was a bit surprised to see the starter offered as “Amish friendship bread” — when we had our batch, it wasn’t called Amish. I have no clue how that mythology started, since one ingredient for the bread itself is a box of instant pudding (how very non-modern). And I was infuriated to read this at the end of the instruction page…

If you lose your starter you will have to get another one from a friend! ONLY THE AMISH know the SECRET INGREDIENT to making a new starter, so keep yours going!

That is pathetic. It’s intuitively obvious what the SECRET INGREDIENT is — something that replicates itself ad nauseum, since otherwise it would be diluted out of the solution. So, the SECRET INGREDIENT is alive. So, it is good ol’ yeast. (Duh, right?) I was amused for a while by the possibility that perhaps this was homeopathic Amish friendship bread, and the SECRET INGREDIENT was somehow made more powerful by dilution…

How sad is it that baking has become a mysterious art? I have a lot of respect for the Amish and Mennonite ability to cope, even thrive, without most modern technologies. But they aren’t keepers of some secret magic. Two generations ago, every woman knew how to bake; today, it’s all about pre-mixed tricks. Yeast was once as normal an ingredient as flour, but today it’s become a mysterious unknown additive.

There is, of course, the distinct possibility that I am taking this much too seriously. Wikipedia, that most credulous of online sources, disputes the Amish mythology behind friendship bread. My Sister’s Kitchen blog has a great post about “AFB” which debunks the myths (such as “NO METAL!”) and, in the comments, has a long list of variations (chocolate, ZOMG!), suggestions, and tricks.

My mother always chided us to practice our manners, even at home, because “Some day you might be invited to the White House, and you wouldn’t want to have bad table manners there!” While this may depend somewhat on whether you’re a particular fan of the President who invites you, it’s a valid enough point — we practice good table manners so we don’t look like uncivilized, disgusting pigs when we’re dining with other people. So far, the most I have been able to apply this to is business dinners, as it is a bad career move to eat like a slob (especially if you’re a working woman, your manners must be impeccable). I expect that the White House is rather far off in the future.

For today’s Etiquette Instruction, we return to the classroom film format which I love so well. Emily Post herself narrated this 1947 mental hygiene film called Table Manners.

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Manners for the most formal dinner party are exactly the same as they are at home!

Translation: Emily Post is very formal at home.

This is a surprisingly high-level discussion of table manners, showing adults instead of children as its subject. I suspect the target audience was not in a classroom, even a high school one, but rather the film was made for showing at the Emily Post Institute itself. (Maybe they had etiquette classes or something. I can’t find much information on its history, and their website publishes various points of etiquette rather than a history of the Institute and its mission.)

But back to the film! I found it hilarious that there is advice on how to eat spaghetti. That’s probably the one meal that I would never imagine being served at a dinner party — maybe it was considered fancy in the 40’s! Finally, I learned that I don’t eat soup correctly (I tip the spoon towards me, not away) and have never done quite the right thing with soup spoons. Damn, ma, why didn’t you teach me that — now I’ll be the laughing stock of that White House dinner!

For years as a child, I didn’t really understand the Morton Salt slogan, “When it rains, it pours.” I thought it was a strange reference to the familiar idiom: after a long spell of nothing happening, then everything happens at once. What this had to do with table salt, who knows.

However, looking at some of their old ads today made me realize they were saying “when it’s raining outside [or just humid], your Morton Salt will still pour from the shaker.” That was one of those “OHHHHhhhh…” moments… followed closely by a “well, duh” moment.

One of their 1926 ads (see left) brought home another weird point: goiters. Most children who manage to stay awake through elementary school health class learn that very small quantities of iodine are vital to the health of the thyroid gland; without it, it will swell and you’ll have a big goiter in your neck. To the modern student, this is weird and strange. But in the 1920’s, goiters were a lot more common, and Morton’s inclusion of iodine was a pretty good innovation.

(On a related note, I always considered gout to be one of those diseases gone by the wayside, back in the age of Ben Franklin — but a few guys in the factory here have it. Weird!)

We’ll probably be visiting Chicago in the next couple months, and we’ll get to drive by the big MORTON SALT factory with the famous girl-under-umbrella spilling her salt all over the place. Poor kid, she’ll get home and Mother will be furious that the salt is all gone and now the family will all get goiters because the iodized salt is all over the street…

With the caveat that the advice in It’s All In Knowing How! is drawn completely from the perspective of the National Dairy Council: Pity the lactose intolerant, for they were doomed to a life without pep in 1954.

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Bob is more complicated than an aircraft, so he needs the right combination of food every day, as well as sleep! Since they want to emphasize the benefits of milk, they skim over Bob’s six-hour sleep cycle (which is probably his biggest problem).

The National Dairy Council still advocates milk, and discourages you from “self-diagnosed” lactose intolerance. Their advertisements have gotten less hokey over time, but I wonder if they still finagle stuff like this into classrooms?