Reducing the reducers to tears

201 Tasty Dishes for Reducers (The Journal of Living Publishing Corporation, 1948) might be trying to sound friendly with its tasty title, but it can be a harsh little book.

The "Questions and Answers about the Diet" section near the end of the book begins by chastising its prospective readers: "To be very much overweight is strong evidence that the individual either lacks will power or is totally ignorant of the effect of foods on body weight." I'd like to think that our society has moved past that idea, but it's unfortunately still in circulation.

Unsurprisingly, some of its ideas are totally unhinged. Some just seem kind of wacky, but not necessarily harmful, like this recommendation. 

Sure! You'll get skinny by wandering around your bedroom nude for 20 minutes every morning! That seems plausible. But at least it's unlikely to hurt anybody, and it might be some fun.

The recommended menu (from "The Famous Victor H. Lindlahr 7-Day Reducing Diet") is MUCH less fun and more dangerous. The representative menu for Monday should give you an idea of what the problem is.

Dieters get 950 calories for an entire day! (To be fair, on Friday dieters get to cut loose and go all the way up to 1015.) Of course, the minimum recommended calorie intake for women is 1200 per day and for men, 1500 per day. By day 2, dieters will be too hangry to have the patience to spread "1 teaspoon cottage cheese" on a piece of toast first thing in the morning.

Luckily, the book doesn't expect readers to spend all their time on the 7-day diet, so it offers some recipes for foods when dieters aren't subsisting on syrup-free canned peach halves and half-cups of string beans. Instead, they can ruin their appetite by starting a meal with a Sauerkraut-Potato Cocktail. 

Or maybe start with a Vitamin Consommé if you like the air of science...

...and don't mind that it's onion, celery, and cabbage boiled in diluted tomato and grapefruit juices.

You might then go on to have a salad. If you find vitamins especially compelling, you can follow up Vitamin Consommé with Vitamin Fish Salad.

I'm starting to think that "vitamin" was code for "with celery and onion."

Or if you don't think vintage diets can be complete without a wobbly salad, there's Chicken Salad Squares. 

Mercifully, they're made with plain gelatin (rather than, say lemon or lime gelatin) dissolved in chicken stock. I'm not sure how well the crushed pineapple will complement the chicken, carrots, celery, and green peppers, but crushed pineapple was very nearly required by law for any vintage gelatin salad.

And if you just prefer random fruits and vegetables thrown together without a protein, there's Asparagus and Grapefruit Salad.

I'll admit that I chose it because I find both grapefruit and canned (but not fresh!) asparagus repulsive, so combining the two sounds even worse. And if you're wondering what the salad dressing that is supposed to be served with this might entail, then you're in for a treat.

I kept checking the Reducing Dressing for All Salads for some kind of a thickener. I realize that as a salad dressing hater, I'm not exactly the authority on this, but I am pretty sure most dressings have at least a little more viscosity than skim milk. Not this one, though! It's basically just lightly seasoned skim milk, so it gives you the joy of turning any salad into a watery mess!

If you insist on something more substantial, like a sandwich, there's a Fish-Vegetable Spread for Sandwiches.

I can't really imagine enjoying a mixture of cooked fish, shredded carrot, minced green pepper, and grated apple slathered onto rye bread, but at least this is more substantial than anything else so far! Maybe it will look good by comparison...

And if you're really good, you can have dessert. Expecting something very sad? Well, get ready for a surprise.

I have no idea why this recipe for Sugar Cookies is here. Granted, it's not the most exciting dessert in the world, but still, there's nothing appreciably "diet" about the cookies. They've got as much butter, sugar, and flour as one would expect, and there's not even a headnote trying to justify what makes these "diet." Maybe the Journal of Living Publishing Corporation just got tired of miserable recipes and wanted to give their readers a little break. Or maybe they wanted to include a recipe that they could berate the reducers for making? What better way to prove their readership is "totally ignorant of the effect of foods on body weight" than to slip in a test recipe and dare them to make it? Given how mean-spirited this book is, I'm more inclined to the latter explanation...

Settling back for fall in the Rocky Mountains

Now that it's officially fall, let's take a short break from (mostly) terrible recipes and check out a few cozy fall-appropriate recipes from Mountain Makin's in the Smokies: A Cookbook (The Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association in 1957). Better get a kettle heated up over an open fire before we get started....

That picture makes me think of a small festival held in our area (even though I am definitely not anywhere near the Smoky Mountains): Apple Butter Day. The book offers the area's own version made with molasses.

Of course, the batch is so small that you wouldn't want to try to make it in a big kettle over an open fire! I also like that the recipe observes that "This kind of butter can be made with sweet potatoes and pumpkins in place of apples," so it's really a recipe for three different types of fruit/ veggie butters, and a way to preserve various crops the family may have grown. You just better have an idea of which spices you want to add and what level will be appropriate to make it noticeably spiced, but not "Am I eating a Yankee candle?" spiced! This recipe isn't about to go into that much detail. 

If you have pumpkins left over after making the pumpkin butter using the previous recipe (or if you just want something a little different), you could try the recipe for Pumpkin Chips.

It sounds like a lot of work to peel a pumpkin and then to cut it "into chips about the thickness of a dollar." Then there is the overnight soak and boiling lemon rinds, then boiling the pumpkin chips in the lemon rind water "until pumpkin chips look clear." It's hard for me to imagine what the pumpkin chips would taste like. (Lemonade, maybe? They're flavored with lemon and sugar, not traditional warm spices.) I'm also not really how one would eat them or what they would be used for. (A snack? A side dish? Part of a dessert?) They're a bit of a mystery, and definitely a departure from the types of pumpkin dishes we usually see now.

Fall is also the time when persimmons come into season, so here's a recipe for Persimmon Pudding.

I love the instructions for this one! No measure of the flour, just enough "to make a medium stiff batter," after which the concoction should "Bake in slow oven until done." You better know what "done" looks like! Similarly, "Serve with a sweet dip," but no word on what the dip might consist of. The upside is that the recommendation suggests the end result should be solid enough to be able to dip it in something. That's the power of context cues!

And finally, for hunting season (and also because no selection of dishes from this book would be complete without a cornmeal-centric recipe), we have Hunters' Cornmeal Cake. 

It's written for people with limited access to resources while hunting, so "Add baking powder if you have it; if not, bake without." Just be sure to put the dough on a "clean board, oak or birch" and "place before open fire and bake." 

I'm sure it was often a cold, uncomfortable, monotonous job to go out on a hunting expedition, and probably more than a bit nerve-wracking if the family depended on the hunter for food and it was a slow season. Still, a description like this is almost enough to make me want to see what a day of cooking in a hunters' camp would have been like.

It's hard not to get a little nostalgic in the fall, even if the old recipes here may be more of a reflection of the need to prepare to survive through a hard season than the cozy celebrations we tend to have today.

The 1970s recommend eating dozens of eggs a day

The Fabulous Egg Cookbook (Jeffrey Feinman, 1979) must have been very popular. When I saw five(!) copies of it at Half Price Books, I recognized the cover because we had this one when I was a kid.

This collection is initially organized by meal (though later chapters focus on specific types of egg preparations), so I thought I would organize this post by meal, too.

Everybody knows about eggs for breakfast, so the book tried to offer some less-expected dishes alongside things like scrambled eggs. We're going with Egg Pie for Breakfast.

I frequently see similar recipes in community cookbooks, but the bread is usually topped with a breakfast meat and then the custard. Since this is an egg cookbook, hard-cooked eggs are subbed in for the sausage, ham, or bacon, so you get eggs cooked in eggs.

Sandwiches can make for an easy lunch, so we will go with the Egg Sandwich Spread. I assumed this would basically be egg salad, with hard-cooked eggs, mayo, mustard, and maybe a few finely chopped veggies.

Well, it's got the hard-cooked eggs, but the recipe uses butter instead of the mayo-mustard mixture. The thought of egg salad frankly makes me gag, but I could almost see myself eating this. (Harder to turn down an excuse to eat butter than to try to choke down mayo!)

If you want more of a challenge than spreading some egg-butter on bread (or just want an eggy side to go with the eggy sandwich), you could make Western Egg Rolls.

"Western" is the important word here, as these are not your Chinese-restaurant-style egg rolls, but something resembling tiny omelets, wrapping a bacon/ ground beef/ green pepper/ cheese filling.

For dinner, we can have a meal the white-bread readers of the 1970s would consider "ethnic." If you want something simple, try Mexican Scrambled Eggs.

I like this just because there are so few recipes that ask cooks to sauté a bag of slightly-crushed tortilla chips in butter. (It's also a reminder that salsa was not nearly as big in the U.S. in 1979 as it is now! I hope a modern recipe creator would swap that in for the catsup.)

If you want something a little more complicated, there's Eggs Italian.

It sounds like a real pain to make a custard in the top of a double boiler, especially when the first step is trying to sauté the onions in the double boiler. This is also another example of throwing hard-cooked eggs into a custard for a double-dose of eggy "goodness." And then there is the whole other step of sautéing tomato slices just until they brown but not until they fall apart... and toasting the English muffins... and layering everything... This definitely seems like one of those recipes where the amount of work will not really be proportional to the impressiveness of the end result.

And finally, if you are STILL egg deficient after a full day of egg-based main dishes, we will end with a Square Pineapple Pie (a.k.a. Unbaked Pineapple Pie).

I mean, you almost made it through a day of egg-based dishes without eating any raw eggs, and we couldn't have that. You don't want to miss out on the threat of salmonella! This recipe is actually pretty similar to the Banana Split Pie I made for a long-ago Pieathalon, so my guess is that it is way too sweet. But at least the eggs are better disguised in the dessert than in all those main dishes, so you might be happy just for the change of pace.

The roller coaster of egg prices means they're not always the cheapest way to get dinner on the table now, so maybe that's why all the copies are at Half Price Books. The recipes themselves aren't necessarily much of an incentive to hang onto this book.

Funny Name: You can pick your recipes edition

What was Frances Estep thinking when they picked the name for this recipe?

I'm not sure, but it snot funny, even if it is one of the Treasured Recipes from Harris House (Westerville, Ohio, 1991).

Okay. It actually is.

Sure, go ahead and microwave that!

I think that The Microwave Guide and Cookbook (General Electric, 1979, though mine is the second printing from 1980) is one I haven't posted about yet.

It's hard for me to judge, though, as there are some major overlaps with The General Electric Microwave Guide and Cookbook (1977) and Guide to Microwave Cooking and Recipe Book (Hotpoint/ General Electric, 1979). I found some things I hadn't covered in earlier iterations, though, so today we'll find out what microwave owners could learn about working their shiny new appliances from this collection.

One interesting point is that many TV dinners apparently still came in foil trays because microwaves were not yet all that common. I'd think those would be a no-go (given that foil is METAL and metal is a no-no in microwaves), but the book actually says it's okay to microwave these dinners in their original trays!

You just have to make sure the foil cover is removed, the tray is "no more than 3/4-in. deep," and the tray is at least an inch from the microwave's walls. There's even a series of photos to illustrate the proper technique for microwaving in foil trays.

I still think I'd just attempt to pop the food out of the tray and microwave it on something else. (Especially considering that a microwave in 1979 dollars could cost around $300-- the equivalent of nearly $1500 today. No point in ruining it for a 50-cent (or $2.50-ish now) frozen dinner!)

The book of course pushed the idea that entire meals could be fixed in the microwave. Why bother getting out the grill when you can just microwave burgers and a can of baked beans on a hot summer day?

Well, other than the fact that the hamburger won't brown, or get those nice grill marks, or get flavor from the smoke... And it might well end up with the texture of a rubber ball...

There's also a somewhat-confusing instructional on making a dinner of microwave ham and apples.

I say "somewhat-confusing" because the instructions specify covering the ham with plastic wrap, but the pictures pretty clearly show aluminum foil. This recipe will take 50-60 minutes in the microwave, too-- a cooking time that most microwave users would find outlandish today. If it takes that long, just use a conventional oven! The book really wasn't afraid of long cook times, though. There was even a special section on an automatic simmering and slow cooking function that apparently turned the microwave into something like a crockpot. So if you really like to just hammer your green beans, the book offers a recipe to microwave them with bacon for 10 to 11 hours.

Or if you feel just a bit more restrained, you can microwave ham and shrimp creole for 4-5 hours.

Yep. This booklet thought not only that microwaving shrimp was a fine idea (I guess the thinking was that it was canned already anyway. How much more could you overcook it?) but also that it should be cooked long enough for the aroma to really fill up the house... (I have to imagine that just using an actual slow cooker would use less energy than running a microwave for this long, even though one of the selling points for the microwave is supposed to be energy savings.)

And yet, microwaves still caught on, even after books like this! Pretty remarkable, even if it is now fashionable to pretend you're above using a microwave. (Funny how a symbol of wealth and privilege turns into a symbol of not caring about food in just a few decades, but that's what happens when luxuries become affordable to the masses. And the microwave still does pretty much the same thing it always has, though at least now we have the benefit of a turntable.)

I wish I could see how the guests reacted to these anniversary cakes....

I was really not sure what to make of it when I came across this picture in the February 1976 Mail Box News (from Maid of Scandinavia Co.).

I mean, I realized the "Happy Anniversary" meant they were probably anniversary cakes, but what the heck are this "Good Together" couple supposed to be? Waning moon and watermelon that's been through some stuff? An undersized wastebasket that's supposed to snug right up against the wall and a MASSIVE multivitamin? Makeup sponge and slightly different shape of makeup sponge? (I'm not that familiar with makeup sponges, in case that isn't clear.)

Unsurprisingly, it's none of the above.

This "really unique anniversary cake" is apparently supposed to be cheese and ham. I think it would have been a lot easier to tell if we had a color photo here. I really want to see layered buttercream meant to mimic "fat and gelatin on the 'meat'" in glorious color! And I wonder if the guests could figure out what this was supposed to be, or if the color wasn't enough of a hint and friends of the happy couple had so smile and say "Wow! What a unique anniversary cake!" and nod in a vaguely approving way.

The booklets don't usually have a lot of recipes, but I did find a pair of recipes for a somewhat unusual pairing: black pepper and cookies. Choose between black pepper chocolate cookies with a pepper flavor that's "hard to detect"...

...or Norwegian pepper cookies with "just a touch of pepper to flavor."

I think I'd go with the former because 1. Chocolate! and 2. The other recipe "makes about 225 3" cookies." I can't imagine ever needing that many cookies.... But people have all kinds of weird needs, I suppose. Like needing cheese and ham anniversary cakes.

A fruity September

Summer is definitely winding down by the time September starts, but Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) reassures us that some crops are still freshly coming into season. Peaches immediately catch my eye since we had peach trees at my childhood home. When we made "peach pudding," it meant that we'd thrown some home-frozen peaches into the blender and turned them into what would probably now be considered a smoothie. Blanchard's Frozen Peach Pudding is considerably more complicated (and probably more exciting).

Since it involves cutting a loaf cake into layers, it reminds me of the sandwich loaf recipes old cookbooks recommended for parties, but this one sounds a lot more palatable than most of them do. I mean, would you rather have layers of rum-and-ginger soaked cake with sliced peaches or white and wheat bread filled with a mixture of cottage cheese, potatoes, celery, and pineapple?

I always think of melons as more of a height-of-summer fruit, but they are listed in the September chapter. I was surprised to see a recipe for underripe melons, but Blanchard recommends turning them into a curry.

This doesn't specify the type of melon, so maybe it doesn't really matter if it's not ripe. It won't taste like a full-fledged melon anyway. In any case, this is recommended as "a spicy relish for plain meatloaf or chicken" (and reminds us that any added spice was all it took to get called "spicy" back in the day).

In addition to the peaches and melons, grapes are coming into season. (September is really the month for fruit!) While I've seen plenty of recipes for raisin pies, I don't usually see recipes for pies using the fresh counterpart.

Considering that you rarely find Concord grapes in the supermarket, I can see why this recipe would be reserved for home gardeners. (I'm sure that the inconvenience of having to separate the seeds, pulp, and skin also play a role in making Concord grapes an unpopular choice for home cooks.)

And honestly, September is already a pretty inconvenient month for families with anybody in school, so there's a good reason why people choose not to spend what little free time they have separating grapes into their various components or wrestling with underripe melons simply to make them taste like sautéed onions. The peaches, on the other hand... Maybe those would be worth the hassle at the end of a long, hectic week? (Who am I kidding? Throwing some frozen peaches straight into the blender is more my speed. But people in the '70s had way fewer devices beeping for their attention and way fewer choices in the grocery store that could taste just about as good as something homemade and be 100 times easier.)