Once again, it's time for a trip back to a time when a refrigerator was still kind of a novelty. Your Frigidaire Recipes (the Home Economics Department of the Frigidaire Division of General Motors Sales Corporation, Dayton, Ohio, 1937) assures readers that the Frigidaire is capable of many things.
The booklet explains that price of the refrigerator will be more than made up for over time, as safe reuse of ingredients means "The [leftover] pork chop may be ground with other pieces of meat and used for stuffing green peppers or for making sandwich filling. The tomato slices may be used for garnishing the next meat loaf. The buttered peas may be used in a jellied salad ring or vegetable salad or scalloped vegetable dish. These are just a few of the many possibilities." Whether people really wanted to eat a jellied salad ring full of (likely overcooked) buttered peas was immaterial.
Alternatively, the bits of leftover vegetables might make a grand Cottage Cheese and Vegetable Salad.
Simply mix leftover veggies with cottage cheese and mayo, leaven with a bit of whipped cream, and then freeze into a solid mass that is sure to put nearly everyone's teeth on edge-- mayo-haters and cottage-cheese-haters alike.
As much as the introduction touts using leftovers, many of the recipes start with all fresh ingredients. The more common denominator among recipes is that everything should be bland. Take the Chicken and Rice Creole. I'm not sure what makes it Creole. Maybe Frigidaire thought using tomatoes in the rice was enough?
I'm absolutely not a southern cook, but I was under the impression that recipes like this should at least have the holy trinity of bell peppers, celery, and onion, plus more spices than a couple whole cloves and some paprika. (And online recipes suggest I'm not wrong.)
The Cajun Chicken and Rice is downright wild compared to the chili, though.
Frigidaire Chili is basically the saddest, most basic sloppy joe mix ever (hamburger, onions, catsup) with a can of kidney beans thrown in for good measure. Plus, the instruction to "Add catsup and cook until the mixture appears oily" do not do the recipe any favors.
The book does offer plenty of delicious-sounding desserts: mousses and parfaits and fruit ices. They're not all winners, though.
Even if Chilled Fruit Dessert sounds really sad (As if anyone wants to eat a partially-frozen can of mixed fruit! Just scrape the whipped cream and maraschino cherries off the top if you like them and skip the rest...), this recipe seems to have had quite a ride, showing up as an even scarier variation in Quick & Easy Dishes (Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, 1968).
I guess I've learned that blandified foods have a chance of surviving their initial awkward phase in appliance cookbooks that were probably marketed to wealthy white families. Chili and "Creole" cooking managed to survive despite their initially being presented as a meat flavored primarily with onion, a tomato product, and hope. Once people had better access to spices and could afford them, they realized that dinner didn't always have to taste like ketchup and sadness.
Freezing random things for no clear reason seems less popular now, though. I can't quite imagine anyone serving frozen fruit cocktail or a slab of veggies frozen into cottage cheese today (even if the fruit cocktail abomination did live into the '60s). We need our freezer space for ice cream and trays of Lean Cuisine and/or Hungry Man.
When I saw Old Homesteader Main Dish in Lower Deer Creek Mennonite Cookbook (Kalona, Iowa, 1977), I was amused by the vague specification that this is a main dish, and I also assumed that it would be some kind of recipe made out of basic ingredients people would have had back when Iowa was still in the process of becoming a state. Maybe it would be something full of organ and/or heavily salted meats, root vegetables, cornmeal.
And then I saw it was an appropriate recipe to help celebrate canned food month, full of canned tomatoes, kidney beans, and Campbells chili beef soup. I guess the "Old Homesteader" this refers to is not the guy who rode his horse to the general store a few times a year to stock up chewing tobacco and molasses, but the old guy in the 1970s who didn't want to have to do any more cooking than necessary. Even after nearly a decade of perusing old cookbooks, I still have trouble figuring out just where they're going. I think that's part of why I love them so much.
The cover of this booklet seems to suggest that the title is Recipes.
However, the title page inside says Victory Recipes (Columbia Broadcasting System, WCCO, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1943), so I will go with that. It's more representative of what the book is: a book on "Menu planning in wartime, a wartime involving rationing, points and scarcities." The recipes come from a contest held by WCCO's Saturday Morning Open House show, which must have been super popular, as the book claims that 1,500,000 recipes had been submitted during its nearly four years in existence.
What kinds of recipes was the station looking for in World War II? Well, like nearly all midwestern cookbooks of the time, this one suggests that recipes with extremely questionable claims to an ethnic group are welcome.
What makes Mexican Rice Timbales Mexican? The French timbale form? The old English cheese? The cooked asparagus garnish? My guess is that maybe it's the fact that these have rice in them, since rice is right in the title, but it's not as if Mexican cuisine has the only claim to rice...
Since meat was rationed, I expected to see some soybean recipes, and I was not disappointed.
Sometimes I think that women in the 1940s could (and did!) loaf-ify pretty much everything. Give them bits of things that need to be used up, a cup or two of crumbs and an egg, and bam! Loaf in about two hours.
The book made me laugh at myself when I realized my distinctly 21st century vantage point. When I saw this recipe, I was incredulous.
Duck and Rice Dinner? As a watcher of cooking shows, I thought, "Who would splurge on a duck during wartime?" And then I felt incredibly silly when I realized that this was a way to use a duck that the family hunter bagged! It wasn't a luxury. It was just a way to avoid using points to get meat.
Well, maybe it was still a luxury compared to eating shit in a squash boat (I guess to help save the wheat bread that would normally serve as the "shingle").
I also find it interesting that Squash with Chipped Beef is imagined as a "Saturday lunch before the big football game." Tailgating was definitely not a thing back then!
Victory sandwiches filled with carrots, olives, raisins, chopped nuts, and mayonnaise may also have helped drive the popularity of duck hunting.
And for sugar rationing, cooks had to get really creative with their icings.
There's nothing quite like the thought of a cake covered in a grape-jelly-flavored meringue to make people give up on the idea of cake entirely.
Victory recipes are definitely fun to read through, but I'm pretty glad I didn't have to experience them.
Aside from being fixated on dried milk and clueless about the meaning of "spicy," Lean Cuisine for the Weight Conscious (nobody wanted credit for this one, but it's from 1978) really appreciated unnecessary quotation marks.
Sometimes they are used in the Weight Watchers way, indicating that a recipe does not really contain the named ingredient, as in the Mixed "Fruit" Sherbet.
Nope-- no actual fruit. It's just "black cherry flavored dietetic soda" and strawberry extract (because strawberries and cherries are known for being so calorific-- can't risk actually eating any).
Sometimes, the scare quotes seem to be an open admission that the recipe title is a lie.
Happy February! Kidding, of course. The shortest month usually feels like the longest, as the cold weather would really be wearing out its welcome at this point if it had ever been welcome in the first place. Let's try to take out some of the sting with more of Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book (1953).
I was interested to see February had recipes for both spaghetti sauce and chili con carne, as those are in so many old cookbooks and can run the gamut from having almost zero seasoning to being the among the few recipes in a cookbook that call for substantial amounts of spice, and from being slowly cooked down using carefully-selected ingredients to being doctored up tomato soup.
Rawleigh goes the vaguely-seasoned route, opting for all-purpose seasoning in the meatballs, and chili powder for both the spaghetti sauce and the chili. There are also cloves in the chili, which I'm not sure I'd be a fan of...
The horoscope is unfailingly positive as always, though it does note that Aquarians "do not often show [their] affection." Maybe that's code for "It's too cold to get nekkid!"
Finally, the spotlighted Rawleigh product for February is the Medicated Ointment and Antiseptic Salve.
I would never have guessed that based on the picture of a young boy and his pet dog, captioned "Such a relief if you're ready WHEN ACCIDENTS COME." Before I noticed the round tins in the corner, I briefly wondered if Rawleigh had ever made a product for getting pee out of rugs. Fido doesn't want to go out in the cold right now either, you know! Let's hope next month will be just a little bit warmer.
