Matchlessly confusing recipes from an electric company

Matchless Recipes for Flameless Cooking (undated, but it's from Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric Company, which was bought by AEP in 1980, so pre-1980, and the mentions of using an "electric refrigerator" suggests it would be earlier than that) is I guess an attempt to get consumers excited about electric (rather than gas) stoves and other electric kitchen appliances like blenders and refrigerators. (Not that I really think consumers needed the electric company to get them excited about easy-to-use kitchen appliances, but considering the booklet's brevity, I'm not sure Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric Company was all that convinced either.)

The recipes can also seem... well... uninspired. Take the recipe for cauliflower, for instance.

Yep-- it's just telling cooks to steam cauliflower in salted water in a covered saucepan "on electric unit." Not too thrilling, and I'm not sure how many cooks at the time would need these instructions anyway. They probably had experience steaming vegetables and if they didn't, they probably owned general-purpose cookbooks that included these instructions and a LOT more useful information.

However, I discovered that the recipes are often more complicated than they initially seem. If they have multiple steps, there is NO indication at all (in the recipe title or in the first set of instructions) that cooks should go on to the seemingly separate recipe immediately below the first. The cauliflower is actually supposed to be topped with tomato sauce, so that's probably why the seemingly unnecessary recipe was listed. It's the first step to something larger, as the tomato sauce recipe immediately below the cauliflower recipe suggests.

And no, there is nothing to indicate that the Tomato Sauce is supposed to top the cauliflower until the middle of the recipe! So if readers skim through the cookbook in a normal fashion-- checking out titles and reading only the recipes they think they might make, rather than sitting down to read the entire page-- there's a really good chance they would make the cauliflower without ever realizing it was supposed to be topped with sauce. (I could also see people making the tomato sauce for a pasta dish without paying much attention and then wondering why the sauce recipe was suddenly mentioning cauliflower.) 

At least some recipes were a bit clearer about there being multiple steps. You might think that I cut off the name for this recipe, but I did not.

The recipe has no name unless you count "Pineapple Top Layer." At least the name clues cooks in to the fact that there must be other layers too. Still, it would be weird to bring out this dish and tell dinner companions it's Pineapple Top Layer with Lemon Cream Cheese Layer and Raspberry Banana Layer. Cooks better already know it's usually called ribbon salad (in which case they may already have the recipe anyway) or make up a name fast. 

And some recipes are just weird, like Stuffed Pink Pears.

I can't imagine there was a huge market for canned pears refrigerated in "dietetic 'red pop'" and rum extract, then stuffed with cottage cheese flavored with additional rum extract, but apparently Columbus and Southern Ohio Electric Company thought this was a grand way to get home cooks excited about electric refrigerators. 

I will admit that I have experience with-- but NO warm and fuzzy feelings for-- AEP, but I am very amused by this booklet from their predecessor. It seems like being kind of inept has always been their thing....