I previously considered the breakfast and dining outdoors pages of Meat for Every Occasion (National Live Stock and Meat Board, 1932), but another section that really surprised me was the "Meat Dishes for Children" chapter. People now might think of things like hamburgers, cut-up hot dogs, or chicken nuggets as kid-friendly meats, but 1930s parents had VERY different ideas of what kinds of meat kids should eat.
Old cookbooks really emphasized the nutritional advantages of liver, so of course kids would be considered a prime audience for it.
I guess the concession made for children in the Casserole of Liver recipe is that the star ingredient is paired with bacon rather than onions.
Sometimes, the recipes seem really damn sophisticated for something intended as a children's meal. Just try telling little Gerald and Betty that they're going to have Sweetbreads and Bacon en Brochette for dinner.
Once they realize that sweetbreads are neither sweet nor bready, they will try to stab you with the skewers. (At least they will eat the bacon. It looks like bacon was the 1930s cheat code to get kids to eat things.)
And some recipes just seem much more like they would be something to serve guests at a dinner party for grownups (possibly ones that the hosts were not so sure they liked) than something for the kiddie table, like Liver Spinach Mold.
I'm sure that 1930s moms wanted kids to have the nutrition of liver and spinach, but serving thick liver custard with a layer of slimy cooked spinach on top does not seem like the way to accomplish it...
Then again, people were often malnourished in the 1930s, so maybe kids really were less picky. If mom made them something special to eat, it would get eaten, as being full of spinach and liver might have been preferable to going hungry-- especially if there were no dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets waiting in the freezer to quell a temper tantrum?
Given the idea of people making complicated recipes for "healthy" chicken nuggets these days, I'm imagining someone getting a set of small dinosaur cookie cutters and making dinosaur shaped liver nuggets for their kids.
ReplyDeleteI guess that the idea that children can't eat the same foods as the adults do has been around for a long time. Whether or not the person doing the cooking buys into that probably depends most on how much cooking they have the time or desire to do.
I'm just glad I can find dinosaur-shaped veggie "chicken" nuggets. Mostly-vegetarians who are nearly 50 should be able to eat dinosaur-shaped nuggets too, just like god intended.
DeleteI'm sure you're right about the cooking something different for the kids bit. It's only a thing if you've got the time and desire. (Well, except for kids who are still transitioning to solid food. Try to serve them the same thing as everybody else and they'll choke to death.)