When people make rich desserts, they often brag about how the recipe is made with real butter. I'd think that would be the case for the Kentucky cooks who put together Morehead Woman's Club's Our Ways with Food (undated, but from the early 1960s), but I was very wrong.
Yes, these cookies brag about being made with margarine right in the title! How was this a point of distinction?
I think Oleos would have sounded nicer. But there's something so decisive about "1 lb. margarine" at the top of the list.
ReplyDeleteOleos are the chocolate version, and you're supposed to make them into very disappointing sandwich cookies.
DeleteI've heard that marketing has a lot to do with the allure of margarine and vegetable shortening. Rendering plants were depicted as dirty and old fashioned. Vegetable shortening and margarine were new, modern, and made in nice clean labs. I can see how margarine would be a status symbol for a certain period of time. The 1960s seems a little late for that, but maybe that's the recipe name passed down through the family.
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but I think the real point of margarine was to provide a cheaper alternative to butter. Usually, people aren't going to publicize that they are being cheap.
DeleteSo when you look through the cookbook you know it's an affordable recipe, and you come up with a different name that sounds fancier when you serve them to others.
DeleteSomething like that.
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