The cover of Quick Dishes for the Woman in a Hurry (Culinary Arts Institute, directed by Melanie de Proft, 1955) looks pretty straightforward: corn on the cob, Brussels sprouts, ribs, strawberries with whipped cream, a relish tray with olives and radish roses lurking in the corner.
A lot of the recipes are pretty rudimentary as well, which is to be expected from a quick cookbook. Need some coffee cake? Rather than making one from scratch or getting one from a bakery...
...simply hack up an unsliced loaf of bread, slather with butter, top with more butter mixed with brown sugar and cinnamon, and then bake up into an ersatz coffee cake.
Want some cheese bread quick? I'll bet you'll never guess the recommendation.
Yep-- hack up a loaf of unsliced bread, slip in slices of American cheese, slather in caraway-mustard butter...
...and for a slight twist ending, dump on some anchovy/ lemon butter just before serving.
The truth is, though, I didn't really get this booklet for the recipes. I loved the pictures by illustrator Kay Lovelace.
While the inside cover does have the expected picture of a woman dressed up for an afternoon out, slipping a casserole into the oven for dinner later, I was much more taken by this imaginative picture just a few pages later emphasizing the need for speed.
The mice NEED to be quick-- hopefully springing the trap with a fork will be enough to catapult the cheese into the catcher's mitt! The two mice in the foreground have their tails crossed for luck, though I'm not sure why. The morsel of cheese is small enough that the catcher will make short work of it before anyone else gets a taste-- even the "chef" in the tiny hat.
Mice make another appearance in the sauce chapter, bringing a bit of humor to an old cliché.
The geese don't mind the cliché about sauce for the goose and for the gander as long as it means a procession of mice in still more tiny hats and aprons delivering dishes full of goodies.
A bunny gets in on the act too, using the salad chapter as a backdrop for her performance of my grandpa's favorite mealtime joke.
The adorable pictures are not confined to cute animals, either. Here are some hot dogs getting ready to get hot and heavy.
I'm not sure whether it's a reminder of how buttoned-up the fifties were that one of the hot dogs in a romance clearly has to be female, or whether this is actually secretly subversive.... They're both hot dogs, after, all, the the "girl" is even flatter than I am (and that is saying something!). Either way, we have dressed-up yet shirtless hot dogs in the throes of romance, so what's not to love?
Uh... Scratch that question. There is something not to love about the illustrations. Ms. Lovelace should have stuck with pictures of adorable animals and anthropomorphic foods because her pictures of people are not always... (How to put this delicately?) ... very respectful.
There's a lot to love about old cookbooks, but there are always plenty of reminders that we really need to keep moving beyond that past they represent, even though a LOT of people seem more interested in regressing than progressing...
Ohh a rabbit doing a burlesque fan dance, and whatever those hotdogs are up to.It's a very risque cookbook.
ReplyDeleteI do kind of like the practicality of just keeping loaves of unsliced bread in the house to cosplay whatever food you want. After all, cake is basically bread with more sugar and flavorings added to it.
Your comment about cake basically being bread makes me think of the nutrition-themed listicles I see sometimes. One title that always amuses me is something along the line of "Can you believe these things have more sugar than a glazed donut?" The comparison isn't all that impressive, though, as glazed donuts have a relatively small amount of sugar compared to other desserts. They're basically just bread that tastes sweet because of a very thin sugar coating on the outside.
Delete(I'm also amused by the outraged articles noting that if you buy almond milk, you're mostly paying for water! There aren't that many almonds in it! And I want to say, "If you are looking for almond butter, it's in a different aisle.")