I know to expect plenty of typos and mistakes in old recipe collections that schools, church groups, charities, etc. sold to raise money. It's not like Gertrude from down the street or Mildred from the church choir was really that concerned about whether anybody else would be able to follow their instructions. Good cooks should have enough sense to figure out what they meant, and if not, well, then nobody else's version of the recipe would be as good as Gertrude's or Mildred's.
I expect at least somewhat more accuracy if I'm getting recipes that are formally published as part of a newspaper's recipe collection. Newspapers are supposed to have proofreaders, after all. The Dispatch Recipe Collection (put together by The Columbus Dispatch (newspaper) in 1933, edited by Bernice Thomas) shows that this was not always the case.
See if you can spot the missing ingredient in the egg cutlets.
That's right-- no eggs, except for the one that's beaten and used to adhere the bread crumbs to the cutlets' exteriors. Instead of the eggs, the recipe just lists the finely cut pim(i)ento a second time. (Maybe Thomas just wanted to try out both spellings?) So much for adding the eggs to the seasoned thick white sauce before "spreard"ing the mixture in a shallow pan to chill until stiff.
Okay, now guess what is in the pear macaroni salad.
If you unimaginatively guessed "pears" and "macaroni," you were only half right. The pears are saladified not with macaroni, but with macaroons. So, yes, pears slathered in cream cheese, rolled in cookie crumbs, and topped with a maraschino cherry half counted as a salad as long as they came atop a lettuce leaf with a spoonful of mayonnaise.
I guess this all suggests that the "women's pages" in 1930s weren't considered worthy of having a proofreader. Or maybe the proofreader just got so distracted by the prospect of macaroons and mayonnaise that proofreading became impossible?
I know the explanation is probably just Occam's razor-- nobody really cared enough to notice-- but it's fun to speculate.
Maybe they meant macaroni as being fancy? I somehow doubt that a recipe meant the obscure meaning of a name normally applied to a specific food. Did they just misspell macaroon, or did they think that pear macaroon salad was too big of a stretch and they would pretend that it was more of a salad than a dessert with the name?
ReplyDeleteA lot of times in newspapers, one person writes content and another writes the headline. I kind of doubt that would apply to recipes, but there is a chance that a different person wrote the title, so maybe they just skimmed, saw "macaro..." and assumed it was "macaroni."
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