The Young Woman's Mission was to keep it short!

No, The Young Woman's Mission Cook Book (Springfield, Ohio, 1940), much like the young women who put it together, is not in great shape anymore. Aside from my unsuccessful attempt to remove the price sticker and the broken binding, you might notice the weird lumps and holes both above and under "Young" and above the comma after "Springfield." That's because whoever owned this book before I did had the odd habit of using straight pins to secure recipes cut from magazines onto the title page.

Of course, that means I got additional recipes, like this one lurking behind "Young":

It's an eggnog chiffon pie, proving that chiffon pies could be created for just about any occasion back when they were popular.

The cookbook itself often tends toward simple recipes, ones that could be featured in the five-ingredients-or-fewer cookbooks today:

For example, "Sausage and Oysters" is only slightly more complicated than the title suggests, also incorporating "a large spoonful of cornmeal." (I'm hoping that the oven should be turned on when the baking dish is set in it, and I imagine the dish should also be removed at some point, but Grace J. Johnson is not one to get bogged down with details.)

This recipe (in the "Luncheon Dishes" section) is slightly more complicated, calling for four ingredients:

Of course, one of them is radio cheese-- and I can't figure out what that is. Internet searches suggest I'm looking for a low-frequency FM station in New Zealand, but I'm pretty sure radio cheese was a type of actual cheese-- probably similar to cottage cheese, based on its being mixed with pineapple and Maraschino cherries. Who would consider this a suitable lunch entree is, of course, open to question, but apparently Catherine E. Hodge thought it was killer diller.

This soup might squeak in as a five ingredient recipe, if we don't count water, salt, or pepper:

The thing that really gets me is that this Mock Turtle Soup is the only version of the old-time favorite I've seen that doesn't use some kind of meat as the "turtle." I'm not sure sieved kidney beans, even with the traditional lemon, hard-cooked eggs, and sherry, would fool anyone into thinking a turtle had so much as dipped its toes in the water used to make the soup, but this was sure to go easy on pre-war budgets.

Well, I'm off to radio my cheese and mock some turtles! I hope your day is the cat's meow.