Mom's visiting! Let's go on a diet.

Most older cookbooks don't have a special section for Mother's Day recipes because they assume that mom is cooking every day except for maybe a stray barbecue in the summer (when she'll still be required to make all the sides and have to act grateful that dad incinerated grilled the meat). The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook (1959) does have a special menu for the day mother (presumably the cook's mom/ kids' grandma) visits for a few days, so that will be our theme for the day.

I love the super-awkward hug! Grandma looks like she's trying to dance with an invisible man several feet to her right, and mom's arms are so fully extended that I almost think she's trying to push grandma back out the door. The kids apparently think this is pretty funny too: "Ha, ha! Glad it's her hugging grandma and not me!"

Or maybe grandma has just spotted the centerpiece and is gesticulating wildly because she is afraid her daughter has lost her mind. A large red cabbage sliced into a "rose" with some kind of weird green pepper pyramid jutting out of it? A greeting like that is likely to make anyone question the host's sanity.

How thoughtful that the menu assumes grandma is an inveterate dieter, piling on the celery, water cress, string beans, melba toast, and jellied fruit ginger mold (which can be made with low-calorie gelatin for extra calorie savings).

The Veal and Eggplant Casserole has some substance to it, at least, and even an attempt at flavor with the aromatic veggies and full quarter-teaspoon of basil. Fancy!

The mold sounds perfectly adequate:

Whipped orange-and-ginger-ale gelatin can't be that bad, and the drawing cracks me up because all the strawberries in the center of the mold look like malformed moaning heads of people who have been damned to Jell-O hell.

Yep, that's how we feel when mom visits, little strawberries. That's how we all feel.