Just eat an apple and keep the doctor out of your business

Today we have a book from The Kroger Food Foundation that tries to tell what to do When the Doctor Says "Diet" (1933):

Apparently, you get to eat two hard cooked eggs on a very sparse bed of parsley. Yippee. That guy's eyebrow arch of dismay could challenge Stephen Colbert's.

The book has plenty of concoctions of approximately the same "yum" value as the eggs and parsley. The section on liquid diets offers a variety of grimace-worthy options.

Some are pretty simple:

Toast soda crackers and then boil for fifteen minutes. Strain and serve.

If straining soggy crackers out of hot water doesn't sound quite exciting enough, there is a more labor-intensive version:

Soak barley or rice overnight, drain, cook for six total hours (two over direct heat, then four more in a double boiler), strain, and chill.

The alternative to strained-out carb-water is the protein option:

Egg white in clam broth! (I'm not sure whether calling the egg white albumen in the title makes this better or worse...)

And if liquids get too monotonous, there is always (ALWAYS) an aspic:

It's not all liquid diets, though. You know how gluten is the dietary bad guy in so many food stories today? It was not always so. Here's a bread recipe recommended for diabetics:

Gluten Bread gets rid of the other trappings of wheat and just keeps the gluten. (I'm seriously wondering what the texture of this would be like, as I eat a lot of seitan-- which is basically gluten with savory seasonings, made into chewy, meat-like chunks. I can't imagine trying to turn that into a passable slice of bread, but maybe the addition of yeast makes a difference?)

There aren't a lot of recipes in the booklet, though. Much of it is lists of menus for various types of diets (high carb, low carb, extra roughage, low roughage, high iron and copper...). Just to give you an idea of how different America was in 1933, here's a diet recommendation we don't often see anymore:

This is the high calorie diet. Even though parts of it are pretty clearly high calorie (scrambled eggs with cream and bacon at breakfast, a milk shake and cookie snack), I'm surprised how much of this overlaps with weight-loss diet foods. Apparently vegetable aspics and grapefruits were inescapable facts of life back then. Even saying that you were trying to gain weight wasn't enough of an excuse to skip them. (At least you could apparently count macaroni as a "vegetable of high caloric value," so that was something...)

My favorite item on the list might be the prune and pineapple salad with mayonnaise. You could try to force that on me all day long, and I wouldn't gain an ounce.

In any case, I don't know whether I'm gladder that I don't have to follow a doctor-recommended diet in 1933 or that I don't have to cook someone else a doctor-recommended diet in 1933. I'm also glad we don't need a damn aspic at every meal.