Cocktail Hour

It's still damn hot! Maybe I should bust out a blender recipe book to fix us some cool "treats."

Electric Blender Recipes (Mabel Stegnar, 1952) has plenty of oddities to encourage homemakers to think a new blender will do absolutely anything.

Need some shampoo?

Why not grind up leftover bar soap with hot water? (I'm clearly too squeamish for the '50s if I'm bothered by the thought of eating food out of a container that had just been used to process gunky scraps of well-used bar soap!)

I was most drawn to the recipes that I tend to expect to see in blender books, the ones for smooth soups and beverages.

The next recipe makes me shudder only because I know how my mind works. If I came across a nice bowl of lightly pinkish yogurt in the fridge, I'd probably think it was a blended peach yogurt and scoop out a dish for dessert, maybe throwing a bit of Great Grains Double Pecan cereal on top for crunch.

And then I'd find out the yogurt was actually flavored with shrimp and cucumber....

Yeah, I'm used to sweet yogurt, so this book would make me extremely skeptical of any yogurt-based concoction in the fridge.

Hopefully I'd smell the onion soon enough to realize this wasn't strawberry yogurt!

In fact, the "cocktails," the precursors to today's green smoothies, are my favorites. I'm not sure anyone was exactly clamoring for a celery cocktail.

Well maybe the Fifth Doctor, but I have my doubts. He may hold the sensible view that celery should be strictly decorative.

The book also supposed there was great interest in battery acid grapefruit juice mixed with random vegetables for a "refreshing" beverage.

Or, for those who found simple vegetable + fruit juice combinations too conventional, there's this alternative:

Yay! The Beet Sauerkraut Cocktail. (Beets taste like dirty sugar and I hate sauerkraut!)

I've spared you a few of their less-creative ideas, as you've already seen the old cottage cheese cocktail, raw-egg-and-orange-juice vitamin drink, and the ever-famous raw liver + chocolate milk trick. Be grateful for that.