The onions that will make everybody cry, and other tales of terror

Are you a body builder? I can carry multiple bags of groceries at the same time. That's about as close as I can get to claiming the title. That's okay, though because even though today's cookbook is for body builders, it's not what you think.

Body Building Dishes for Children (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1950) is for a different kind of bodybuilders whose group I don't belong to-- kids!

The booklet suggests kids were made of much different stuff (literally and figuratively) in 1950 than they are now. Here's a dinner suggestion from the book's "Menus for the Preschool Child" page:

I don't necessarily believe that kids really need to run on a steady diet chicken nuggets and mac 'n' cheese (as so many kids' menus seem to suggest), but I can only imagine full-on temper tantrums when a toddler confronts a plate of baked stuffed onions and a "sandwich of watercress and lemon butter."

Things get no better on Tuesday:

Liver and potato pie? Minced uncooked cabbage with lemon juice? Again, this seems more like a recipe for kicking and screaming than for a peaceful meal...

The fare for slightly older children presents its own kind of problems. In fact, the book seems at least semi-aware of the problem. The vegetables chapter, for instance, suggests it has found the perfect way to get little ones to eat their greens:

Yes, "The valuable but less popular vegetables will be welcomed lustily if baked in a ring mold." Never mind that I don't want to see kids welcoming anything "lustily" (gross!).... The only people who really seemed excited about ring molds were the women mid-century cookbooks were marketed towards. Even the editors don't seem to buy the argument that kids are way into ring-molds, as this is the only actual ring molded recipe in the vegetable chapter (aside from a briefly outlined variation of a chopped spinach recipe):

The ring mold section is not the only apparent misunderstanding of child psychology:

If you had told childhood me that you were serving a "schoolmate of Donald Duck," I would not have found it "really hilarious." I would have been sobbing for an hour, and I probably would have wanted to keep ALL the adults who had apparently participated in his murder as far away as possible.

Reassuring me that dinner was not, in fact, a duck, but a hacked-up little lamb would not have helped.

Fifties kids must have been made of much sterner stuff than eighties kids (or current kids), and/or Ruth Berolzheimer et al. must have had some really weird ideas about children that they did not bother to field test. Either way, this book makes me glad I have never tried to ply a toddler with stuffed onions or insist that a carrot ring be welcomed lustily by the elementary school set.