Rawleigh's Follies

I have had the good/bad fortune to come across another pamphlet from the multi-level marketing scheme that ruined so many childhood weekends and summer vacation days. I just loved it when my sister and I had to sit around at some elderly couple's house while mom loaded the station wagon up with cases of medicated ointment and steak and hamburger seasoning. If we were especially unlucky, we might have to drag a wagon around the neighborhood afterward and try to convince our neighbors to buy ground pepper and antiseptic salve and whatever other nonsense mom had bought.

At least "Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac ... Cook Book" from 1954 got rid of the creepy kids from the 1950 version and shows an idyllic stream with a couple bumpkin kids fishing in the distance.

This has a small set of mostly-boring recipes featuring (of course!) Rawleigh products, but a few are more interesting, such as scalloped pig's feet (or, more accurately, pigs' feet. unless the pig in question had six feet):

Rawleigh must have known their audience in the 1950s. Farmers who couldn't get to town too often might have had to rely on pigs' feet and seasonings from the Rawleigh lady for dinner. (I'm just not so sure that business model translated so well to suburbs in the 1980s....)

The mix of food and health products in the booklet seems a little weird sometimes. For example, it's hard not to worry a little about the salad recipes when they're across the page from ads for Rawleigh stomach remedies.

I always thought my grandma didn't know how to pronounce antacid, but apparently the tablets used to be called "anti-acids."

There's also the Rawleigh version of Pepto Bismol.

Not so fun fact: I have vivid memories of my cousin barfing Pleasant Relief all over my aunt's kitchen floor.

The salads are mostly pretty standard picnic salads (macaroni, potato), but you know I can't resist a weird molded salad:

I didn't even know Rawleigh made gelatin-- they must have quit by the time my family was in the racket. I guess selling the unflavored gelatin gave the company another way to try to sell their flavorings like Lemon Nectar (though mixing it with seedless grapes and celery seems like one of the less exciting ways to try to move product).

I was a little mystified by some of the cookies and desserts. I thought macaroons were cookies, usually involving coconut (and not to be confused with French macarons), but the Apple Macaroon recipe seems not to fit my idea of macaroons at all.

It's a scoopable dessert mostly made of apples-- not a cookie or biscuit. The only clue to why Rawleigh decided it was a macaroon is near the end: the baking should make "a macaroon crust [develop] over the top." Apparently, the pebbly top from the baked nuts is supposed to give this enough of a similarity to the cookies that we can just put it in the macaroon family? Or maybe the fifties had a looser definition of the term?

In any case, I'll leave you with my favorite image from the book-- a cookie that seems not to bear any relation to the actual cookie recipes in the booklet.

Besides being unsettlingly squat and having a hole in the right edge of its head (I guess so the booklet could be hung in the kitchen by a hook?), this creature has four fingers on one hand and three on the other. Plus, even though the body is human-ish, the mouth looks like a cat's muzzle. Or is it a weird mustache and the mouth has just disappeared completely? In any case, I have a feeling this little guy has to wave because nobody ever comes closer than waving distance... just like our neighbors when they saw us trying to sell Rawleigh!