Starting a Year of Martha Meade

The new year means a new seasonal cookbook to kick off each month! This year, we'll be making our way through Modern Meal Maker (Martha Meade for Sperry Flour Co., 1935).

Martha Meade had a radio show about cooking for Sperry Flour on the West Coast in the 1930s, so that's why the cover makes sure to prominently specify the recipes are by Martha Meade. When I initially picked up this book, I saw the "Winter/ Spring" designation on the cover and worried that I'd still have to track down the Summer/ Autumn book, but then when I flipped through, I realized that the fronts of the pages are printed with winter and spring; the backs are summer and autumn. In other words, I have the whole book! All I had to do to find the other half-year was flip the book over.

Every day has a full menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (or breakfast, dinner, and supper on Sundays). You'll notice there are way more menus than recipes 1115 v. 744) because the book assumes that home cooks already know how to do a lot of things (like bake potatoes, poach eggs, and broil liver with onions), plus a lot of recipes get reused. While there are fewer breakfast recipes than for the other meals, the ones that are included tend to be memorable. Do you want your entire breakfast in one compact disk? Have some Bacon and Egg Cakes from a menu for the first week of January.

Start frying and egg, and then top it with pancake batter that has bacon (both drippings and the crispy bits!) mixed in. I guess that's the 1930s equivalent of a McGriddle?

The bacon and egg cakes were part of a particularly memorable day that culminated in a savory shortcake. (Shortcake may mean dessert now, but that definitely has not always been the case!)

A Google image search for "shortcake" now will not show biscuits topped with fried hamburger and onions anywhere near the top of the page. (If you have infinite scrolling time, maybe you'll eventually find a dreary brown meat shortcake, but I still wouldn't bet on it.)

One interesting aspect of the cookbook is that so many of the lunches are quietly vegetarian. Average families in the 1930s apparently didn't expect (couldn't afford?) meat at every meal, and some of the options are more interesting than the usual brick-like loaves of leftover veggies glued together by eggs and breadcrumbs that older cookbooks tended to offer as meatless meals.

As a Spanish rice lover, I have to admit to being halfway tempted by the thought of Spanish rice cakes topped with melty cheese sauce! (I suspect that this recipe desperately needs some chili powder at the very least, though. Spanish rice needs some seasoning beyond salt.)

Since this is a recipe book from a flour company (and since a lot of recipes would require flour anyway, not just as a dough ingredient, but as part of a meat dredge, sauce thickener, etc.), it's no surprise that flour makes a regular appearance. The book is pushing hard to sell Sperry's Wheat Hearts (I know the link is to General Mills, but they owned Sperry), too, though, and those uses sometimes get a little odd. Why use plain old flour to make rich, sweet, chewy brownies when you can make Brownie Pudding?

Wouldn't the kids rather have wheat germ cereal with prunes and egg white folded in, and just enough chocolate that you can maybe convince them that it's actually chocolate-flavored? I'm sure it's a valiant effort to make a nutritious dessert, but perhaps taking the name "brownie" out of the title would make it less of a disappointment? Maybe "Cold Brown Mush that Tastes Mostly of Prunes but Maybe a Little of Chocolate if You Concentrate" would be more accurate... but not an easy sell. I guess I can see why it got that title.

In any case, I am excited to see a year's worth of Martha Meade's ideas! Maybe by the end of the year she'll have us all wearing our "I 💓 Wheat!" shirts.