Rawleigh responds to war with veggies, a bit of salt and pepper, and a lot of macaroni

Woo hoo! Now that I'm able to safely hit the antique shops/ thrift stores again, I can continue my quest to collect old Rawleigh Good Health Guide/ Almanac Cook Books! My most recent excursion yielded not one, but TWO old guides. Today, we'll peruse the older one.

My copy of the 1944 Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book obviously came from a family with a child who was learning to write, as you can tell from the cover. Nearly every page has handwritten (and incorrect!) page numbers, scribbles, and random circlings, so you might notice a few of those as we go.

The more interesting thing about this booklet, though, is its date. As you might guess for a publication from 1944, it's got quite a bit to say about World War II. The woman on the cover, so eager to read a letter that she reads it right in front of the mailbox-- before she can even get inside-- is probably supposed to represent the farm mothers awaiting letters home from their children in the military. Of course, Rawleigh is also supposed to make the difficult job of wartime housekeeping easier, too, as this woman who is positively overjoyed at a medicine cabinet full of Rawleigh pills and potions suggests.

My favorite part is that the discussions of the medicines make the case that these elixirs are a doubly-good deal, as they are so versatile. The Liniment can be used internally for stomach ache, externally for pain, AND for farm animal ailments. What's more practical than that?

You're not here for the pictures of old medicine, though. You want some good old-fashioned ration-coupon-stretching recipes! There are a lot of veggie-based dishes.

A Tasty Triumph reminds me why meals that didn't feature meat were not as common until the latter half of the 20th century. A lot of them just involved combining various veggies, boiling them, and then hoping that butter, salt, and pepper will be enough to make all that boiled veggie matter exciting. (If you're feeling cheated that I didn't include the picture that the headnote "The particular combination shown here" seems to suggest, rest assured that there is no picture. Maybe "shown here" is supposed to refer to the list of ingredients that immediately follows, though that seems like pretty clunky phrasing if you ask me.)

If dinner's just not dinner without a roast of some kind, there's Cheese-Bean Roast.

This one goes all crazy and adds an eighth of a teaspoon of paprika along with the salt and pepper. Wild!

Those with slightly more extravagant tastes could use coupons for canned fish and make delicacies like Salmon Custard.

Custard recipes were pretty popular, probably reflecting the fact that neither fresh milk nor eggs were rationed because they were too hard to ship overseas.

Families that were sick of all the custard might be placated with Creole Tuna Fish and Peas.

I always associate Creole cooking with hot sauce and the holy trinity of onion, bell pepper, and celery. Rawleigh seems to see it more as a cuisine that's happy to blend salad dressing with chili sauce to season seafood-- which, I guess, fine, but that doesn't really seem to be the best takeaway, especially if you're just using said glop on canned tuna.

For those lucky enough to have a bit of leftover ham, there's Deep-Dish Dinner.

The cheesy sauce and vegetables will make the leftover meat (or frankfurters, minced ham, diced ham, or sausage-- It's adaptable!) go a long way.

Perhaps the thing that puzzled me the most, though, was the fixation on stuffed peppers. I mean, I get why stuffed peppers could be another good way to make rationed meat stretch, but in a booklet with all of 58 recipes, I might expect one recipe for stuffed peppers.

Sure, maybe something stuffed with macaroni, cheese, and tomato puree.

I wouldn't really expect a second stuffed pepper recipe in the same very short booklet, but if I did...

It would not also be stuffed with macaroni, cheese, and tomato. (Well, it's tomato soup this time, not puree, so Rawleigh apparently thinks the distinction is enough to merit an entirely new recipe. They never watched my Grandma cook, as she was fully convinced that any canned tomato product could be replaced by any other canned tomato product.)

And I really would not expect a third stuffed pepper recipe. There is one, though, and I'll bet you never guess what it's stuffed with!

Yep. Macaroni. Cheese. Tomatoes. You'd think that Rawleigh also sold macaroni, green peppers, and/or tomato products, but nope. Apparently someone who wrote this really just loved endless variations of macaroni-and-tomato-stuffed peppers with cheese. 

Oh, well. Let's forget all that and just lean back in a nice bath and let the hot water and mild Rawleigh soap sooth all our wartime worries.

And we'll definitely NOT worry that the bathtub is entirely out of scale with our body. Or that we are in the tub sideways. Or that the tub appears to be much deeper than a standard tub would be. I guess the war and/or Rawleigh just made everything weird.