Recipes that will make you think differently about victory

The cover of this booklet seems to suggest that the title is Recipes.

However, the title page inside says Victory Recipes (Columbia Broadcasting System, WCCO, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1943), so I will go with that. It's more representative of what the book is: a book on "Menu planning in wartime, a wartime involving rationing, points and scarcities." The recipes come from a contest held by WCCO's Saturday Morning Open House show, which must have been super popular, as the book claims that 1,500,000 recipes had been submitted during its nearly four years in existence.

What kinds of recipes was the station looking for in World War II? Well, like nearly all midwestern cookbooks of the time, this one suggests that recipes with extremely questionable claims to an ethnic group are welcome.

What makes Mexican Rice Timbales Mexican? The French timbale form? The old English cheese? The cooked asparagus garnish? My guess is that maybe it's the fact that these have rice in them, since rice is right in the title, but it's not as if Mexican cuisine has the only claim to rice...

Since meat was rationed, I expected to see some soybean recipes, and I was not disappointed.

Sometimes I think that women in the 1940s could (and did!) loaf-ify pretty much everything. Give them bits of things that need to be used up, a cup or two of crumbs and an egg, and bam! Loaf in about two hours.

The book made me laugh at myself when I realized my distinctly 21st century vantage point. When I saw this recipe, I was incredulous.

Duck and Rice Dinner? As a watcher of cooking shows, I thought, "Who would splurge on a duck during wartime?" And then I felt incredibly silly when I realized that this was a way to use a duck that the family hunter bagged! It wasn't a luxury. It was just a way to avoid using points to get meat.

Well, maybe it was still a luxury compared to eating shit in a squash boat (I guess to help save the wheat bread that would normally serve as the "shingle").

I also find it interesting that Squash with Chipped Beef is imagined as a "Saturday lunch before the big football game." Tailgating was definitely not a thing back then!

Victory sandwiches filled with carrots, olives, raisins, chopped nuts, and mayonnaise may also have helped drive the popularity of duck hunting.

The prospect of a raisin-and-olive-salad sandwich was enough to make almost anyone reach for a gun. (To hunt ducks, obviously.)

There was also the threat of a baked bean, peanut, celery, onion, and ketchup sandwich to contend with.

And for sugar rationing, cooks had to get really creative with their icings.

There's nothing quite like the thought of a cake covered in a grape-jelly-flavored meringue to make people give up on the idea of cake entirely.

Victory recipes are definitely fun to read through, but I'm pretty glad I didn't have to experience them.