What's up with Watkins?

You know how I'm always posting Rawleigh pamphlets when I can find them thanks to my family history with this questionable sell-from-home company? Well, today we're looking at something similar: Watkins. When I found a copy of Watkins Cook Book (J. R. Watkins Company, 1938), I had to pick it up to see what this sell-spices-and-other-assorted-nonsense from home company thought people should be cooking in the years following the Great Depression. 

The plain blue cover is a good indication that a lot of the cooking is very plain and practical too-- as would befit post-Great-Depression food. There's a lot of repurposing. Got leftover cereal? Turn it into soup. 

Very, very bland soup, seasoned only with a bit of salt and Watkins pepper.

Need a sandwich, but have only odds and ends?

Just slap some olives, almonds, peppers, and apple between slices of bread and call it a sandwich. Hopefully, whoever you packed it for will be at work or school by the time they figure out the filling is a random assortment of be-mayoed plantstuff and you won't have to hear the complaints until evening, by which time they will hopefully be too wiped out from mining the coal or clapping the erasers for the chalkboard or whatever else people had to do at work or school back in 1938 to put up too much of a fight.

The book also had the requisite questionably-Eye-talian recipes, like this Spaghetti Italianne.

Any recipe that begins with breaking the spaghetti into smaller pieces automatically loses some Italian points, I'm pretty sure-- and it doesn't help the case that the sauce is flavored with Worcestershire and catsup.

I think I'd rather go with their macaroni-and-cheese-adjacent Spaghetti Loaf.

The "Italianne" spaghetti made me a little too skeptical of the book's ideas about Italian cooking, though. When I saw a recipe for Gnocchi (described also as "Italian Luncheon Dish"), I expected to see little potato-based dumplings shaped on a fork and boiled before serving, so I was skeptical when I found this instead.

Cornmeal gnocchi, cut out like tiny cookies and baked? It sounded like Watkins was making things up again, but this is totally a thing. I can never get too high and mighty working on this blog because it reminds me way too often that there's so much I don't know.

Still, though, it's not a bad idea to be skeptical. This book ends with a health guide, naming the various components of food, telling why they are important, and listing good sources of them. I'm not sure how much I trust a book that tells me to get my vitamims...

And I'm even more puzzled when it insists that sugar is a good source of vitamims. Sorry, Watkins, but you lost me there. I appreciate the effort to help people use up leftovers when money was tight, but the health advice seems a bit suspect! 

On second thought, though, I could maybe argue that Reese's peanut butter cups are an excellent source of vitamims, what with all the sugar. Hmm. Maybe I'll come around to their health advice too, the same way I did with my new understanding of gnocchi....