Keeping it cool with the Kelvinator

Cooking with Cold (Kelvin Kitchen, 1932) showed up right at the start of August, as if the booklet knew it might get stuck in the queue for who-knows-how-long if it had showed up in a cold-weather month.

I love the little ice cubes pretending to be an ellipsis after "with" almost as much as I love the tiny Kelvinator coat of arms (which includes a panel with retort and volumetric flasks, two panels of lightning, one panel with a cloudy sky, and in the center-- I don't know-- a black rabbit with a really long snout wearing a dark shirt with a white collar? I'm sure it's actually something related to electricity, but I have no idea what). There's also a woman stirring something in a bowl, but the artist couldn't decide whether to make it day shot or day-for-night and split it into both. 

The booklet has plenty of delectable desserts, but you know I'm not going to tell you how to make fresh strawberry ice cream or Chantilly mousse. Instead, we'll start with an appetizer of Frozen Clam Bouillon.

Will little cupfuls of clam bouillon frozen "to a mush," then topped with salted whipped cream and paprika make diners grateful that something more substantial is sure to follow or apprehensive about what the cook's idea of a delicious main dish might be?

Shrimp Cocktail with Ice Cups might be a slightly more substantial and entertaining starter, though.

I love the way this manages to make ice cubes seem exciting by partially freezing them, draining, and then saving the shell for a serving vessel. The sauce is also one of the spiciest I've seen in my old cookbooks-- six to eight drops of Tabasco in only 1-1/4 cups of sauce! I guess the cook had to offset the chill of the ice cups somehow.

Frozen salads are also pretty common in this booklet. Some are light and loaded with fruits and vegetables, like Frozen Pineapple Salad on Tomato Rings.

Maybe the concept of really cold food was so new back then that nobody thought about the possibility that people's teeth might be too sensitive for a whole plate full of icy chips of pineapple, celery, cabbage, and almonds (presuming they even wanted to try ingesting it). Or maybe the rounds of tomato jelly were supposed to melt the salad enough to make it easier to eat? Who knows?

Some salads are much heavier-- maybe for those summer days when people knew they needed calories but were too hot to want to eat them?

All the fat of the cream cheese, peanut butter, mayonnaise, and whipping cream might make this salad at least a little less likely to be icy? And it would be so cold that nobody could fully taste what that concoction paired with green peppers, pimiento, and celery was really like?

The main dishes made me wonder if "omelet" had a different meaning in 1939 than it does now.

The Frozen Shrimp Omelet is not cooked at all (assuming the shrimp are precooked)! And the shrimp is just mixed with egg yolks, with the whites folded in as the last step before freezing-- not even close to the classic filling enclosed in an envelope of cooked eggs.

There's also a Molded Lamb with Fruit for the people who love meat/ fruit combos (and to help meet my quota for gelatin-based concoctions).

This one starts with plain gelatin instead of fruit-flavored, but it also has a half-cup of fruit juice and 3/4-cup of sugar, so combine that with all the oranges and pineapple, and I'm not sure it would be any less sweet than if it had just started out with flavored gelatin and left out the sugar.

My favorite recipe, though, might be the creatively-named "Salmon Entrée."

Okay, the mixture of salmon, broken-up spaghetti, peas, lemon, and mayonnaise may not sound like much more than a very plain salmon/ pasta salad, but 1. It's frozen! (Kelvinator simply cannot resist telling home cooks to freeze pretty much everything.) and 2. There's a picture! In color!

What could be prettier than a chunk of frozen salmon and peas thunked atop a leaf of iceberg lettuce? Only that frozen chunk and pale leaf accompanied by a lemon slice cut into a flower shape.

I'm pretty sure this is better as art than it is as a main dish.

And I just now figured out how the Kelvinator recipes really kept diners cool on hot summer days. Guests would stare down a slab of frozen salmon/ spaghetti/ canned peas, or an icy chunk of random fruits and veggies on a sea of tomato aspic, or a cup full of clam mush, or a plate fully of frozen raw egg froth, and an icy feeling would creep over their bodies as they would realize "I have to eat this or risk offending the hostess!" Kelvinator's cooling worked on multiple levels.