And now it's almost September. Hooray. September is the start of drink-from-the-firehose season for me, but I imagine that for the housewives the Rawleigh's Good Health Guide Almanac Cook Book (1953) had in mind as the main audience, September meant at least a small break. Little Linda and Johnny might be going to school! The house (and especially the kitchen!) might start cooling off. Rawleigh's recipe ideas sometimes seem appropriate for the season and sometimes seem comically mismatched, so let's see what they thought the good wives and mothers of 1953 should be cooking up in September.
It seems like Rawleigh counted on the usual fickle early fall weather by providing plenty of cold items (like tuna fish salad and chiffon pie), but also hedging their bets by serving the cold items with things that would need to be baked for an extended period (like a full leg of lamb or a peach betty that requites two hours in the oven). I'm sorry to report that the menu items that I most wanted recipes for (gelatin beet salad and cocomint chiffon pie) have no accompanying recipes. We're left with things like the standard tuna salad and the aforementioned peach betty.
September is also apparently unofficially potato month, as the menus call for mashed potatoes, twice baked potatoes, baked sliced pimiento potatoes, creamed potatoes, Franconia potatoes, Dutch potato salad (made in the pressure cooker!), and presumably also in Thursday night's New England boiled dinner, the only menu that doesn't explicitly mention potatoes.
What's in store for Virgos? Well, the book says they are "strong believer[s] in blue blood," who "aspire to the best things." They may consider themselves "fine scholars and inspirational musicians," so I guess this is all a warning to steer clear of Dorothy when she's trying to put together one of her insufferable little ladies' luncheons where she shows off her new china, goes on and on about the wonders of vitamin-enriched bread, and then makes everybody listen to her play the flute.
The Rawleigh product for September is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that Linda and Johnny are going to drag all kinds of germs home from school.
I love that Rawleigh keeps stating that the pine oil disinfectant is "safe to use." It's in both the pink and the blue large type, plus serves as point three on the list of the product's features. I guess that families in the 1950s were getting wary of the household disinfectants that were so efficient at killing off germs that they also killed off the biggest reservoirs of germs: the entire family. I'm sure glad we have better product safety laws now!
Happy September, whether this marks the start or end of your busy season, or is just another month.
I'm glad that there's finally a cleaner that you can wash your face with and kill typhoid. I wonder how many mothers dipped their kids in this when they got home from school?
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of school, I imagine women in more rural areas didn't get much of a break considering that they were up to their armpits in zucchini and other produce that had to be processed in a very short time. That would be especially true if the daughter who helped with everything went back to school. I guess that parents always wanted their kids to be born as fully independent adults even if they pretend that they don't.
Getting unpaid employees seemed like it was kind of the point to having kids on a farm.
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