Let's Play a Game

This week, I want to play a game. (Okay, maybe that link was a little misleading. It's not that kind of game. Nobody has to saw off a body part or anything to "win.") I'm going to present a lunch and dinner menu consisting of a series of not-particularly-surprising recipes that are from a specialized cookbook published in 1948. You have to figure out what the cookbook's specialty is supposed to be.

Okay, let's start lunch with a vitamin-packed salad.

The combo of carrots, green peppers, and apples also gets a sprinkling of chopped peanuts, so maybe it's a health food cookbook? Lots of veggies combined with peanuts definitely seems health foody.

The peanuts are probably not enough protein on their own. To go with that, let's have some Baked Rabbit.

Obviously, it's not actual rabbit, but the "Welsh rabbit/ rarebit" variety, so maybe this is a vegetarian cookbook? The use of processed American cheese suggests it's not a particularly health-foody vegetarian cookbook if that's the case. "Processed" did have a nice scientific ring in 1948, though, so maybe that doesn't wreck the vegetarian health food theory.

Now, let's move on to dinner. We can start with something that blows the vegetarian theory out of the water: Broiled Chicken. 

And lest you think that maybe this is a diet to convert people away from the saturated fats in red meat, note that the chicken needs to be basted in some fat, and bacon grease is one of the options. There haven't been too many carb-heavy foods so far, though, so maybe this is a low-carb diet? Well, let's go for the side dishes and find out.

Well, potatoes are still on the menu...

...as are minted green peas. So carbs must be okay, I guess. Can we have dessert from this cookbook? Maybe if there's a dessert, that will help you figure out the specialty. 

Aaaaand... it's pretty standard sugar cookies. That does not help. Give up?

It's 201 Tasty Dishes for Reducers (Victor H. Landlahr)!? What makes this a weight-loss cookbook? It honestly just seems like a pretty standard cookbook. Maybe there's a little less butter in the potato-parsnip combo and on the minted peas than one might expect? Maybe the rabbit servings are a little on the small side? Who knows?

The funny thing is that the recipes themselves don't really even seem to be related to the reducing component of the book. There's a bunch of pretty standard-looking recipes (aside from occasionally specifying to use lean cuts of meat or skim milk) with no real guidance on their calorie counts or how to combine them, followed by an extremely Spartan 7-day reducing diet at the very end of the book (Most days call for less than 1000 calories total! 😵) that makes almost no mention of any of the actual recipes and generally calls for dieters to eat things like 2/3 of a cup of spinach, 3 oz. of broiled hamburger, and 1/3 of a cup of canned applesauce. It's almost like Landlahr (or whoever actually wrote the book-- I'm just naming Landlahr since he wrote the forward and is responsible for other diet books) really only had a 12-or-so page reducing diet and knew he couldn't sell that by itself, so he padded it out with unrelated recipes at the beginning and some calorie count and height-weight charts at the end.

I'm pretty sure that whoever originally owned this book wasn't all that committed to diet recipes either, as she taped this in the front:

I am kind of charmed to learn that "stick tight pie" is "the old fashioned name for pecan pie." I'd never heard that before, and it seems like the name must be largely localized and forgotten, as I could only find ONE relevant result with a Google search. (Mostly, Google seemed to think I needed help with getting a lattice pie crust to work!) I'm so glad the previous owner of this book did not take it too seriously, and she taught me something new. The other recipes are mostly fine but forgettable.