A fridge full of ribbons, charlottes, and "vegetarian" fish

The Westinghouse Refrigerator Book (1932) is fun because it gives a little insight into what life was like for families lucky enough to get a refrigerator in the early 1930s. 

I wonder what the pink loaf pan on the cover is supposed to be filled with. It could be a Jell-O concoction, a salmon loaf, a beet salad, a strawberry ice... In any case, it's probably for the ladies' luncheon our Westinghouse owner has to host this week to show off her new refrigerator.

And of course, if you want to impress the ladies' aid society during the luncheon, you'll need a ribbon sandwich loaf. 

The layers in this one are pretty simple-- pimiento cream cheese and green pepper cream cheese-- with an "icing" of egg-yolk-enriched cream cheese. It's much less complicated than the ones that come later (featuring such combos as cottage cheese, potatoes, crushed pineapple, and garlic powder). Plus, the pimiento flower on top looks so nice!

I wonder why the bread is so pink, though! Maybe the loaf pan in the cover picture is full of the cook's special pink bread dough, getting ready to rise overnight in the fridge?

Next, the luncheon hostess needs a fancy sweet. Maybe an Apricot Charlotte for dessert would impress?

I love that making this dessert entails carefully changing the refrigerator's temperature-- I'm guessing in an attempt to get the dessert frozen initially but avoid freezing everything else in the fridge.

Of course, a good 1930s cook couldn't focus entirely on impressing the ladies. There were also children to attend to. I was surprised to see so many desserts had regular versions and children's versions, like this Child's Charlotte.

I initially thought the assumption was that children don't like fruit all that much so this would be plain, but as I reviewed the children's versions of desserts, I noticed that they tended to have more milk and eggs and less cream, so my guess is that the desserts were supposed to be part of the effort to get kids to ingest a quart of milk a day.

The recipe doesn't suggest any specific personalization to make the dessert more attractive to kids, but the accompanying picture shows it spruced up with strawberries and animal crackers.

Anything to distract from the fact that mom's trying to get more milk down the youngsters' throats...

The book also reminded me that "vegetarian" did not mean the same thing in the 1930s as it does today, especially when Catholics had to abstain from meat (meaning land animals) on Fridays.

Not too many current vegetarian appetizers would include anchovy fillets, but they'd be fine for the "fish on Fridays" bunch. (Plus, now the little fish are more likely to be part of a fancy toast or pricy pasta dish than plunked down on cabbage and green pepper slathered with cocktail sauce.)

I'm just happy that my fridge has way more square footage than the one in the illustration. Mine is packed to the gills and maybe twice the size of that one, and there's only about one-and-a-half people in my household. (That comment has nothing to do with children. We just have a weird arrangement that's kind of hard to explain.) The 1930s women had to cook for the ladies' luncheon and at least a couple of kids, and they still had the space in such a tiny fridge to set multiple fancy gelatin molds and refrigerate the ribbon loaf! I'm impressed. (And glad I live in 2024).