Endless salads: The entire point of a 1930s refrigerator

I got the Westinghouse Refrigerator Book (1932) partly because it was under $5 and had a lovely pastel cover, but if you know anything about me, you probably also suspect that I wanted a refrigerator cookbook because refrigerators were a gateway to that most coveted of early-to-mid-20th-century dishes: the chilled salad. This book did not disappoint.

There is, of course, a salad with a kind of racist name.

I'm not really sure why shaved cabbage topped with tomato slices, half a hard boiled egg, chopped parsley, and "a generous mound of mayonnaise which has been pressed through a pastry bag" couldn't simply have been called a garden salad.

There is an attempt to show off the freezer compartment.

Everyone is sure to be thrilled by chunks of frozen tomato, cucumber, green pepper, crushed pineapple, and celery suspended in a mayonnaise-y gelatin. 

There's a "Health Salad," though I'm not really sure what sets it apart as being any healthier than the others.

The vegetables are certainly nutritious, but not particularly distinctive. Maybe Philadelphia cream cheese was considered a health food in the 1930s? 

There's a "de Luxe" salad. Something about making "deluxe" into two words always makes me feel like it's fancier, somehow.

Here, apparently "de Luxe" means the standard gelatin and chopped veggie mixture get the canned tomato soup and American cream cheese treatment. (Also, how was American cream cheese different from Philadelphia cream cheese?)

There's also a reminder that cottage cheese was once so popular (especially when money was tight) that a ring mold of cottage cheese stiffened with gelatin could be considered a main dish...

...as long as there was a green salad served in the middle and hot clover leaf rolls on the side.

Of course, for those with more free time and a vaguely artistic personality, there was also the opportunity to create a multicolored showpiece salad.

Yep-- the layers are in an ice tray! So homemakers could show off that they had ice trays! And the two-toned salad cubes could nestle into a little lettuce nest. Just perfect for a ladies' luncheon!

And everybody would be jazzed to have tomato aspic on top of cucumber and pineapple jelly. Or at least, that was the polite social fiction. 

But you know that afterwards, Phyllis and Geraldine would spend an hour discussing how silly and vain it was to show off the fancy ice cube tray by serving tomatoes and olives on top of cucumbers and canned pineapple. And then Norma would overhear them and report back to the host, Mildred, and things would never be quite the same.... 

And that's why I love the old salad recipes. They're so dramatic! (Just like Mildred.)