Del Monte suggests ways to make everything dark green, kind of metallic, and overly moist

I love the front of Del Monte Spinach: A Few Suggestions for Its Everyday Service (undated, but the 1930s estimate I've seen online seems about right).

The top picture (which doesn't seem to illustrate, as far as I can tell, any of the 19 recipes in the pamphlet) looks like a side dish masquerading as a wrapped gift, what with the red-and-white striped sides capped off with a frill of ruffly canned spinach. The middle image looks like a yellow-eyed alien creature peeking out of spinach shrubberies at the diners about to devour it, and the bottom image is maybe Oscar the Grouch on a spa day? (Of course he would have lemon slices on his eyes, not cucumber. He needs to be grouchy, and citrus juice in one's eyes will accomplish that... And the flowery bowl is the spa equivalent of a trash can, which is so fancy as to be infuriating.)

In any case, most of  the recipes are pretty straightforward, like creamed spinach or baked onions stuffed with spinach. A slight variation of creamed spinach for people who really enjoy two supremely boring vegetables is Spinach and Celery Purée.

Yep-- It's basically creamed spinach, made exciting with the addition of thinly-sliced celery. 😮 (Yes, that is definitely a sarcastic "Wow!" face.)

Since it was basically impossible to get too far away from deviled eggs in old recipe collections, as they were the go-to way to add cheap protein to round out any meal, there's a Stuffed Egg Salad.

I thought it was interesting that the filling in this case is just spinach with green onions, salt, and mayonnaise. The yolks get put through a sieve and sprinkled on as a topping-- perhaps because people in the '30s weren't prepared for green eggs and needed the golden yolks to hide the green bits?

The book also offers a very wet and squishy-sounding sandwich of the "anything between slices of bread counts as a sandwich" school of thought.

I imagine chopped up canned spinach mixed with mashed sardines and lemon juice and slapped on buttered bread would indeed make "A moist sandwich for the lunch box"-- one the maker might be glad to have out of the house before the diners discover what got packed. (I swear, some of the old lunchbox sandwich recipes suggest that the cooks were just constantly trying to make the kids and/ or husbands just pack their own goddamn sandwiches, although it's more likely the families didn't have a lot of money or a good way to get to the grocery too often and just had to figure out how to use up whatever odds and ends they had around the house.)

My favorite combo might just be the Spinach Salad--French Dressing.

I am overly amused at the thought of topping garden-fresh lettuce leaves with a tightly-molded wad of canned spinach and some French dressing. If you've got the fresh lettuce, well, there's the salad. Canned spinach can only detract! (But of course, leaving it off would mean having to find a new recipe to fill that hole in the pamphlet, so gloppy, metallic canned spinach on top of fresh lettuce it is!)

You've got to admire the recipe writers' pragmatism: Throw in enough recipes to fill up the space and then go off to do something else. No point in trying to make anything too good out of canned spinach...

Such a very '70s picture!

I have, admittedly, been making fun of The American Culinary Society's Menu Maker (Marguerite Patten, 1973) for several posts, but it's out of love (well, mostly love, but also partly vicarious dyspepsia). I've been saving the thing I love most, though. This book has one of the most perfectly 1970s pictures I own. Feast your eyes on this chorus line of whole fish clearing the way for a billowy pineapple float.

There's nothing quite so peaceful (and by peaceful, I mean nightmare-inducing) as a platter full of whole fish in a starburst of citrus, chins resting on tomato slices and tails weighted with asparagus as their sunken eyes remind all who behold them that death comes for us all. And it will insist that some of us be coated with gelatin and put on a macabre display when we go.

That's why they need to be followed by the fluffy little cloud of pineapple-- so we can say "Ooh, cute!" Then we can admire the way the gold-tipped meringue points imitate the pineapple skin and the way the saved pineapple top completes the look, because the best way to put a pineapple on a 1970s dinner table is to completely deconstruct it and then reconstruct it again with ice cream and whipped egg whites to show off that one has the leisure time to fuck around with a pineapple all day.

Should you ever need put on a 1970s dinner party (and have an entire day to arrange garnishes, shellac them with fishy gelatin, whip and pipe egg whites, etc.), here are the recipes.

I think I'm just going to use the picture as the wallpaper on my desktop for a few weeks. I scanned it. That's as much work as I am willing to put into this menu.

Not-so-Sexy Sixties Microwave Recipes

I've written about Amana microwave cookbooks before, but those books were from the 1970s-- a time when microwaves were just beginning to get popular. Today's book is special because it's even earlier.

The Amana Radarange Microwave oven Microwave Cooking Guide is from 1968-- just after the first models appropriate for household use went into the market.

Part of what I love about the cookbook is its sixties vibe. Microwaves were so new that owners had to be instructed on how to find a place for the appliance, and this kitchen is just soooo sixties I want to frame it and hang it by my desk.

Just look at the cheery red-orange cupboards with the white trim! And the profusion of bright orange and yellow flowers in the wallpaper, with an avocado-green dining room chair hiding in the background! It's such a cheery late-'60s wonderland that I can almost forget for a second that people who weren't killing and dying in Vietnam were being assassinated right here at home. 

But hey! At least lobsters didn't feel self-conscious about going out with unshaven armpits.

And yeah... If you were rich enough to own a microwave, you were also rich enough to nuke a lobster. I've already covered that.

The thing that really struck me about this very early microwave cookbook, though, was just how many organ meat recipes it had. The microwave was billed as an easy way to cook liver.

It could also scramble sweetbreads like nobody's business.

Or it could bake veal OR pork brains!

Or if you couldn't remember whether your fridge was full of sweetbreads or brains, well, either could be Dejeunered, as long as you had a few fresh veggies and some canned asparugs.

It just seemed odd to see so many organ meat recipes (dishes that seem more like meals for farmers who used up all parts of their animals or for people on limited budgets who couldn't afford steaks than for ritzy trend setters) in a cookbook for a pricy appliance. I guess maybe microwave owners had to make up for the price of the microwave by making more economical dishes?

Or maybe tastes just really were more old-fashioned back then, as the first word in "Prune Party Crock" now seems out of place to me.

Yeah, there's wine in the prunes, but maybe party guests would rather have their alcohol without prunes, especially if they're trying to make smoldering glances to the cutie across the room rather than worrying about what that gurgly feeling down below might presage....

I'm just not sure Amana was quite ready to party in 1968, but it was trying to make using up the prunes and organ meat seem kind of fancy and thrilling.

These cringes are not just from the recipes...

I would be remiss not to note that Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969) reminds me that the 1960s were definitely NOT enlightened times. Each selection of recipes comes with a headnote describing the restaurant from which they came, and some of those headnotes have... shall we say... not aged well.

Maybe some people will think the biggest offense in the section featuring Homard à la Crème is the idea that one should waste lobster, brandy, sherry, butter, and cream in a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup.

I'm more disturbed by the description of the Bacchanal restaurant from which it comes, however...

The end of the last line... Ouch! I'll bet the people who played those "slave girls" et al. had to put up with a lot. People who thought it was a good time to be served this way were surely royal pains in the ass.

And then there was the Golden Lion, which offered up a different type of old-school cruelty.

No, I'm not talking about stretching out a creamy oyster soup with an indeterminate number of cans of frozen condensed oyster stew. 

I'm talking about using phrases like "gateway to the Orient" and "exotic spectaculars" and a longing for "the glory of British colonialism at its height, when far-ranging British ships were opening to Western civilization the mysteries of the East." This concept aged so poorly that The Golden Lion no longer exists, but the Seattle Public Library's digital collection offers a menu, and the menu does in fact include an oyster-based Golden Lion Soup, priced at $1.50 (which, assuming this menu is roughly contemporary with the book, would be about $13 now). 

I know people often long for a simpler or more glorious past, but looking through old cookbooks is a good reminder that I am happy not to be there! Not that society has necessarily made that much progress since this book was published, but we've made enough that most reasonable people know it's at least in poor taste to playact oppressive stereotypes and assume one should be "justly proud" about it. It's a small, small victory, but I'll take what I can get...