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...