Salad Collecting

I consider myself to be a collector-- too much of one, really. If you can sidle your way around my stacks of old cookbooks, you'll probably run smack into a shelf full of tiny plastic replicas of Leatherface and Ash Williams and R.J. MacReady and Herbert West and... (And don't worry. I'm clumsy. I've knocked them off too. They should be fine as long as you don't get flustered and step on one.)

Anyway, I'm a collector. But the bar to being a collector was much lower in 1950s America, as evidenced by the Collector's Cook Book inserts that came in issues of Women's Day magazine. They were just a few pages of recipes printed on coarse paper, meant to be ripped out and kept after the rest of the magazine got tossed out, so the aggregated collection might serve as a loose-leaf cookbook. Women could collect those for a few years before they would even need to get a second folder, so this was not the type of collection that could take over one's house. The point (Surprise! I kind of have one!) is that I recently acquired the Main Dish Salads & Salad Dressings collection from June 1958.

I'm not really sure what the cover is supposed to represent. It looks like there's a bird flying in from the left, looking down at... Maybe a garden? That's kind of shaped like a blocky woman with a shrub growing in her face, and she's wearing a quilted dress that's short enough to reveal she has three legs? (And she likes lace-up boots.) Or something.

There aren't a lot of recipes, as this is only a few pages long, and about a quarter of every page is taken up by a quote like Martial's "...why is it that lettuce, which used to end our grandsires' dinners, ushers in our banquets?" I'm sure the cooks of 1958 contemplated that while they desperately tried to wrangle dinner out of whatever cans they had stocked in the pantry and whatever was in the back of the fridge that had not yet sprouted a fur coat. Some of the salads definitely suggest this desperation, like the Frankfurter, Egg, and Cheese Salad.

I guess it's egg salad for when you don't have quite enough eggs, or ham salad for when you don't actually have ham, depending on your perspective. In any case, it has definite "clearing-out-the-fridge" vibes.

It's the same with Kidney-Bean and Salami Salad, except this one raids the pantry too, not just the fridge.

Gotta do something with the canned kidney beans eventually, right? Might as well put them in salad with hard-cooked eggs and some salami strips.

The cooks who wanted to pretend the let's-use-some-shit-up salad was fancy might prefer to call it Salmagundi.

It's still just a mixture of semi-random cooked veggies, eggs, cheese, and processed meats, but at least it sounds higher class.

For those special occasions, though, there is a Jellied Lobster Ring.

You can tell it's fancy because it uses unflavored gelatin-- not lemon! And it features two cups of diced lobster meat. The peas are frozen, not canned! In short, this one goes all out because occasionally, even 1950s cooks needed something more than hard-cooked eggs mixed with mayonnaise and whatever else was in danger of spoiling or had been in the cupboards for who-knows-how-long.

I'm sure the 1950s women would think I'm weird for being an adult (by age, anyway) with a big, unruly toy collection and no affection for mayonnaise or children. I feel kind of bad for them, living in a world circumscribed by hard-cooked eggs and recipes ripped from magazines that also provided detailed instructions to sew their children's toys and threatened that their husbands would leave them if they failed to properly and regularly deodorize their crotches. At least we all share a bit of the collecting bug. That is just part of human nature.