Meaty Occasions

More than 50 years before Drayton Sawyer advised chili cook off contestants not to "skimp on the meat," the National Live Stock and Meat Board put out Meat for Every Occasion (1932) with essentially the same advice.

However, the Live Stock Board was advertising more traditional meat than Drayton was using, and it does not offer a chili recipe, either-- just recommendations for serving meat at any and every meal. The lunch and dinner chapters are pretty much as expected, with hash and meat in cream sauce making appearances in the lunch section and roasts and chops suggested for dinner. The breakfast items go beyond what I expected, though. Rather than pairing the eggs with bacon or ham, the booklet suggests making Sweetbreads in Egg Sauce.

In case parboiling and chopping the sweetbreads and making a sauce is an insufficient amount of work first thing in the morning, the book also notes that the sauce can be served "in cream puff shells." Have fun making those before the sun even comes up! (Or just be lazy and serve the sauce over toast.)

For those who prefer a sweet-and-savory meal, the booklet recommends Liver Baked in Apples as a breakfast treat. 

Just be sure to warn the diners that the apples hide liver among the raisins and chopped nuts in the filling! Or be prepared for some early morning gagging when people worry that something has gone terribly wrong with the raisins....

The booklet's picnic recommendations also caught my eye. They go beyond explaining how to roast a hot dog on a stick or turn a wad of raw ground meat into a charcoal briquette burger. There is an attempt to go international with Mexican Camp Sandwiches.

I'm not sure what makes this blend of bacon, shredded dried beef, grated cheese, and chili sauce particularly Mexican OR suitable for outdoor cooking. I guess the chili sauce is supposed to be the "Mexican" ingredient, though the version called for in a 1930s cookbook is likely only slightly different from ketchup. The fact that this is made in a frying pan means this could potentially be made over a fire, but there are plenty of other frying-pan recipes in the other sections of the cookbook. I kind of wonder if this one just got thrown in the picnic recommendations to fill up extra space...

Even more puzzling-- to me at least-- is the Ribbon Sandwich Loaf.

It's just a stack of ham slices with ketchup, mustard, and grated cheese in between. Why is it assembled in a baking pan? Is it supposed to be baked? I'd assume you could just use a platter if this tower was supposed to be served as-is, but there are no baking instructions. And without any heat to help cement the layers together, isn't this more of a tower than a loaf? And if it's supposed to be heated, how will that work if it's outdoors? The oven would seem to be the best bet if this stack needed to be heated up, not a campfire or grill. And how is this supposed to be served and eaten? Cut into slices and served like a layer cake? Somehow turned into a sandwich filling? I imagine someone out there knows what this is supposed to be, but I'm just mystified.

At least the title Meat for Every Occasion suggests this booklet is ready for anything. The National Live Stock and Meat Board was thinking of "every occasion" as specifically dining occasions, but the booklet is equally prepared for confounding and amusing an extremely niche blogger 90+ years in the future. It was very forward-thinking.