Recipe Dispatches from the Dispatch

Do you remember newspapers? You know, the kind that came on actual paper and that (if you were like me) you begged your parents to get every day because you didn't want to miss out on the comic strips and they were too cheap to get a subscription? Today's pick is from back when newspapers were so popular they would sell their own cookbooks. Well, kind of. 

This is a loose-leaf cookbook (edited by Bernice Thomas) in a binder, and readers could send away for additional recipe sets to keep adding to their collections. More specifically, "From time to time, 20 pages of recipes will be released for distribution to Dispatch Readers and can be secured by writing the Household Department of The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio, and inclosing 9 cents in stamps." Whoever owned this one gave up pretty quickly, as my Dispatch Recipe Book only has pages 1 and 2 of each chapter (1 on the front and 2 on the back-- so I only have one sheet of paper for each chapter). It's undated, but the Columbus Metropolitan library dates the collection as beginning in February 1933. (They also scanned the whole thing, so the link is worth checking out-- though you will be limited as to how many pages you can access at one time.) As far as I can tell, "Volume One" was an ambitious claim. I couldn't find evidence of a volume two (though the library's copy of volume one proves there were a lot more pages than I have).

For today, let's "enjoy" a brief menu from the small selection of pages in my volume. We need to start with an appetizer, of course.

It's pickled green chili peppers, olives, Worcestershire, and "enough yellow grated cheese to make a paste." (Doesn't that sound appetizing? Mmmm.... Paste.) And then the paste is spread on pineapple, topped with more pineapple, frosted with "plain soft yellow cream cheese," and broiled. So... weird. 

Also, my brain broke when I was trying to figure out what "Cut six slices pineapple in half, making two circles" meant. I thought pineapple slices were already circles, so how halving six of them would result in two circles (rather than a dozen half-circles) completely eluded me. I am terrible at visualizing written directions for real-world physical processes (I need pictures!), so I knew I must be missing something. (I finally realized cooks were probably supposed to try to cut the pineapple slices like a layer cake, so each single thicker circle turns into two thinner ones, but it took me a while-- longer than I am willing to admit. I'm still not convinced I would have the coordination to make that happen, but at least I think I understand the process now.) These are the instructions you get when nobody has home cooks test the recipe before you print it.

The entrée should be more straightforward so my brain can rest. How about a nice spaghetti platter? A bounty of spaghetti coated in a thick tomato sauce seasoned lavishly with herbs...

...or not! Yes, this is just buttered spaghetti noodles with link sausages, pineapple, and prunes camping in Hoovervilles on the edges of the platter. You can definitely tell this one is Great Depression era.

Maybe we should end the meal with a nice novelty to lighten the mood.

Banana novelty is one of those recipes for when home cooks must have been bored out of their minds. Cutting grooves in bananas, filling the grooves with partially congealed gelatin (which sounds nearly as easy as nailing Jell-O to the wall), and then chilling the combo until the gelatin sets up (and the banana turns brown) seems so pointless when you can just stir a sliced banana or two into a container of partially set gelatin and call it a day.

Maybe these recipes are the reason that whoever owned this book gave up after the first round of pages? Who knows, but at least I got a few of them.

Recipes without the main ingredient

I know to expect plenty of typos and mistakes in old recipe collections that schools, church groups, charities, etc. sold to raise money. It's not like Gertrude from down the street or Mildred from the church choir was really that concerned about whether anybody else would be able to follow their instructions. Good cooks should have enough sense to figure out what they meant, and if not, well, then nobody else's version of the recipe would be as good as Gertrude's or Mildred's.

I expect at least somewhat more accuracy if I'm getting recipes that are formally published as part of a newspaper's recipe collection. Newspapers are supposed to have proofreaders, after all. The Dispatch Recipe Collection (put together by The Columbus Dispatch (newspaper) in 1933, edited by Bernice Thomas) shows that this was not always the case.

See if you can spot the missing ingredient in the egg cutlets.

That's right-- no eggs, except for the one that's beaten and used to adhere the bread crumbs to the cutlets' exteriors. Instead of the eggs, the recipe just lists the finely cut pim(i)ento a second time. (Maybe Thomas just wanted to try out both spellings?) So much for adding the eggs to the seasoned thick white sauce before "spreard"ing the mixture in a shallow pan to chill until stiff.

Okay, now guess what is in the pear macaroni salad.

If you unimaginatively guessed "pears" and "macaroni," you were only half right. The pears are saladified not with macaroni, but with macaroons. So, yes, pears slathered in cream cheese, rolled in cookie crumbs, and topped with a maraschino cherry half counted as a salad as long as they came atop a lettuce leaf with a spoonful of mayonnaise.

I guess this all suggests that the "women's pages" in 1930s weren't considered worthy of having a proofreader. Or maybe the proofreader just got so distracted by the prospect of macaroons and mayonnaise that proofreading became impossible? 

I know the explanation is probably just Occam's razor-- nobody really cared enough to notice-- but it's fun to speculate.