Cheese and Ways to Serve It (Kraft-Phenix Cheese Corporation, 1933).

What a cute little booklet! It’s sort of the dimensions of a recipe card, only a little longer, and the pages are perforated so you can tear out the recipes and put them in your recipe card file. The recipes are all cheese-related and mostly are variations on a few common themes: Cheese Sauce Poured Over Something, Macaroni and Cheese Molded or Stuffed Into Things, “Loaves” Made of Ground-Up Things with Cheese Functioning as Glue, or Fancy Party Sandwiches Made with Cream Cheese or Cheese Spreads. Practically all feature glutinous processed cheeses, mainly American or Velveeta. A lovely presentation of typical recipe-booklet convenience-food fare.

Graphic Design: A real favorite. The size, shape, and detachable pages make it incredibly cute. Inside is clean and modern-looking, with some feminine touches softening things up a bit.

Illustrations: This has one of the best covers ever––cute apron-bedecked 30s housewives frolic and serve up cheese dishes on a black background. Inside are very nice color illustrations of food and lots of black-and-white spot illustrations of housewives.

Look at all the different kinds of processed cheese products you can get!

You can even get Limburger!

This was from back in the days when "salad" meant a bizarre little piece of food art parked on a lettuce leaf.

No, it's not a cake, it's a party sandwich loaf!

It's not just Welsch Rabbit on Toast, it's Electric Welsch Rabbit on Toast!

Gee, Mom, isn't that bridge built yet?

Velveeta-stuffed toast logs! Mmmmmmmm!

For a truly elegant dessert, serve blocks of processed cheese on a cheese and fruit tray! OK, maybe not...

I love these cute little product illustrations.

Menus: 8.

Recipes containing Limburger cheese: None, unfortunately, although Kraft did make it at that time (there’s a picture of the package on page 5).

Great Recipe Names: Macaroni Mousse, Cheese Dreams.

Great Product Names: Kraft Kay, Kraft Taste-T-Spread, Kraft Ham-N-aise.

Sample Menu:

Afternoon Tea

“Philadelphia” Cream Cake
Coffee

Sample Recipes:

Macaroni Stuffed Peppers

5 green peppers
1 cup cooked macaroni
1 1/2 cups grated Kraft American Cheese or Velveeta
1 cup cooked tomatoes
1 cup bread crumbs
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Salt, pepper, paprika
1 can tomato soup

Remove tops and seeds from peppers and boil 5 minutes in salted water. Mix macaroni, 1 cup of cheese, tomatoes, crumbs, Worcestershire sauce and seasonings to taste. Drain the peppers and stuff with macaroni mixture. Stand upright in a baking dish, sprinkle remainder of cheese on top and pour around them the tomato soup slightly diluted with water. Bake in a moderate oven, 350°, 30 to 40 minutes.

Cheese-Bean Roast

1 lb. can kidney beans
1/2 lb. Kraft American Cheese or Velveeta
1 onion, chopped fine
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup bread crumbs
Salt, peppper, paprika
2 eggs

Drain liquid from beans, run beans and cheese through a food grinder. Cook onion in butter. Combine ingredients, add seasonings and beaten eggs. Mold into a loaf or roll, moisten with melted butter and water and roll in bread crumbs; or pack firmly in a buttered baking dish and cover the top with buttered crumbs. Bake in a moderate oven, 350°, until nicely browned. Serve with tomato sauce.

The Calumet Baking Book (Calumet, no date, looks 20s or 30s).

Calumet is a brand of baking powder and this booklet contains all the recipes you’d expect would have baking powder in them: biscuits, muffins, quick breads, cakes, cookies, and other baked goods, plus a few pie and pudding recipes and a couple of main dish recipes for such things as beef stew with dumplings. No real surprises here, except perhaps the suggestion that you put baking powder in pie crust and the Double-Acting Baking Powder Effectiveness Test. Nice illustrations, though.

Graphic Design: Plain, straightforward, uninteresting.

Illustrations: Nice cover with an illustration of baked goods on the front and a really huge can of baking powder on the back. Lots of attractive full-color illustrations of baked goods on the inside.

What's the deal with the monkey figurine?

You want a few more griddle cakes with that butter, maybe?

Calumet: Look for the king-sized can!

Great Recipe Names: Maple Curlicue Biscuits, Calumet Pocketbook Rolls, Dixie Waffles, Patty’s Birthday Cake, Lightning Layer Cake, Stone Jar Molasses Cookies [the “stone jar” refers to this final instruction: “Store in stone jar.”], Magic Pudding with Preserves.

The Great Double-Acting Baking Powder Effectiveness Test:

“Put two level teaspoons of Calumet Baking Powder into a glass, add two teaspoons of water, stir rapidly five times, and remove the spoon. You will see the tiny, fine bubbles rise slowly, half filling the glass. This is Calumet’s first action––the action that takes place in your mixing bowl when you add liquid to the dry ingredients. After the mixture has entirely stopped rising, stand the glass in a pan of hot water on the stove. In a moment, a second rising will start and continue until the mixture reaches the top of the glass. This is Calument’s second action––the action that takes place in the heat of your oven.”

Sample Recipe:

Potato Puffs

1/2 cup sifted flour
1 1/2 teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder
1/4 teaspoons salt
Dash of white pepper
1 cup mashed potatoes
2 eggs, well beaten

Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder, salt, and pepper, and sift again. Combine potatoes and eggs, and add flour. Drop by teaspoons into deep fat (385° F.) and fry until golden brown. Makes 18 puffs.

Cake Secrets (Igleheart Bros., 1920).

This booklet gives you some idea of what cake-baking was like before mixes, electric mixers, or even ovens with thermostats and consistent heat. What it was was complicated and chancy. Check out this baking instruction from the Regulation Butter Cake recipe: “Put the batter into the pan and let bake about 35 minutes. Have the heat moderate until the cake has risen, then have strong heat until three-fourths of baking time, then gradually reduce the heat.” Practically every cake, even the butter cake, requires stiffly beaten egg whites, and this before the invention of the electric mixer. It’s no wonder there’s an extensive “Causes of Cake Failure” section in the back. Igleheart’s made Swans Down Cake Flour and the booklet also contains recipes for such things as biscuits, cream puffs, and pie crust. A real piece of cake-making history.

Graphic Design: Plain, clean, and simple.

Illustrations: The cover has a rather laughable faux leather look with the title in an Old-English-style typeface. Inside are many quite beautiful full-color illustrations of cakes and other baked goods.

I wonder who makes the regulations for butter cake.

Isn't this a beautiful two-page spread?

Well, it's got some rat in it.

Aren't these the lightest, fluffiest biscuits you've ever seen in your life? Pass the butter!

Recipes Called Something “Surprise”: 1––Strawberry Surprise.

Recipes Containing Prunes: 1––Prune Pie.

Great Recipe Names: Emergency Cake, Creole Cake, Queen Tea Muffins.

Nutrition Quote: “Right here I want to call your attention to a fact which, in my opinion, is not generally understood––homemade cake is a real food. Bread has long been a synonym of food, and as cake is a refined, sweetened, and flavored bread, there is no question as to the place cake takes in the dietary [Ed. note: Take that, Marie Antionette detractors!]. Generously represented in most cakes are the food elements from which our meals are chosen––the protein in eggs, milk, and flour, the carbohydrates in the flour and the sugar, the fats in the milk and butter, the minerals in the eggs and the milk. Because of its high nutritive value, cake is most desirable at a meal that lacks hearty food in the form of meat or fat or their equivalents; but as sugar satisfies hunger almost instantly, cake should be eaten at the end of a meal.”

Sample Recipe:

Emergency Cake
[Ed. note: They don’t specify the emergency, so I assume they mean running out of cake.]

1 2/3 cupfuls Ingleheart’s Swans Down Cake Flour, after sifting once
1 cupful sugar
2 teaspoonfuls baking powder
2 egg-whites
Soft butter as needed
1/2 cupful milk
1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg

Sift together the flour, sugar, and baking powder. To the whites in a measuring cup add enough soft (not melted) butter to half fill the cup; add milk to fill the cup; turn into the dry mixture with the nutmeg and beat vigorously 7 minutes. Bake in a loaf or sheet.