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.

Favorite Housewives on the Covers of Recipe Booklets

It's obvious this 20s housewife is proud of her rolls.

These 30s housewives are so cute. I would love to have kitchen curtains made with fabric in this pattern.

This 20s housewife gets her serenity from Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, the sponsor of this booklet.

It takes a lot of Snowdrift shortening to make Depression-era food taste better.

OK, Mommy, I give up! Please don't lock me into your new General Electric refrigerator!

This has to be my all-time favorite recipe booklet housewife. She's pretty, in a girl-next-door kind of way, and she stands beaming with pride, holding the cake she just made with her big ceramic Hamilton Beach electric mixer, just like the one my mom used to have. What more could you want out of life?

This one gets the Sexiest Housewife Award for her low-cut peasant blouse and come-hither look.

Calm down, Grandma! It's just a mixer! Note: The housewife in this one is smartly at home attending to important cooking duties, after punishing her teenaged daughter for staying out after curfew by assigning her to take Grandma shopping. (Sorry about the tape on this one, but that was the original condition of the booklet, and it was too daunting to try to correct in Photoshop.)

Yes, folks, this is what happens to you if you eat too many waffles: the Heartbreak of Wafflization.

The Art of Baking Bread (Northwestern Yeast Co., no date, looks 20s or earlier)

This was obviously written in the days when breadmaking was still a regular part of most housewives' routine. Elaborate sponge recipes using boiled potatoes are involved in most of the recipes and you get a general sense of the hard work involved in breadmaking. On the other hand, you also get a sense that the finished loaves were incredibly fragrant and delicious, especially from the beautiful illustrations. There's something calming and restorative about this booklet, even including the root beer recipe.

Graphic Design: Very nice Art Noveau-ish typography and layout in brown ink on cream-colored paper.

Illustrations: Extremely beautiful full-color illustrations of homemade bread and rolls, which somehow capture the essence of such baked goods.

You can almost smell that good homemade bread smell.

I don't like raisin bread, but I love this illustration.

These don't look like rolls to me––they look like thick slices of homemade bread, but what do I know? Who cares? They look delicious.

Surprising Quotes:

• "Making bread at home is an American custom, and a home art in which the housewives of this country excel."
  
• "Today the knowledge of how to make good, wholesome bread stands first in the science of home cooking, and rightly so, for nearly half of the diet is now bread. Every housewife should know how to make good bread because it constitutes so large a portion of the family food."
  
• "Every ten-year-old girl should learn how to make good bread. It should be the starting point in her home cookery training."
  

Sample Recipe:

Root Beer

MATERIALS

5 cakes Yeast Foam or Magic Yeast
3 tablespoons sugar
1 pint lukewarm water
1 bottle Root Beer Extract
5 gallons pure, fresh water, slightly lukewarm
4 pounds sugar

Dissolve 5 cakes of Yeast Foam or Magic Yeast and 3 tablespoons sugar in a pint of lukewarm water. Keep in a warm place for 12 hours, then stir well and strain through cheese-cloth. (Throw away particles of meal left in cloth.) Add bottle of Root Beer Extract, 4 pound sugar and 5 gallons of lukewarm water. Mix thoroughly and bottle. (Tie or fasten in corks.) Keep in warm place about 48 hours. After cooling it is ready for use. Keep in cellar or place of low temperature.

Introduction: Those Little Recipe Booklets

It is January, 1971. It's the first day back at school after the holidays, but there's been a blizzard, and radio station KFAB has pronounced the magic words, beloved by children everywhere, that mean "no school today". I didn't actually hear the words on the radio--Mom came into my bedroom at my usual required wakeup time and told me I could stay in bed. For a natural night person like myself, staying in bed is one of the best parts of a snow day. I respond to this news by blissfully going back to sleep, with visions of a schoolless day, a day all to myself, dancing in my head.

But now it's about 9:30 am or so and I'm ready to get up, or just about. I spend the last few minutes in bed listening to my mom go about her morning routine, a routine I'm normally not privy to because I'm in school. It involves puttering around in the kitchen, listening to the "housewife programs" on radio station KMA, Shenandoah, Iowa. There's Arthur Godfrey, coming in on the network. There's "Swap Shop", a radio swap meet. There's a call-in housewife program presided over by a woman named Billie Burke. But mainly there's "Kitchen Klatter", a program that lasted over 50 years, but could not possibly exist today.

"Kitchen Klatter" was a program for housewives, farm housewives in particular, but there was enough there to interest a suburban housewife like my mom. The "klatter" was the kind of stuff a housewife's best friend might share over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Recipes and household hints, of course. But what do housewives mainly talk about when they get together? They talk about their families, of course. And the ladies of "Kitchen Klatter" were all members of a big extended farm family, and they considered their listeners to be honorary members of that family, interested in the latest family news. So the "Kitchen Klatter" program was mainly a radio family newsletter, interspersed at intervals with recipes, household hints, letters from listeners, and pitches for various "Kitchen Klatter" products, including a salad dressing, flavoring extracts, and various laundry products.

All this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the gestalt that was "Kitchen Klatter". Did I say big, extended family? The "Kitchen Klatter Family" was one huge monster family, with incredibly complex comings and goings, and it was assumed that listeners could identify everybody by name and keep track of it all. It was sort of like "Gasoline Alley" to the max. I never could make sense of it, but my mom seemed to. Of course, my mom had a bunch of rural Iowa cousins to keep track of, so maybe she was used to it. (I would sometimes get those real relatives mixed up with the Kitchen Klatter folks.) And she subscribed to "Kitchen Klatter Magazine", a sort of baseball program for the show, complete with photographs of the major players.

The family stuff didn't really interest me, though, to be honest. What fascinated me were the recipes, done in that unique, measured speech which assumed that the listener was trying frantically to write it all down. They were for things like fancy molded Jell-O salads, casseroles you could take to a potluck, cookies for a fancy tea, and cakes, lots of cakes, made always with Kitchen Klatter Flavorings. I would try to imagine what they must be like to make and what they would taste like. I was fascinated by recipes long before I was allowed to invade the sanctity of my mom's spotless kitchen (me being a far from spotless kid).

And then there were the mail-in offers for a wide array of household gadgets described in glowing terms by the Kitchen Klatter ladies ("I have to tell all of you that this is the best ice-cream scoop I have ever used. I just don't know how I ever got along without it."). All for a few coins and a couple of boxtops from Kitchen Klatter Bleach or Kitchen Klatter Blue Drops, or the inner foil seal from a bottle of Kitchen Klatter Burnt Sugar Flavoring. I love gadgets and I love to get stuff in the mail, so I never understood why my mom didn't send for all of them.

All this "Kitchen Klatter" would mingle with the real kitchen klatter of my mom cleaning up the breakfast dishes, and then maybe cooking something, if she had a holiday to prepare for or a potluck to go to. My mom, like most moms of her time, loved convenience foods, so I wax nostalgic for things like instant mashed potatoes and tuna casserole the way folks of an earlier generation waxed nostalgic for homemade goodies. Maybe, if I was lucky, she would make a cake, from a mix of course, mixing the batter on her big, white ceramic Hamilton Beach electric mixer). Maybe she would consult her big, orange-covered Betty Crocker Cookbook (which I have inherited). Or maybe she would look through her magnetic photo albums full of recipes cut from Women's Day or Family Circle magazines, or from the backs of boxes, bottles, cans, or jars.

Or maybe she would leave her clean kitchen intact, and turn on "As the World Turns" and do the ironing.

Anyway, the point of all this is that all of this comes rushing back to me whenever I find in a junk store one of those little recipe booklets put out by food manufacturers or manufacturers of kitchen appliances. I love those booklets, especially if they are from the 1930s to the 1960s, feature garishly-colored food illustrations, and have a "modern" Kitchen of Tomorrow mindset. So this blog's main feature is a romp through my collection of recipe booklets, though I also hope to touch upon some of my other food-related obsessions.