Old Cookbooks!

This is going to be a long one, so grab a tasty beverage and your favorite butt-pillow. And maybe some Beef Jerky snacks and a pair of compression hose.  And a lighter. 

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WHATS FUCKIN' NEW AT THE EL APARTMENTO? 

WELL FINE I WILL TELL YOU HOLY CRAP PEOPLE.

It's the 4th of July here, and we at the El Apartmento are day drinking and waiting for nightfall, when Armegeddon is going to break loose 1/4 mile down the road in Marietta, which is on Rez land, Lummi Nation, right on Puget Sound, where fireworks unsold by nightfall will be fired off with no regard to sanity, safety, life, limb or Giant Penis Whapping.

 

Say you need gas. And you pull up to the Seven-Eleven but you don't pull up to the front pump. 

This dude ^^^ will run out of the Seven-Eleven and smack you with this goddamn thing. I mean it. right through the drivers side window man. 

Admit it you would be shocked.       

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-What I Did During Pride Month:  I lurked around Value Village on Thursdays (the cruisy day) in my rainbow tie-dye t-shirt and exchanged knowing nods with other elderly queer women.

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-Mad Adventures:  Went shopping at Fred Meyers and then abandoned a full shopping cart in protest of their attempts to press-gang me into joining their Fred Meyers Rewards Card bullshit.  I do not support a compu-food future and I refuse to participate in all attempts to create a foundation for that entire idea. Fuck you Fred Meyer. Just fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

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Well here you go. FINALLY. 

Our first cookbook is  "Onion A Collection of Recipes featuring WALLA SWEET ONIONS Gloria.'

What you need to know is that the Walla Walla Sweet is an onion so mild and so very sweet that you can eat it out of hand, like an apple.  Really. When this variety first hit the market, it was honestly that sweet.  It was also incredibly fragile. It has since been intermingled with market-stable varieties, and has lost that sugary flavor, but back then this onion was a curiosity. And some poor lady was given the task of compiling a giveaway recipe booklet full of recipes using this sweet, sweet, mushy onion.

ONWARD.

I was going to put this in the 're-donate' pile until I gave it a second reading.  I kind of took to my heart the plight of the woman whose job it was to compile all these recipes...and besides, A. Judging from the stains and wear, this was a used cookbook, and as we all know, used cookbooks are the best kind. This one is 1.From Oregon  2. Printed in 1979  3. In Milton-Freewater OR (A dry town)  by  2. The great great great  grandchildren of people who thought liquor was the piss of Satan.  My thought is they were so bored they developed a really sweet onion to relieve the tedium.

This poor lady goes to huge lengths to include decent recipes. She steals from 'The Gold Cookbook', Escoffier, Julia Child and more.  And long before it mattered a damn if you stole some content because you lived in East Chuck La'Fuck and nobody cared, she attributed those thefts; and dammit I find that impressive. She did not have a lot in the way of inspired local contributions *read further.* Yet she was gracious enough to include whatever she received.  And once she ran out of stock clip art, she enlisted the services of one of her kids to fill out the volume. 

Ok here's some recipe submissions.

Only one of multiple Onion Sandwich variations. Lose the lemon and this is what every person I ever knew who survived the Great Depression used to eat on the regular. Can you fuckin' imagine?  Or hey - maybe you're an Onion Sandwich Afficianado. Tell me what the fuck you find edible about this concept. 

You see?  This poor broad. This is the kind of thing she had to include. There's four or five variations on this idea. She had to be embarrassed.

I have no idea what's happening here.

OK enough of that. Onward to The White Trash Cookbook, which was a major motive force behind the resurgence of 'Down Home Suthun Cookun' in the 1980s, when shrimp and grits swelled from the ground, and people began frying bologna like their lives depended on it. I hated that food trend, and I hate this fuckin' cookbook. It is so arch. 

Wow. Shock me shock me with the title.

I mean this is the kind of thing you'll find in here. Are you going to cook any of this shit?  No, you're going to pour yourself a white wine and flip through it Christmas morning with your girlfriends and snicker at the patois.

OK fine I had to include the infamous 'Handjob Salad' recipe.  Here it is. It's real. I hope you're happy.

Photograph of quaint rural poverty. Which is what you look for in a cookbook.

The afterword.  Ick. Ick ick ick.  

-But hey, Andy Warhol.

And now!  FIXIN' CHICKEN 101 WAYS

Oh hooray! A sunny chicken cookbook from the 1970's!! 

There is not one single recipe inside worth noting. It's just all the usual chickeny suspects. And that's fine; this cookbook was marketed as a novelty gift - yeah, recipes, but also the largest collection of illustrated chicken puns ever printed!!!

I love a chicken pun.  

They start out, you know, kinda corny, goofy, it's all good here...

I can just hear her voice!

...and then, because it's 1975, it gets a little topical - or at least as topical as you'd want to get in a cookbook... 

...and then it goes off the rails a bit. 

 

This thing is an unsung jewel of the Vintage Cookbook genre.  Spread the word people.

OK wow dang geeze hooray here is the Tupperware Book of Picnics and Snacks Around the World!!!!!!

The poor authors had to 1. Go to all these chain hotels around the world, and 2. Try to shoot food glamor shots, a thing they had no experience with whatsoever, C. while trying to write recipes AND working in all the various types of Tupperware you might find useful in your 'round the world picnic adventures.  It is sad and embarrassing, and the recipes are all from hotel chefs.

But they do tell you how to make a Guitar Cake. So there's that.

AHA!!!! Did you ever own an Oster Super Pan?  It was like a shallow slow cooker combined with a very high-sided electric frying pan.  It was a pretty useful thing.  This little manual/cookbook was the giveaway you'd find inside the box.

 A Poem

I AM IN LOVE WITH MR. SUPER PAN 

I think he's kind of sexy, flying around with his pokey fork. 

He will poke you with that fork. 

Get with it America. 

Buy a Super Pan 

or this little fucker will zip in through your window and poke ya.

Poke poke.

Once inside it's all orange ink and bag stock pages - really trendy, to appeal to the young newlywed or something. I dunno. But I love this 'Marimekko Mod' look from the early 1970's!

You see all the shit you get with this pan?  You can do ANYTHING.  And I am not joking. This was a great appliance.  Tough as nails, too. Mine was stolen by a roommate lo these many years gone by.

BOOM we got the fondue recipes right off the jump. Hey young trendy newlywed, you can do massive fondues now!  You will be the envy of the housing development, you and your massive fondues.

You can even make whatever this ^^^ is.  I've read this over and over and I still can't imagine what's supposed to be going on here.  Do you get it?  I do not.

If you have to avert your eyes you go right ahead. This is going to be grim as fuck. This is

CASSEROLE COOKERY.

This is not one of those 'fundraiser kit' cookbooks where all you do is put the name of your outfit on the cover and the recipes are just stock content. OH HELL NO. This is a collection of actual recipes sent in by living women from all over the Midwest who regularly fed their families this stuff.  

This is way too real. 

It has some nice custom photography.  A little vintage food porn is OK with me.

Here is the intro.  

Gaze into the eyes of our editrix. This is clearly a woman who knows her casseroles.  She has that glint in her eye.

AAaaaand this is the kind of thing you'll find inside.  

I am sorry. I really am. But history isn't always pretty.

Now comes a treasure. Bought at a very, very rural garage sale for .50 cents, this is a regional charmer from Vancouver BC!  

This is what they gave you just for entering the showroom.  And I like to think that this was an effective sales tool; hell, it sold me on the advantages of coal gas and that shit's illegal these days.  

Just enjoy the following:

I love the way old recipes are written. This does not disappoint.  

Just a glimpse of some of the contents in this slim little volume.

It's not just food - they'll help you figure out your baby, cure your stout people and waterproof your boots!

Quite a large section of Chinese recipes too.  And this is the real thing, the first iteration of American-Chinese food as it was made by immigrant cooks here on the West Coast.

This is written with the expectation that you already knew your way around a kitchen - and a wood-fired kitchen at that. C. 1890 - 1900.

And now dessert.  

Are you dainty enough to venture within the elfin pages of 'Dainty Desserts for Dainty People?'

Oh well it doesn't matter. Let's go.

This is a booklet from 1923, and I am given to understand that it was slipped through the mail slot by travelling Knox Gelatine sales agents visiting town. You the housewife were supposed to be so charmed by the contents that you would go to your local grocer and ask if he carried the product; and if not, why the fuck not?  And you'd waved this booklet at him and then begin crying. And he would relent, and soon Knox Gelatine would flow throughout the land.

Two little toddler-aged kitchen sprites carrying The Gift of Gelatine flank the head of the baby cow that was boiled down to make that gelatine.

Those are some dainty people ^^^ right up there. They hit you with them right on the first page, where gelatine is explained.  I am loving the artwork and borders and initials!

Dammit gelatine people.  Look you can even feed it to babies. You should, in fact. Do it now.

And now, let's just enjoy the content.

The don't make high-crowned molds like this anymore.

This thing looks GLORIOUS.  I might even make it when the blackberries come ripe a month from now.   

 

Imagine this!  Sparkling gelatine?  Oh yeah!

They have a bunch of Charlotte Russe recipes for some reason. I guess they are dainty. I feel dainty just looking at them.

Here we see that Perfection Salad was always gross.  But apparently Tuna Salad was not. This would be light and savory. Sure, I'll have one.

The original Pink Jello Shaped Like A Fish. All I'd change here would to use fresh cooked salmon like a responsible adult with functioning tastebuds. This would be really tasty.  

What I love here is the italicized assurance that, with a little taste and skill, jellied tongue doesn't have to look appalling.

I would fake being sick and lie in bed all day eating Wine Jelly and Cream Chicken Salad. Hand me the Grapefruit Gelatine. I am SICK. I have to RECOVER.

Here at the very end is tucked away Knox Gelatines dirty little secret:  back in the day when fresh butter was expensive and not widely available, this was the way that folks stretched what little they had.  My grandma would go ahead and go the calfs' foot route because she was just that badass; but most people used gelatine.  This is why you'd keep the recipe book, right here. The Knox Gelatine people knew how it was. They got it. They were sparing your blushes. 

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Do not panic. There are more cookbooks to come!  I knew you were panicking and so I thought I would reassure you, so, yeah, there you go. More cookbooks to come!  Huzzah!

Except...I thought I'd take a little break in-between.  A little side-journey into Paper Ephemera. A stroll down memory lane, if you like.

Oh yeah. 

Memory lane.