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player ready...You can pay $35 for a glossy book of lemongrass-cilantro recipes by some chef whose four-star restaurant specializes in Mongolian holiday flatbreads. Or you can cruise the garage sales this summer and pick up a 50-cent, 1947 copy of “Sour Cream Cookery.”
Go for the goulash.
Cheap and plentiful, old cookbooks provide great fun, great reading … and some of the worst recipes on earth. (Popcorn salad, anyone?) But beyond the belly laughs–and aches–they also provide a periscope into the past. Suddenly you’re reading about how to clean the ice box, plan a meal on ration stamps, or concoct a festive lunch like “Barbecued Bologna For Men A La Crisco.”
“Pick up a 1950 `Joy of Cooking,’ and you’re immediately plunked down into that era,” says Nach Waxman, whose Kitchen Arts & Letters store in New York sells old cookbooks alongside the new.
“It gives you a picture of what daily life was like that most history books completely ignore,” adds food historian Sylvia Lovegren. Her new book, “Fashionable Food” (Macmillan, $35), chronicles the edible fads of every era, beginning with the once immensely popular “3-P Salad”: pickles, peas and peanuts in mayo, circa 1920.
If that sounds like a treat you might not race home to, perhaps you should read old cookbooks the way many folks read modern ones: as a sort of travelogue.
“Every culture eats something that another culture finds repugnant on first tasting,” Lovegren says. “You could say that people from the ’20s lived in an essentially different culture.”
They sure did. “Dainty food” was sweeping the country back then, in tandem with cozy tearooms. The cute, crustless sandwiches served there were considered feminine and delectable even when filled with, say, kidneys and bacon fat.
“We tend not to genderize our food as much anymore,” says Barbara Haber, curator at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, where 25 percent of the collection consists of cookbooks. From the turn of the century pretty much up to the ’70s, however, real men didn’t eat quiche, crustless sandwiches or most of the syrup, mayo and cream-doused concoctions once considered healthful salads.
Ah, “healthful,” that most mercurial word! It doesn’t take more than a glance at two or three vintage cookbooks to realize that the foods considered “healthful” change as often as those considered “gourmet.” The sour cream cookbook, for instance, gloats that “good cooking and good health march hand in hand” when dollops of the saturated fat are stirred in.
Similarly, the classiest hors d’oeuvres of cookbooks past send shudders down the spines of today’s tuna carpaccio crowd. “Spread very small stuffed olives with cream cheese flavored with horseradish,” reads the 1943 Settlement Cookbook. “Roll in finely chopped dried beef. Serve cold on toothpicks.”
Yeah. And run.
At the same time, some long-forgotten favorites do sound delicious, if out of date. In the ’20s, for instance, huge, moist, fig-stuffed Lady Baltimore cakes were the rage because this “modern” era brought with it the modern notion of saving time by serving only one (albeit enormous) dessert.
If you think quick cookery is a new development in American cuisine, consider the 1925 “Busy Woman’s Cookbook” I purchased for $1 at a tag sale last summer. “The average woman is The Busy Woman nowadays,” writes no-nonsense author Mabel Claire. “It seems to the writer that (her) time may be spent more profitably than in hours of pot-watching.” The book is then divided into menus taking 15, 20 and 30 minutes, making today’s 60-Minute gourmet look like a slave to the stove.
Pick up a cookbook from the ’30s and you may find it emphasizes a new type of cooking: casual. In keeping with the unpretentiousness of this era, hostesses began to cook in front of their guests, instead of in the kitchen. Thus chafing-dish cookery became chic, and continued to be so through the ’50s.
The war years brought rationing and with it, recipes that look suspiciously modern, as women struggled to substitute other foods for precious eggs and meat.
It is the ’50s, however, that provide the most amusing cookbooks for amateur collectors, as this was the era when kitsch ruled the kitchen.
“There was a great emphasis on Jell-O and puddings and prepared foods,” says historian Arlene Avakian, author of “Lion Woman’s Legacy” (Feminist Press, $14.95). Looking back she now realizes “that this was really a diet constructed by the food industry.” Many of the cookbooks were published by food manufacturers themselves, ever devising new ways for housewives to use their ingredients.
At the same time, misguided home economists were pushing more and more meat upon an already carnivorous nation. Our penchant for four-legged food, canned treats and brand names reached perhaps its apotheosis in the 1956 “Fruit Cocktail-Spam Buffet Party Loaf.”
Sixties cookbooks will strike a chord with anyone clipping recipes from modern-day women’s magazines. Both call for envelopes of dried soup and boxes of cake mix. It’s easy to get a feel for the era if you read Peg Bracken’s classic “The I Hate To Cook Book.” This passive-aggressive treatise on how to pretend you’re a happy homemaker while grouchily employing as many shortcuts as you can speaks as loud as any Betty Friedan tract. Women were clearly ready to revolt. And their food was already revolting.
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By the ’70s, cookbooks began exploring the themes we see today: freshness, ethnicity, greens and grains. The ’80s made them precious, pretentious and “lite.”
Someday, our current cookbooks will no doubt look as silly as 3-P salad (think of oat-bran cookery). For now, you have a choice: Ever-so-hip artichoke pasta with chipotle sauce and fresh shiitake mushrooms. Or Jell-O Surprise.
Surprise us.