Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Mom would be proud: not only is it a less expensive brand, it’s knocked down even from that!

I’ve made some great old cookbooks available under The Padgett Sunday Supper Club banner, as well as one or two not-so-great cookbooks. Today’s is very close to my heart as we approach Mother’s Day on Sunday. For my entire life until she died, my mother has had this red-covered folder (PDF File, 7.1 MB). It was from her home economics class, or whatever it would have been called circa 1960, in high school.

When dealing with vintage recipes, people commonly talk about our lack of knowledge about what the intended audience for those recipes knew. Recipe authors and recipe readers assumed a common understanding that we, fifty or more years later, necessarily lack.

This bit of ephemera from the cusp between the fifties and sixties provides some insight into how some, at least, of that shared knowledge was acquired in that period. As other vintage writers can tell you—Glen Powell, for example—the kinds of background knowledge that recipes assume change over time. The background knowledge that people had during the era of wood ovens will be very different from the era of gas ovens and then electric ovens.

Except for the rice krispy candy I don’t remember any of these dishes, and I don’t know for sure that she even used that recipe instead of the one on the back of most marshmallow bags. These aren’t the classic foods I remember mom making when I was young. What they are, are the recipes that trained her to make those foods.

I do know that mom often had the notebook out when preparing for a potluck or a luncheon. I suspect she was making biscuits, or consulting the measurement equivalents. Those are the pages that look most worn. The rice krispy candy page is very worn. She may also have been using the cherry pie filling recipe for any fruit, judging from its stains. We had pie a lot, but it was rarely cherry pie.

That said, I certainly don’t remember cottage cheese coleslaw, and that’s one of the most stained pages of all.

Available in print on Amazon^• and Lulu.

In their 1926 Frozen Desserts and Salads, Frigidaire described the “two classes” of ice creams:

Philadelphia Ice Cream, which is made from thin cream, sugar and flavoring, frozen without thickeners or without whipping the cream, and French Ice Cream which has a custard foundation (made from egg) with thin cream and a flavoring.

They went on to describe the variations on frozen desserts:

A mousse is a heavy cream, beaten stiff, sweetened and flavored and frozen by packing without stirring, highly adaptable to preparation in Frigidaire.

The same is true of parfait, a sugar syrup poured over either beaten egg white or yolk of egg and added to the flavored cream.

Sherbets and ices are, naturally, of thinner consistency and likely to show ice particles, but can be made smooth by manipulation.

Understanding these differences was important to Frigidaire’s sales. In 1926 few households were likely to have any experience making ice creams beyond hand-cranked machines filled with salted ice. They were hard work and they made a mess. Those households fortunate enough to own a refrigerator had a lot more options available to them, options once only available when going out to eat at businesses with commercial freezers. Frigidaire wanted people to know about those options, and hopefully buy a Frigidaire refrigerator/freezer because of them!

Over the last year, I’ve discovered two new recipes from old standbys in my cookbook collection, and two new recipes from an even earlier, 1927, cookbook. I’m going to handle these recipes from the youngest to the oldest.

A bowl of… pink?

One of my favorite idiosyncratic cookbooks is Larry Kusche’s 1977 Popcorn. Circa 1977, because it’s come out in multiple versions, including the wonderfully-spined Popcorn Popcorn Popcorn just to get the point across that This book can change your life!

Three times…

Well, Easter can change your life. Popcorn is fun. And Kusche’s book is a great book for popcorn fans.

This year I’m continuing my Christmas-to-Easter candy cane tradition with Kusche’s Spearmint Crackle. The recipe calls for “chopped spearmint-leaf candies” and a little green food coloring to emphasize the spearmint aspect. But it works very nicely with chopped candy canes and no food coloring at all, leaving the popcorn a nice pastel pink.

I recommend using redskin or Spanish peanuts as the nuts in this caramel corn. The red skin nicely complements the Easter pink of the popcorn’s caramel coating. The nuts should definitely be salted: the salt offsets the sweetness of the sugar. If you use unsalted nuts, add an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of salt.

If you somehow end up with a lot of hard candy and you’re not a hard candy eater—not uncommon after Christmas or Easter—consider using them for making popcorn, too. This recipe should work with any hard candy, especially butterscotch candies or root beer barrels. Or for something really different, try lemon sours. I haven’t, but if I suddenly found myself with a bag of them, I’d seriously consider it.

Try to use only one color, or only a few colors that mix well. My dad had a bunch of fruit-flavored candy canes left over from Christmas 2023. He left them out for the grandkids to eat, but the grandkids were not eating them. I told him in the spring that if they were still there come Thanksgiving I’d be making caramel corn out of them.

I know I just did a pecan pie two weeks ago for Texas Independence Day. But you can never have too much pecan pie, and Friday is Pi Day. Why not extend it to 3.1416 and make it a Pie Weekend from Friday the 14th to Sunday the 16th?

It may take that long to finish this year’s pie.

Wheat for Man’s whole wheat crust was also great with banana pie.

A wonderful crunchy top, honey-flavored gooey insides. A great pie.

A dollop of ginger cream cheese was pretty good on this pie, too.

Both the pie and the crust come from people with a deep partiality to specific ingredients. The pie shell is from Dora D. Flack, Mabel H. Miller, and Vernice G. Rosenvall’s Wheat for Man. This otherwise standard whole wheat shell adds both an egg and vinegar to the ingredients. Replacing some of the water with a bit of vinegar is always a great idea when making pie crusts—at least as long as there are no competing flavors such as orange juice, or 2023’s beer.

Sunday is Texas Independence Day. Over the last decade I’ve managed to acquire several vintage Texas community cookbooks as well as several other Texas-related cookbooks from businesses such as the Imperial Sugar Company.

It’s possible that I’m overcompensating for having moved here from Michigan by way of California.

I’ve decided to start featuring these cookbooks, or at least their better recipes, for Texas Independence Day. March in Central Texas is a good time for celebrating outdoors—usually. Unless there’s a polar vortex rolling through, it’s cool but not cold, and neither dry nor humid.

One of the cookbooks I would have liked to feature earlier is the 1975 Potter County Home Demonstration Council Bicentennial Cook Book, published to coincide with the American Bicentennial. I acquired this cookbook too late for it to go into my Sestercentennial series’ inaugural entry, A Bicentennial Meal for the Sestercentennial, and that’s too bad, because it’s a very nice book. Lily Ward’s Potato Chip Cookies were the best of the three potato chip cookies I featured in last year’s National Potato Day cookie post. They were so good, I included them among the three treats I mailed out to friends over Christmas.

Mrs. C.D. Baldwin’s Hawaiian Fudge is also the inspiration for my own Les Johnson’s Antimatter Creams. It would never have occurred to me that you could heat fresh banana to 240° without harming it if I hadn’t made her pineapple fudge. Both pineapple and banana are great additions to a nut fudge. The added green food coloring, however, was only really appropriate for the radioactive variant.

I completed three food-related publishing projects this year. First, in July, I published the second edition of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods, my collection of recipes from Chicago’s television chef and IGA icon, Eddie Doucette. It includes an interview with his son, which I expanded for a more detailed post in September, He was the chef.

In August, I published my own personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book. It’s a compilation of recipes that I used to save by way of photographing them with my phone so as to have them available while traveling. It’s a lot easier to access now that they’re in PDF, ePub, and print form.

And finally, in October I started publishing facsimiles of the vintage cookbook pamphlets I’ve been writing about. The first to get this treatment was The Horsford Cook Book from 1877 or so. Also available: Mrs. Winston’s Receipts for 1876 and the ca. 1880 New Centennial Cook Book.

For the moment I’m only doing this for works from 1929 and earlier¹. But that leaves many more to come in 2025 and up, so stay tuned to the food section of Mimsy Were the Borogoves or The Padgett Sunday Supper Club.

I continued preparing for the sestercentennial this year with a collection of 1876 recipes from a handful of cookbooks celebrating or benefiting from America’s centennial. I cannot overstate how much I recommend surprising your family and friends with a mashed potato pie in place of the more traditional sweet potato pie. There are a lot of dishes that have disappeared into our history that deserve restoration, and this is at the top of the list for me.

I also managed to restart my refrigerator cookbook revisited history survey with Montgomery Ward Cold Cooking from 1942. The Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest from 1947 is coming soon, and I have a few more tidbits up my sleeve to round out that trilogy.

Also available in print.

Merry Christmas! As we move closer and closer to the sestercentennial in 2026, here’s a centennial-adjacent cookbook from 1876. While Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876 (PDF File, 5.1 MB) was, obviously, designed specifically for 1876, it had nothing to do with the Centennial. It was, ostensibly at least, an almanac. So there was one for every year, including 1876.

“Mrs. Winslow” was not selling a baking product. “Mrs. Winslow’s” had been putting out Receipt Books every year since at least 1863, in the service of selling Brown’s Bronchial Troches¹ and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. They’re often classified as quack medicines but I’m not sure that they’re “quack” in the normal sense of the word. Judging from the ingredients and the advertisements in this pamphlet, they did what they were advertised to do.

Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup may not have been the best idea for quieting children suffering “the excruciating pain of Cutting Teeth”, but it probably did reduce the pain: it contained morphine. Most of the adult medicines promise to relieve coughs and sore throats, which they probably did. The products advertised in these almanacs, at least, do not appear to have promised a cure of the underlying ailment, only a refuge from the symptoms. Given the state of medicine at the time, they may even not have been the worst of contemporary methods of relieving such ailments.

Also available as a printed copy.

My Independence Day post this year presented a collection of recipes celebrating the 1876 Centennial. I couldn’t find as many such books as I could find for 1976. I’ve continued to find Bicentennial cookbooks well after my inaugural 2023 post. Most likely, improved and more economical printing technology over the century between 1876 and 1976 opened the opportunity for more organizations to publish.

As a result of the dearth of source material, though, I had a few automatic searches set up on various sites to find Centennial books. Not all of the results were about the Centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A lot were about state centennials. Some were apparently just because “centennial” is a cool name.

The New Centennial Cook Book (PDF File, 4.7 MB) appears to be one of the latter. It came up in my searches because the seller thought that the “centennial” in the title meant that was the year of publication. And yet, there’s nothing else in the book to bolster that assumption.

It really looked like the word “centennial” in “New Centennial Cook Book” was referring to something else. A search on newspapers.com seemed to confirm my suspicions. The same company that produced this pamphlet also produced a line of (apparently cheap) kitchenware. L. E. Brown & Co.’s “patent Centennial Cake Pan” first appeared in August 1877, in an advertisement aimed as much at sales agents as at bakers: