Denveater

Husted Collection Curios: Good Housekeeping is totally in the eye of the beholder

***Part of a semiregular series about my findings at the Margaret Husted Culinary Collection—a remarkable, undersung cookbook archive whose 1000s of specimens run the gamut from serious historical finds to quirky treats like this.***

It's these little Cold War–era, checkout-aisle throwaway promos that are the meat of the Husted—crammed shelves upon shelves of them, each as goofy, perverse & or chilling as the last. You know—what Candyboots said.

Good Housekeeping's Appetizer Book & Entertaining for Six or Eight exemplify the genre.

  

It was all about the fondue, the skewers, the peach melba & the...Campbell's & Eggo mushroom soup waffles with pickled peppers? What the hell are those things on the right? Well, whatever it was about, it was for the swingers—

the sloshed hostesses making obscene gestures as their husbands fumed, arms crossed, above phrases like "Other Quickies" & "Stuffed Nuts";

the randy teens feigning wholesomeness with varsity sweaters & accordions; 

the constant double entendres (or so they ring in my ear) & faux-haute misdeeds

& downright food antiporn, featuring the apparent likes of deformed melting testicles (parsleyed, of course). 

God bless taste-free space-age America!

Husted Collection Curios: Military Meals at Home COOK BOOK, or why we love men in uniforms

***Part of a semiregular series about my findings at the Margaret Husted Culinary Collection at DU's Penrose Library—a remarkable, undersung cookbook archive whose 1000s of specimens run the gamut from serious historical finds to, well, the following.***

In a post-post-Vietnam, post-9/11, post–Iron Chef, post-ironic era, what's not to love about a good old, genuine, pre-loss-of-collective-(however willed)-innocence, WWII-era collection of recipes "used by the Military Service in their kitchens & galleys," from shit on a shingle to biscuits & gravy? The cover alone's a happy heartbreaker,

  

between the use of all-caps to emphasize COOK BOOK—lest you, trawling across, say, the website of the US Army food service for photos like 

this

need convincing that Military Meals at Home (1943) isn't in fact some sort of joke book—& the guarantee that the recipes therein will build "resistance." What, like vaccines? Is it possible to choke down enough "Irish grape & bologna salad" that you could develop an immunity to it? 

No, somehow I don't think you could ever get used to potato salad such as this, heaped atop what appears to be thin-sliced roast beef & ringed round with either black olives (the referent of the above slur) or actual grapes. Or blueberries with some kind of infection.

Per the introduction, "It is a truism that 'food is what men fight with,' but it has only recently been recognized that food is what men see with & fly with. High-vitamin food is what supports the terrific strain of emergencies." An example might be a nice cuppa trusty old joe, which apparently comes with not only firepower but all the milk, sugar & caffeine–induced vim you need to  use it.

Another would be oh-so-nutrient-dense fried mush & bacon. 

 

To reiterate that caption:

You can't get 'em up

You can't get 'em up

Sure you can get 'em up
when its [sic] fried mush and
bacon for breakfast

Those midcentury drill sergeants were no Madvillain, I'll tell you that. Granted, the studs of the armed forces in general don't seem to have been prone toward lyricism, especially of the romantic variety.

Was that a threat? Did droves of vets leave their high-school sweethearts for mess cooks with hardons for hardtack? 

If so, it must've been those same don't-ask-don't-tell targets who founded the US Army Culinary Competition, which actually looks like a) a blast b) the real deal:

  

Hell, the rulebook—covering everything from clarified consommés to marzipan modeling—is 81 pp. long! One key caveat:

—A service member that gets injured during Armed Force Chef of the Year, Armed Forces Jr. Chef of the Year, or Categories K [Practical & Contemporary Hot Food Cooking] & P [Practical & Contemporary Patisserie] will be evaluated by the lead kitchen judge. If the injuries are serious, the lead judge will stop the competitor & show staff will ensure that the injured service member gets proper medical attention. The competitor will not be rescheduled.

Suck it up, soldiers—after all, cooking isn't just a job, it's an adventure!

Husted Collection Curios: My Better Homes & Gardens Cook Book, by & for the desperate housewives of 1930

***Part of a semiregular series about my findings at the Margaret Husted Culinary Collection—a remarkable, undersung cookbook archive whose 1000s of specimens run the gamut from serious historical finds to quirky flukes.***

It's falling apart on the inside as well as the outside. 

Glam as the recipe testers must have been with their pre-WWII careers, their matching handbags & pumps, their wasp-waists & –style tresses, 

their souls were surely clawing ceaselessly to escape the gaping maw of the dark within. At least, that is, if the frantically cheerful, culinarily delusional &/or creepily suggestive headnotes are any indication. In all 3 categories:

Barbecued Pork Chops (& by "barbecued," they of course mean oven- baked with ketchup)

Tri-Meat Roll-Up (4 if you count the bacon! Love the garnish of whole onions)

In the generation-gap category: Tuna mousse is doubtless “tops with high-schoolers” (oh, kids today & their fish-pulp)! In the zonked-out-Stepford-Wives category: Shrimp-orange salad's “pretty, fresh-tasting, and a company puzzler.” (Because everything's hard to figure after a few highballs. "Jeepers, am I one zozzled tootsie, or is this salad some kind of trick?") In the no-cuisine-please-we're-American category: “Lemon gives lamb a chickeny taste and color!” In the "gee,-I-hope-you-didn't-go-to-any-trouble-on-my-account" category: Hawaiian ham “has that just-made-for-you look guests go for!”

One can only sigh dreamily to picture the editorial meetings around a tableful of auburn-coiffed, milk-skinned dames moving from purrs to shrieks, the skeletons of one another's hubbies dancing in their mental closets all the while.

Husted Collection Curios: Trade Winds Cookery, 1956 (sneak preview: fish popsicles!)

***Part of a semiregular series about my findings at the Margaret Husted Culinary Collection—a remarkable, undersung cookbook archive whose 1000s of specimens run the gamut from serious historical finds to quirky treats like this.***

In all its exotic mystery, the cover of Trade Winds Cookery: Tropical Recipes for All America by Norma A. Davis (not to be confused with  )

naturally caught my eye, filling me with urgent questions: What's that native girl doing on an 8'x8' island with a bunch of groceries? How did she get there? How long can she stand like that? Shouldn't someone send for help (like maybe the guy who drew her picture from the deck of his passing yacht or something, the heartless bastard)? Etc.

                                 

The recipes didn't disappoint, equally lush with illogic. Take the caviar ice cubes from, uh, Santo Domingo. Because when you think "sturgeon eggs," the republic that comes to mind is the Dominican one, right? Or, okay, Soviet, close enough. At any rate, what a clever idea, eh, freezing caviar with a little onion & lime juice in a tray so you can pop a cube or 2 into a nice cold glass of boutique vodka? 

Oh, wait. The cubes go on a plate with buttered toast points. Of course—why didn't I think of that? After all, what's a party without some stickless fish-egg popsicles & soggy croutons? (Seriously, am I missing something?)

For the record, I actually made some with tobiko, minced onion & lemon juice, thinking they'd make a good snack out of a shot of my fave bison-grass vodka. Here's what they look like in one of the tarantula-print candleholders the Director mistook for bar glassware when he bought them (speaking of lush illogic, especially since we use them all the time). Here's what they taste like—what they are, which is good if you don't mind bottoming up the dregs of piscine ova. (Hey, waiter, there's a flying fish fetus in my booze.)

Another startlingly dreamy-sounding recipe that I haven't made yet:

 

Avocado is a fruit, after all, used to make ice cream & smoothies the equatorial world over. Mashed with sugar, chocolate liqueur & a little citrus for balance, it'd make a fine dessert indeed—although I'd think seriously about substituting Amarula or Kahlúa for crème de cacao, just to up the intrigue a little. 

Really, the book's full of such breezy, balmy attention grabbers, from fried grapefruit

to this:

Should some enterprising reader be inclined to test any of the above, I'd welcome a guest post. 

Husted Collection Curios: goofball gems from the Beat era (sneak preview: T-shirt pie!)

***This will be the first in a semiregular series about my findings at the Margaret Husted Culinary Collection at DU's Penrose Library—a remarkable, undersung cookbook archive whose 1000s of specimens run the gamut from serious historical finds to, well, the following.***

"From the Unsquare corners of North Beach, The Village, and Venice West, comes this authentic collection of Beat Recipes" published by 7 Poets Press in 1961, according to the intro, which continues:

"Most of the recipes are inexpensive (who has bread for steaks?), quick to prepare, and a gas to gobble, compiled over a period of three years spent On The Road and two years Up the Creek. … A Loft is not a Pad without a Beat Generation Cook Book—Eat Beat! It’s the way out, Man.—The Editors."

(Psychedelic highlights courtesy of me!)

Thing is, the recipes are wack like crack (or, less anachronistically but less mellifluously too, like LSD). Check out the 1 for Streetcar Pie:

Groovy, eh? At least I think so, though the ambiguously gendered guy with several missing toes in the illustration at the bottom of the page doesn't seem so sure. 

Now it's your turn to spot the pot-fueled humor!

But here's the best part: the back ad.

 

Sure wish Bukowski & Hughes had contributed some recipes too, although in the former case I guess it would just be: 

Beer

1 bottle of beer, unopened

Open bottle. Serves 1.

As for Hughes—what, dried grapes? 

After all, poets tend to be too busy writing, fighting, drinking, & going insane to think about eating much, never mind developing recipes. And bona fide rock stars like Sonny & Cher? Forget it. 

Which makes "The Yardbirds’ Lemon Butter Chicken" a little hard to swallow. But sure, maybe that wacky Don Adams, aka Agent 86 on Get Smart, really did whip up a dip of port wine, peanut butter, raw onion & processed garlic cheese from time to time to smear all over Agent 99 back in the trailer.

The Penrose Library Book Sale: Wacko Swag!

Browsed the racks (in 1 room) & stacks (in another) at the DU library book sale (through tomorrow, May 9—details here) just long enough this morning to see that the food & wine sections were not only pretty small but oriented toward diet cookbooks on the one hand & the sort of self-published community cookbooks on the other that can be quite the hoot—I have a slew in my own collection, like

  &

—but can also be depressingly homogenous, recipewise, across demographics & generations (green bean casserole at a Wichita church potluck circa 1955 is green bean casserole at this year's cul de sac commune kegger, after all, with or without irony). 

However, the rare gems are priceless indeed.

             

is the real thing—a joke, but a practical joke, so to speak: as long as you "keep your bare fingers away from the hot metal" like so,

apparently you really can prepare 

                   

And then there's

   ,

whose cover must've been just a riot to late Cold War–era cocktail party wags

(cf., natch,

 ),

but seems pretty (if no less eye-catchingly) pointless to me, since the guide itself is a straightforward Australian wine primer. Still, maybe I'll start carrying it around, quoting from it. As words to live by go, "If you don't like it then bloody well don't drink it" seem at least as logical as "to be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing."