Scary salads.

Aunt Carrie's recipe box has a number of salad recipes, heavy on the coleslaw and jello salads, and I'll share some of those later, but these two stand out for two reasons: they have just a list of ingredients, no real instructions, and they sound slightly horrifying.

Home economists in the early twentieth-century liked to come up with strange combinations of chopped fruits and vegetables, bound together with that processed food innovation, salad dressing. Miracle Whip was the most famous of these, a sweeter version of mayonnaise, and both began to appear ready-made in jars at about the same time. In my home growing up, we called Miracle Whip "mayo" and used it exclusively on our sandwiches and in our tuna salads. When I grew up and got my own home, I developed a distaste for Miracle Whip and came to love Hellmann's mayonnaise. My husband still prefers the "tangy zip" of Miracle Whip (to quote an old commercial) and so I keep a small jar of each for us in the fridge, in the reduced-fat versions.

Feel free to use either, should you decide to tackle one of these salads.

Salad

When I scanned this one, I wasn't even sure how to label it since it didn't really have a title, so I labeled it "Yukky Salad." (Of course then I couldn't remember what the label was when I went to find it just now.)

The card reads "Salad - Ebersoles," who must have been a family Aunt Carrie knew, maybe from church. No quantities are specified, just a list of ingredients seemingly pulled at random from one's pantry and fridge.

Carrots
Bananas
Marshmallows
Peanut Butter
Celery
-----Mayonnaise--

Odd as it is, this is a somewhat typical "salad" recipe of the kind I mentioned above. The only ingredient that looks unfamiliar to me is the peanut butter. Bananas and marshmallows, in particular, were beloved in the 1920s and 1930s as treats that went well with chopped salads and Jello salads. Bananas were tropical and exotic, and marshmallows were a novelty. I would assume here that one grates the carrots, dices the bananas and celery, and mixes all the ingredients together with a little mayonnaise dolloped on at the end, either to help bind it or as a garnish on top. Let's move on, shall we?

Carrot Salad

Salads based on grated carrots have been around for a long time. I remember my mom making a Jello salad with grated carrots and crushed pineapple suspended in orange Jello, and it was darned tasty. There's also a grated carrot salad with raisins and a sweet mayo-based dressing in one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, as Ina Garten, the author, likes to delve back into the retro recipes of her youth from time to time.

Aunt Carrie notes "Radio" as the source for this salad, probably one of the many homemaker programs that were on the radio for decades in the mid-twentieth-century.

2 cups grated carrots
1/4 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup red apples diced
1/4 cup canned pineapple cubes
Enough mayonnaise to moisten.

Honestly, I would eat this. I might squirt a little lemon juice on it to brighten up the taste and keep the apple chunks from browning. Plain or vanilla yogurt to replace the mayonnaise would probably be an excellent and much more modern taste for this salad. Not something you'd want to eat every day, but a good way to get some vitamins and fiber in the wintertime, when fresh fruits and vegetables used to be a lot harder to come by.

For hungry babies...and hungry baby pigs.

This is my great-aunt Carrie's recipe box. It's a carved wooden box that she bought from Ten Thousand Villages, a group of shops begun by a Mennonite woman to sell the works of artisans in poor countries here in the United States. This particular box was made in India.

Carrie Elizabeth Weaver Morris was born in 1916 and died in 2011. She was my grandma's older sister. I didn't know her well, but saw her every couple of years when she and her husband would come to visit my grandparents or at family reunions. When Carrie went into a nursing home a number of years before she died, she gave a few of her belongings to my grandma, who spread them out on her kitchen table and invited some of us assorted family members to take what we wanted. I picked up the box.

The recipes in the box cover a wide span of years, I think. The most recent date on a card is 1993. The oldest look to be at least 30 years older than that. Some of them are very well-used, others look cleaner though yellowed with time.

I suspect that this wasn't Carrie's only recipe repository. If she was at all like me, she had cards and papers and cookbooks and maybe even a folder or binder or two, scattered in various spots in and near the kitchen. The recipes are heavy on cookies and desserts, lighter on meats and salads, and full of interesting oddities. I thought I'd kick things off with two of the more amusing ones.

For Hungry Babies:



1 oz. Pet or Carnation milk
2 oz. boiled water
1/2 teaspoon Karo

-Dr. Moorehead

I think Carrie may have longed for children much of her life. She married at age 38, and for whatever reason, the babies did not come. In middle age, she and her husband Paul adopted a little boy named John, but he was early toddler age when they adopted him, so probably would not have needed formula. Carrie may have written down this recipe to use for her many nieces and nephews when she went to help their mothers after the latest baby arrived.

This looks like a fairly common baby formula recipe from the post-war era...Pet and Carnation are brands of evaporated milk, and Karo is a corn syrup brand. I think most of us would hesitate to give a baby corn syrup nowadays!

Feeding Baby Pigs by Dr. Barber



1 part cow's milk
3 parts boiled water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon lime water, to make a pint.

Feed every 2 or 3 hours for several days.

Carrie and Grandma grew up on a small farm in Ohio, and most family farms had at least a pig or two for meat. Carrie lived at home most of the time until she married, so she may have fed any number of squirming baby pigs. I've never fed a pig, but it seems like it would be difficult!

Here's Aunt Carrie with her siblings in 1966. From left to right, Martha Weaver Martin (my grandma), Carrie Weaver Morris, Edna Weaver Zook, and John Weaver.

American Cookery, February 1942.

The cover of American Cookery for February 1942 features a patriotic tablescape with a starry Seafood Pie (page 295), shrimp, crab, fish, and oysters in a white sauce, topped with a flaky crust. I think I'd eat that. For dessert, Lincoln Log Cake, a vanilla cake filled with maple-flavored frosting and rolled into a log jelly-roll style. Lincoln's birthday (February 12) used to be a much bigger deal before it got rolled up (like a jelly roll) with Washington's birthday (February 22) and turned into President's Day (the third Monday of February.) Page 297 also features a four-tiered Washington's birthday cake, much more patrician than the humble log for Lincoln.

I'm sure many of us have wondered about the three basic rules for giving a church supper for men, and on page 302 we are answered: 1) have plenty to eat, 2) give good service, and 3) don't try to make money. Yes, men are cheapskates, so if you need to raise money for church ministry, try a ladies' luncheon where the pocketbooks are presumably open. This begs the question of why one would have a church supper for men, but I suppose making all those weighty decisions and solving pressing Scriptural issues is easier when stuffed with baked ham, mashed squash, hot rolls, and mock Indian pudding (the recommended menu.)

We also get a step-by-step preparation for a "stag party," (page 306) which did not have the 2018 connotation in 1942. Here we see Winifred Hackett doing every bit of preparation for her husband's dinner party (thrown for a friend who is joining the Army) before tiptoeing away and letting her husband take all the credit. The Greatest Generation, indeed. Click on each image to enlarge.