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The General Foods Kitchen Cookbook (1959)

 





For my friends who like history and cooking, I have a real fun one. The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook is from 1959 (436 pages, authorship credited to "The Women of General Foods Kitchens"). It's loaded with full-color, full-page photographs and two-color drawings, and has an unusual square-ish size. I think of this as one of the first "modern" lifestyle cookbooks in its look and feel. (Modern, retro and dated all at once!)

It has a marked difference in its approach to handling the recipes, which I think reflects the new prosperity in lifestyle and more leisure time that Americans found in the 1950s. 

Instead of grouping similar foods together in chapters (e.g, Meats, Breads, Vegetables), General Foods organizes eight chapters around "everyday and special situations," including family meals, daytime entertaining, parties, meals outdoors, and holidays. Each chapter describes various scenarios under the topic, with sample menus and recipes. 

Unique to this book are what are essentially troubleshooting tips. Under the various chapters, the authors present twists and turns and their tips on how to deal with them. Some examples:

  • How to outwit time when Susie's always late on Wednesdays and the family can't eat together.
  • So they gave you a blender for Christmas!
  • What to do when Dad comes home for lunch.
  • Company for dinner - how to present the seated dinner when you have a maid and when you're on your own.
  • Tea for two ... or 200. How to brew it and serve it.
  • When the committee meets at your house, and Pamela's dieting again.

    One chapter has the cringe-worthy title "Cooking 'native:' meals from home and abroad;" however, its introduction states that it recognizes how Americans are moving around more and need to open our minds to new customs and ways to preparing foods.  It offers American regional specialties (such as New England clambakes, Hawaiian luaus, and Midwest sportsman's dinners) as well as some "around-the-world cooking" (primarily European - paella, coq au vin, zabaglione- but also shish kebabs and sukiyaki) .

    Two additional chapters advise on how to feed a crowd and "how to rise to the occasion," with scenarios such as the electric power failing, drop-in visitors, and good meals on a diet (the first time I've seen a cookbook with recipes specifically for diabetics and sodium-restricted. Also different are the use of packaged mixes in some recipes, although they do not specify any brands.

    You may recall a previous post about Bettina, the fictional newlywed from 1917 whose cook book put her into hundreds of daily-life scenarios (unflappable Bettina always saved the day with her best recipes and advice). In a way this book is a throw-back to that, but this time around the authors set up the reader as the heroine of her (yes, HER) supposedly real-life dilemmas. 


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