The Man Bait Mandate

Life, Dec. 18, 1950

Shedd's Old Style Sauce does not sound like your everyday culinary temptress. If only the Sirens had known about Shedd's, they could have really put a crimp in the Odyssey. All they needed to do was put some of this stuff on a little souvlaki and wave it around. Even though Ulysses had his sailors put wax earplugs on and had himself tied to the mast, he would not have been able to resist the Sirens once he got a whiff of Shedd's.

But what was in this incredible concoction? Well, Shedd's Old Style Sauce was a sort of mayo plus horseradish and general tangyness. Over here and  here you can see an early 1960s booklet extolling the Sauce from the same man-pleasing angle.

Uncle Phaedrus, he of the Lost Recipes, has a Shedd's Sauce Clone recipe on his site which involves mayo, horseradish, ketchup and a few ordinary spices. Whatever was in it, you could put it on just about any old thing and disembodied heads would - well, they would gather round and eye the sauce bottle with beaming smiles. Sometimes a dotted line would connect the head with the bottle and then you'd start wishing you'd used French's Mustard instead, wouldn't you. Because at least Hot Dan would eventually get bored and wander off to the next flavorless meal.

It was sold as Aunt Nellie's Old Style Sauce until 2007 but doesn't seem to be available any more. Aunt Nellie must have got tired of all those men she'd caught. Never mind what Uncle Joe thought of them!

The Psychedelic Pie Dress

Graphic Design - TJS Labs

Here's an enticing offer. Buy up lots of Johnston's Pies and you can get a Great Paper Dress for a dollar and a quarter. Because when you are shopping for pie, that is just when you are thinking: I wonder where I could get a really unusual maxi dress that looks like it is made of that kicky new shelf liner I got to match my new pink and orange kitchen? Say, maybe I'll get an idea while I'm buying this mince pie.

Perhaps the design is based on psychedelic mince pie. That must be it. And since it is a "newsy gown," maybe they made it out of leftover newspaper. It is, after all, "just off the press."

Paper dresses were a 1960s fad, as was paper clothing in general. They even made paper bikinis that you could wear, in theory, two or three times. I can't imagine who would do this, though. They should have made a dress out of the wallpaper in my grandmother's 1960s powder room: black, pink and silver with fake Parisian scenes featuring poodles. Or maybe that was "too wild to print."

You might like to wear the Andy-Warhol-inspired Souper Dress to enter a party and then change into the Pie Dress around dessert time, that might be fun. Or not. Because, as Wikipedia notes, these clothes were uncomfortable, the dye came off on you, and worst of all - well, they were flammable. So get someone else to heat up the 25 Johnston's Pies you are now stuck with.

The Pizzaroo Was Here and I Missed It?

Vintage Ads LJ

 Yes, let's all miss the Pizzaroo! While Biff is spinning some platters, we can sneak out the back door and go to the drive-in for burgers and malteds.

Missing the Polkaroo was another matter, back in the day. If you happened to be a Canadian kid, that is. I will explain that in a minute. First: the platter party.

A platter party was a social event centered around listening to records, which were called "platters" by wannabe hepcats (or perhaps by the non-hepcats, from the look of things on the left) because they were flat and round like, well, platters.

This looks like the early to mid 1960s but I've seen the term "platter party" in some 1940s magazines so this had been going  on for some time. Well, not this particular party. It only felt that way, maybe because of the Pizzaroo. Pizzaroo is not Polkaroo's long lost cousin from Italy, but is unfortunately a Spam-based pizza. Ugh, does that not look terrible? I don't even know what to say about this. But the olive slices are not helping.

Now, on to matters Polkaroovian: For those of you who missed out on pre-21st-century Canadian children's television, Polkaroo was a tall, strange what-is-it with a polka-dotted body, the neck of a giraffe and the head of a slightly addled dinosaur - a comical version of the creature envisioned by Yeats in "The Second Coming." 

Polkaroo was on a show called Polka Dot Door, that had two hosts - a guy and a girl. Polkaroo - who was mute, probably from boredom - would make fly-by visits, but only when the girl host was there. Then the guy would come in and act like he cared, as you can see in the clip below: "Oh NO! You mean the Polkaroo was here and I missed him?" This happened - and whatever guy was host  would say this line - every single episode. Yeah, you did miss the Polkaroo, because you were inside the Polkaroo costume.

Now sometime in the 1990s there was great excitement because Polkaroo was going to be un-Harpo-Marxified. Hence Polka Dot Shorts, the show which gave Polkaroo a voice! Yes, a voice! Only he never said anything very exciting. This was because Polkaroo, his pet Bibble (a large trilling pompom) and their friends lived in a forest and spent their time eating snacks and bickering. Just like life with toddlers.

The Coffee Incident

It's time for another great moment in 1920s etiquette, as imagined by Lillian Eichler,* who was second to none - not even Emily Post could outshine Miss Eichler here - in her creation of Embarrassing Moments. This one is from a 1921 ad for Eichler's Encyclopedia of Etiquette and is entitled "Has This Ever Happened To You?" The full page ad is here, by the way.

As you can see, Mr. Whipple - in his pre-Charmin days as a Jazz Age socialite (you didn't know that, I'll bet) has just spilled a cup of coffee all over the tablecloth. So - what should he do now? Multiple choice time! Please circle the correct answer and turn your quiz in to Miss Eichler in ten minutes:

a. Turn to the hostess and say "I beg pardon."
b. Offer his apologies to the entire company.
c. Ignore the incident completely.

I think that we will all pass the quiz if we go with a, but aren't b and c fun to imagine? Mr. Whipple getting up, making an impassioned speech to everyone, begging them to forgive him (and to stop squeezing their table napkins and hand them over right now so the hostess can start mopping up the river of espresso that is nearing her fringed flapper dress at an alarming speed). Or even better, him continuing to chatter excitedly about paper products because he thinks that that way, no one will notice that the caffeinated version of the Mississippi is roaring towards them.

*For even more Eichler posts, just try the "Mind Your Manners" tag down at the bottom of this post. I really ought to have an Eichler tag, though.

Top of the Pops, 1917

Popular Mechanics, December 1917 [big version]

In the winter of 1917, W.Z. Long, a Teddy Roosevelt lookalike, was inviting people to come over to his house (in the ad on your right). And there you would learn how to make a new-fangled popcorn confection called the Crispette.

Crispettes were similar to modern rice cakes or popcorn cakes. Andrew F. Smith writes in Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America (1999, p. 64) that W.Z. Long  has been making Crispettes since the 1890s.* They were made by mixing popcorn and corn syrup (plus a bit of baking soda) and rolling this out into thin sheets. The sheets were then cut into squares or other shapes. And they were selling like - well, hotcakes. Hot popcorn cakes, that is.

W.Z. wasn't the only one making popcorn crisp confections. Other entrepreneurial confectioners were busy mixing popcorn with syrup and flavorings like chocolate, maple and vanilla. I remember going to a candy store on Cape Cod in the 1960s and getting bars of popcorn flavored with chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. My favorite was the chocolate one. They were subtly sweet, and quite delicious.

Anyway, suppose you wanted to take Mr. Long up on his offer to set you up in the Crispette business. You could take the more reserved route of writing a note to him. But he actually preferred you to just, well - pop in:

Come to See Me at My Expense

Don't say you're coming. Just drop in quietly. Call on any banker or merchant. ..See if folks think I'll make you a square deal. Then come and see my store...Up to a distance of 300 miles I'll pay all your traveling expenses, if you buy a machine.

Wikipedia

So if you ended up hating Crispettes and didn't buy a machine, you'd have to shell out for that first class train ticket, right? And no doubt Mr. Long would make you sleep in an old popcorn bin. But since "everybody likes Crispettes - children - parents- old folks"- you'd probably want to know more.  And Mr. Long would give you all the equipment, and some recipes too. Well, not give, exactly. You'd be paying him later, after you'd made your millions - everything was on credit.

This was not a bit unusual in 1917. Credit back in the early 20th century was an everyday matter. My great grandmother had credit at the grocer's in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 30s; I'll bet yours did, too.  People simply ran up a tab, and the grocer - or Mr. Long of the Crispette machines, or whoever - trusted you to pay later on.

But now credit is a lot more complicated. Which means that it's a really good idea to keep track of your credit score. A service that can give you a free credit report -  and even help you find some pre-approved loans - is a nice thing to know about. Another nice thing to know? A vintage popcorn cake recipe  from the 1921 edition of Skuse's Complete Confectioner. And you don't even need a machine to make them - except for the caramel cutter - which looks, from the illustration in the Caramel chapter, like a printing-press with a wheel. Just use a knife instead, it's easier that way. The proportions are immense, since this is a commercial cookbook:

POPCORN CAKES

5 lb. sugar
2 1/2 lb. glucose
1 1/2 pints water
6 oz. treacle
6 oz butter or margarine
1 Tb salt

Pop 5 lb. of corn, then place it in a bowl and chop up small with a large knife. In the meantime, place the sugar and water with the glucose in a pan on the fire and boil to 270 degrees F. Add the treacle and butter or margarine, previously broken into small pieces. Continue to cook to 290 degrees F. Remove the pan from the fire and stir in the salt and popped corn. Stir until the corn is well covered with the sugar. Replace the pan on the fire to heat it a little, then empty the batch on an oiled slab. Flatten out with a rolling-pin. Roll into a  sheet, about a third of an inch thick; mark with a caramel cutter and cut into suitable pieces.

*Here is an item, in the August 1917 Popular Mechanics (p. 276) showing Mr. Long's machine.

A Theatrical Cigarette Card

Wikimedia Commons

I have always liked illustrated Victorian advertising cards. As you know, I love old ads of any kind, but there is something special about those that show a little glimpse of what the world looked like a century or two ago. The cigarette card on your right takes us to the Old Bowery Theatre, at 165 Bowery in New York. There are people walking by and coming out of the nearby restaurant, and poster boards propped on the theater steps, telling which plays were on at the moment.

Cigarette cards were first printed in the 1870s, and by the end of the 19th century they were popular to collect.  You could find series of cards depicting everything from  popular sports heroes and actresses, to scenic places or even illustrated riddles.

The Bowery Theatre, as you can see, had a splendid facade with very tall, rather pinkish columns - somewhat out of place sandwiched between the more modest structures on the street. It opened in 1826, with room to seat 3,500 people;  it was the largest theater in the United States at the time.

By the late 19th century the Bowery had changed hands several times and had been home to various immigrant theatrical groups. It burned down in 1929, and wasn't rebuilt - in 1944, the site was bought for a future gas station. And today at 165 Bowery there is a shop called  Mandarin Dynasty (I looked on Google Maps). It sells "European Crystal Chandeliers" and is housed in a plain, postwar four story block - without a single majestic pink column to be seen.

Illustrated cigarette cards are a thing of the past now, no longer an interesting innovation. In our time, things like the eCigarette are innovative. The electronic cigarette, which delivers nicotine in a flavored liquid, in small amounts; electronic cigarette side effects may include slight sore throat or dry mouth at first, but there is no tobacco in them. Brands such as green smoke are often used by smokers trying to quit, as a helpful way of weaning themselves off of smoking. That is something no one in 1826 would have been able to imagine.

The Egg And I (And A Band Aid)

LJ Vintage Ads

Never before a bandage that sticks like this!
And never before has boredom had a mandate
That did decree: so boring are boiled eggs,
Why not enliven cooking with a Band-Aid?

Yes, go ahead: stick them on all your eggs
That will be fun! Into the tiny pot
Lower them one by one, though if you have
Raw eggs a-dangle in both hands, watch out -

For they must fall and make a mess: it is
The kitchen's strange unutterable law
That something untoward will occur and then
You'll have a horrid mess upon the floor.

Alas for Band Aids and for using them all!
For if your hand in boiling steam will linger
You'll soon regret your fancy tricks, because
You'll want to put a Band Aid on that finger.

The Clever Hostess

Life, July 1, 1940

-Good dinner, wasn't it? Joan's a clever hostess.
-I must ask her where she got those wonderful big tender Frankfurts. Weren't they delicious?

It looks like the car is talking in the ad - maybe it is - but I guess not. The Guests are talking on the way home from another one of Joan's creative culinary endeavors. Try reading that little mini scene in sarcastic voices, though. Add mocking laughter at the end. Yeah, ask her where she got them so we know not to shop there.

Last time, we saw just how brilliant Things In Cans can be. Maybe Joan's clever dinner didn't come out of a can, exactly (though maybe what it's sitting on did, who knows) - but still. Hot dogs? This is clever?

Perhaps they tell jokes. Maybe Joan tells jokes. Or they could even be a double act. They do "Witty Songs and Sayings" - which is the name of one of Fred and Ethel Mertz's old vaudeville routines. Which you just know from the name will positively full of UGH. Just like Joan's dinner.

Oh, and I just noticed this  - that is one place setting. So that is not the service platter for the whole dinner party - that's one serving. No side dishes. No nothing. Just a bunch of hot dogs sitting on a plateful of frilly stuff. Where on earth is Hot Dan the Mustard Man when you need him?

Good thing old Joanie made her special Pepto Bismol gelatin mold for dessert. How did she get the Tums to stay suspended in it so perfectly? Well, because she's  - a clever hostess.

And Then Some

Life, July 15, 1946

A feast for the eyes - and then some!

To tell you the truth, it's the "and then some" part that is really worrying me. I don't know if you can see this in all its detailed glory. Hmmm. Here's the big version. The retro Post-It note that unfortunately is not covering up that sad excuse for a meal is telling us to "trust things in cans" because they are fresh and not overcooked. Um, OK.

This is obviously a patriotic act, too,* because a golden eagle holding a red white and blue banner is hovering over that plate of - what the heck is on it, anyway? Overcooked hot dogs weighed down by a half-cylinder of...something beige and solid from a can. Oh, look - the caption tells us what we're having for dinner here:

Bountiful buffet...jellied tomato bouillon, crackers, deviled ham, Vienna sausage, sliced liver loaf, tongue and chicken; hot corn pudding; vegetables for salad, honey for hot biscuits, iced tea...and they all come to you in cans!

But I just don't want them all to "come to me in cans." It sounds ominous - cans with little metallic feet, in a double line. Just like 1960s kids on a grade school trip, remember that? "Form a line and hold your partner's hand" - and it was always someone you didn't want to know about, and everyone's hands were all sticky and - ugh. Anyway, yes, Cans. Salad vegetables from cans? Please tell me the lettuce in the ad is not from a can. Because, as Yeats would tell us if he was coming over for dinner, lettuce "once out of nature"** should never go near anyone's plate.

And that goes double for the liver loaf.

* You can write that biting (hah) political essay that makes analogies between the deviled ham and Senator McCarthy, yourself.

The Eight Day Cable Caper

Don't let it get tangled!

It's 1917, and your Aunt Hattie in Nyack, New York wants to phone you to remind you to bring your Creamed Bean Surprise for Thanksgiving dinner. But you are living over in Tarrytown - on the other side of the Hudson River (about 25 miles north of New York City). What to do?

Fortunately, that was the year that the largest, heaviest submarine telephone cable in the world (to date) was laid under the Hudson. It was almost 15,000 feet long and weighed almost 90 tons. Imagine making sure that that didn't get tangled up like giant spaghetti.

Now, almost 100 years ago, cables were not the sleek and relatively light things that they are today. Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, had experimented with submarine cables as early as 1842, when he covered a wire in a mixture of tarred hemp and India rubber -  for waterproofing - and lowered it into New York Harbor. The first working underwater cable line - copper wire coated with gutta percha - was laid across the English Channel in 1850. And from then on, submarine cables were being laid in all sorts of places.

The Nyack-Tarrytown job took 8 days, several tug boats and scows, and a great many anxious-looking telephone company gentlemen - each in a natty bowler hat or flat cap. It took 2 days alone to put some of the cable, wound on a huge reel, onto a tug boat. The rest was put onto a scow (I don't know how many days that took).

Telephone men in bowler hats and caps

One end of the cable was "chained" to the land on the Tarrytown side. Then the tug went over to the Nyack side and repeated the process. Red and yellow striped "targets" had already been set up so they would know where to put the cable (good idea). The cable was chained to the river bed with what one can only hope were extremely heavy chains.

Did you have any idea about this sort of thing - about just how difficult it was to deal with cables back then? I didn't.

Thank goodness that today, there are great places like Optimized Cable Company where you can find all sorts of sleek, easy to use cables - in some lovely colors, too. And don't forget that things like Ethernet cable allow you to simply e mail Aunt Hattie to let her know you lost that Creamed Bean Surprise recipe and are bringing  brownies instead.

Another good thing? You don't need to load a tugboat with tons of huge cables while wearing a bowler hat.

[The photos and information are from "World's Biggest Telephone Cable Laid Under the Hudson," Popular Mechanics, June 1917.]

Some American Pie

Whitman: thinking of pie?

Garfield: yes, pie would be great! 

In the 19th century, way before Don McLean’s song about it, there was definitely a thing called “American pie.”

People in the US were known for their devotion to that particular kind of flaky pastry, so much so that it was even eaten for breakfast, sometimes.  In 1887 one writer noted that when he met the poet Walt Whitman, Whitman insisted that everyone should eat his favorite dish “solid American pie, washed down with the strongest of strong tea...Inquiry elicited the fact that pie was the main pabulum of Whitman’s life.”* And Thomas Jefferson Murrey writes in Valuable Cooking Receipts (1877): 

It seems to be a cardinal belief [in Europe] that no meal is furnished here without a superabundance of pie; that, even at the best inns and restaurants in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, pie is devoured at breakfast, luncheon, dinner and supper; that no American would sit down to a table where he could not see plenty of pie; that all the States are closely connected and bound together by a prejudice in favor of pie; that it was love of pie rather than force of patriotism which, in the civil war [sic - not capitalized], preserved the Union. 

I have found a few unusual pie recipes to include - not apple pie, though since we have just had the 4th of July that would be appropriate. Instead, let me share recipes from two states - Ohio and Arizona. 

Why these two? That would be in honor of Jacob Bromwell Inc., who make delightful retro kitchenware such as the All-American Flour Sifter, which will assist you in making a pie crust (or any other sort of baking endeavor, really) and the lovely Golden Era Pie Plate, in which to place said crust. Jacob Bromwell was originally located, you see, in Cincinnati, Ohio, but is now based in Tempe, Arizona.

Garfield Pie was an old Ohio specialty named in honor of Ohio-born President James A. Garfield:

GARFIELD PIE

Combine in a bowl 2 cups stewed sour apples, 1 tablespoon flour, 2 beaten egg yolks, 1 tablespoon melted butter, the juice of half a lemon, and sugar to taste. Bake in a single crust, then when it is almost done, cover with meringue (I suppose this is where you use the 2 egg whites you have lying around from when you needed the yolks) and put it back in the oven until it has golden edges.

ARIZONA GRAPEFRUIT PIE

And from Arizona, a pie that asks the culinary question: if you can make lemon pies and orange pies, why not a grapefruit one?

First you need to make and bake a single pie crust. Then set it aside and make the custard:

Sift ½ cup of flour (using, perhaps, the Bromwell Designer Flour Sifter) and then resift this with 1 cup of sugar and ½ teaspoon of salt. Combine this with 2 beaten eggs and then add in 1 ¼ cups scalded milk. Cook all of this over hot water (in a double boiler, that is) until smooth and thick; stir it a lot. Then add ½ cup grapefruit juice and cook for 10 more minutes. Take it off the heat and stir in 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. Pour this into that baked pie shell you have nearby (you do have it nearby, right?) Place 1 cup of grapefruit sections on the top and sprinkle with ½ cup of brown sugar. Run it under the broiler (on low) until the sugar caramelizes and the grapefruit is a little bit browned. Let it stand until is has cooled down, then serve.

Jacob  Bromwell and Co., 1886

Jacob Bromwell Inc. has been making things since 1819. In the 19th century (and in Cincinnati) they made sieves, pans, buckets and brushes. Since then they’ve been specializing in kitchenware, cookware for camping, fireplace items and other goodies - all made with old-fashioned care, and with a lifetime guarantee. I love the style and quality of their products and I think you will, too.  

Note: Both pie recipes are from America Cooks, by Cora, Rose and Bob Brown (New York, 1949). I rewrote them a little as some of the recipes are so very much of a certain vintage that they hardly tell you anything except a list of ingredients. This is not the fault of the Browns or anything, though.

*Robert Williams Buchanan, A Look Round Literature (1887), p. 343.

And the wonderful old engraving of Jacob Bromwell Inc. (then called Jacob Bromwell and Co.), on your right, is from an 1886 book entitled Leading Manufacturers and Merchants of Cincinnati.

Just Open A Can

Life, July 8, 1940 [big version here]

Early in the morning, as I stagger back down from the kitchen to my basement office, slurping coffee, I sometimes say to myself: Just open a can of Diet Coke and breakfast is different. Because, you know, it is really hot out these days and I am too lazy to make iced coffee that early, etc. etc. Or something like that.  And maybe I just groan a little, too, if the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet.

But even in a crabby, decaffeinated state of mind,  I adore this 1940 ad which shows a family from Not This Planet, snappy dialogue swirling out of their smiling mouths, fresh from the Hollywood Movie Set wardrobe and makeup facility that they clearly have in their garage.

And why do they look so petrifyingly pleased?

Juice, my friends. Libby's juice. And so here is Libby's Family of Juiceheads, ready for the day. This is the point where we all might make a few jokes like: I'll bet I know what's in THAT juice!

The only juice that really seems different - not exciting, mind you, just different -  is the loganberry juice, so that ought to be the one that's messing with their heads. But they're getting all het up (as my grandmother used to say, only not about juice of course) about the tomato juice. Maybe Mother made them all Bloody Marys. Just open a can and Breakfast Is Different!

That little girl is the only one not saying something unctuous. She is thinking: I'm not touching the Libby's juice. No way.

Go ahead and click to see the big version which gives you a frighteningly good view of this disturbing scene!