The Generational Recipe Shift

I've been going through my grandmother's recipe cards again putzing through and looking for something that screams Old Americana nostalgia like a nifty casserole or a recipe that's so funky and uncool that it's cool again - a horrid jello salad with marshmallows in it would adequately fulfill this want. I think making that would be so deliciously awful and retro it would revert time and space and the dish would become phenomenally awesome, like the clothes I wear that my dad boxed up from 1960-something. Sidecar cocktails and women's magazine chop suey recipes are the bell bottoms and luncheon gloves of Waybackwhen.

Still, there is one category of recipe which vexes me, the company made recipe. Recipes clipped from the back of a box of Vox (lard) or XLNT (chili beans) or other product that no longer exists. The problem here is sometimes the recipes aren't clear so I have no idea what the actual ingredient is. The instructions simply read "Stir in (X-Ingredient)." So sadly, I am left with the words that haunted me throughout college and high school trig and calculus courses: solve for X. The internet is also only so useful when hunting down something that hasn't been sold in stores since 1971.

There's always a bit of a generational recipe shift when trying to translate these cards. Sometimes the recipe is straightforward enough and I can pound out the dish easy enough. Other times my grandmother, having committed the recipe to memory or having been familiar with it, wrote it out in shorthand leaving gaps for me to figure out like baking times, degrees, or order of ingredients - creating a sudoku-style recipe where I have to fill in the blanks based on the information given which at times isn't lot, and games of sudoku don't run the risk of burning or making your kitchen smell of failure. In some cases it's simply a type of dish or flash-in-the-pan hot recipe that I'm completely unaware of and therefore have no inkling as to what the final product should be. 

But it's not all bad. I can trace out the history of culinary America, or a short period of it, through this box. It definitely reflects a time where convenience cooking is held in high regard. Sliced white bread. The intoxicating newness of frozen peas for a "Fresh Pea Soup." Canned corn that makes for a "Southwest Salad." And lo' and behold the glory and miracle that is the microwave which goes hand in hand with the frozen dinner - or ones that you can make at home! Make a dish and freeze it for later - the novelty of it all! Gather up the kids and we'll all watch a swell episode of I Love Lucy! I hear Joan Crawford will be guest starring in tonight's episode!

It's amusing to say the least. But what's even better is when the card is noted as "old fashioned" and refers to some dish popular in the 1920's like a bully old appetizer of mushrooms stuffed with crab and cheese or big bowl roman punch.
Plus I find it interesting to follow the food fads of the time. Curry powder was making a resurgence, indeed curry as the dish itself was huge. In fact there's a whole section dedicated to curry in the recipe catalog such as Hawaiian Turkey with Curry Sauce and Governor Smylie's Lamb Curry (using Smylie's brand prune chutney, of course!). Lots of stuffed mushrooms for all those neighborhood parties. I don;t judge this based solely on the box, but rather than many of these recipes are clipped from magazines and newspapers and glued to note cards.

Another big fad was Chinese food. It was HUGE in the 50's. Indeed every woman had their own unique recipe for chop suey. Incidentally, chop suey when translated to Cantonese means "odds and ends." As Jennifer 8. Lee related in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles Americans in the fifties whet crazy for what they thought was the national dish of all of China. This would be like someone from China coming to the U.S. and asking for our national dish which they heard was called "leftovers." (There is much more to that story but you should read her book to get it.) But basically as adventurous eating turned to the many new Chinese restaurants popping up in the U.S. which had dishes that were altered for American tastes using local ingredients - making the unfamiliar a little bit safer - people wanted to cook these dishes at home.

There's also a huge section of recipes for "Liver / Kidney," the third biggest next to "Salads" and "Grilled Meat." I assume this is one based out of poverty and of a time when people simply ate more offal before pre-packaged cuts of meat became so widely available and people were able to simply pick up mass produced choice cuts. People then became separated from it and now the populous at large is disgusted by the food their grandparents happily grew up eating.

Anyways, it's an interesing topic to look at. How food and recipes have changed and stayed the same over the years. The food fads and trends (1980's goat cheese salad anyone?). I'll probably delve into the rhetoric of recipes sooner or later too after more research. Stay tuned.

Nifty Links:
Recovered Recipes
Rockstar Ingredient Theory
War Cake Recipe
Tomato Soup Cupcake (Depression Era Recipe)