Gumbo and a Birdcage Kitchen

The Kitchen Digest (circa 1953) was published by the Parent-Teachers Association of my local school district.

It's a bit different as far as modern fundraiser cookbooks go because the first 62 pages are actually a compilation of short articles and national brand advertisements for homemakers. Some of the areas of interest are Food-Family Homemaking, Fashion and Beauty and Sewing-Needlework. For both husbands and wives, there is Home Furnishings and Interior Decorating and Travel & Resort. These pages are in black and white and at the rear is the Home Shopping Dept. which has a couple of pages of gifts and gadgets from Shrell Products.

The remaining pages (35 of them) are given over to recipes from local ladies and local merchant sponsor advertisements.

The previous owner has made corrections to several of the contributor surnames with her ink pen. I wonder how disappointing that was to the ladies of the 1953-1954 PTA to discover their names spelled incorrectly after the fact?

I recognize many of the names of the contributors and the merchants. This is a small town, after all, and not much has changed.

Sanitary Farm Dairies is the brand name called for in all recipe ingredients that fall under the dairy category: butter, oleomargarine, pasteurized or homogenized milk, cream, buttermilk, sweet milk, cottage cheese, whipping cream, and sour cream.

The following recipe is from the book and may come in handy if you have to feed a crowd.

SHRIMP GUMBO FOR 250 PEOPLE

10 fat hens
2 qts. hog lard or other grease
8 stalks celery
1 doz. green peppers
4 doz. small cans tomato paste
1 box salt
4 boxes crab boil
2 boxes file powder
50 lbs. shrimp
25 bunches shallots
1 bushel okra
5 lbs. flour
pepper

Day before you wish to serve:
Boil hens, bone and grind meat and add back to broth and freeze. Clean shrimp with shrimp cleaner, be sure to remove sand duct down the back. Cut shrimp in small pieces and freeze.

Brown flour until it is the color of peanut butter and close in a jar. Wash celery, green peppers and onions, chop fine and freeze. Cut okra ad fry in hog lard until slime is gone, cool and freeze.

Day you wish to serve:
Take 4 pots, 15 gallon size. Start 5 gallons water in each pot, bring to a boil. Add green pepper, onions, celery, okra and tomato paste. Simmer 2 hours. Add chicken and shrimp to broth and add enough water to have about 10 gallons of gumbo in each pot. Cook 20 minutes. Add hot gumbo a little at a time to the brown flour until it is a smooth thick sauce, then add this back to the gumbo. Add salt and pepper to taste, 1/4 box to each pot of gumbo. Let come to a boil and remove from fire and add 2 tbsp. of Gumbo File to each pot. Serve on steamed rice.

STEAMED RICE

Wash rice 3 times, last time with hot water. One cup of rice to one cup of water. Place in double boiler and boil about 45 minutes. Do not stir at any time while cooking rice.
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One of the advertisements in the homemaking section caught my eye. It was for Armstrong's Linoleum and featured a Birdcage Kitchen.

This unique kitchen looks like it was designed for a round or an octagonal-shaped room. Wish I could see this ad in color. There are stripes on the ceiling, cabinets and walls all meeting in the center of the ceiling above a hanging light fixture (complete with greenery), just like the top of a bird cage. There's a curly filigree around the top of the soffit. Two birdcages with resident cardinals are stenciled, painted or decaled onto two of the cabinet doors. Check out the design on the floor. It's just too cute.

What do you think about this kitchen? Do you suppose anyone every actually had one? I always did like those old Armstrong flooring advertisements.

Cookbook Triple Play

Wherever I go, I cannot resist picking up the cookbooks. I may not take them all home with me, but I ALWAYS look at them. After the food company cookbooks, some of my other favorite types are regional and fundraising cookbooks.

The other day, while on my way home from borrowing a pressure cooker from my dad, I picked up what looked to be a Tennessee regional cookbook at the Bellville General Hospital Ladies Auxiliary Resale Shop. (Ladies, I do like your shop, but I sure miss the annual Rummage Sale and the two week pre-sale of all the books! We don't have nearly enough Rummage Sales here in Texas.)

The Etowah Cook Book (1945, 62 pp.) is a collection of favorite recipes that were collected and compiled by the Ladies Auxiliary to The Order of Railway Conductors.

It's like many others of the same ilk--it contains recipes popular during that particular time period, from that particular area, and the names of the recipe contributors. Also like so many other older fundraiser and community cookbooks, there is a notable lack of illustrations.

While looking through the book a bit more thoroughly after I got home, I was pleasantly surprised to find several small advertisements for JFG Special Coffee and J. Allen Smith's White Lily Flour. Since Etowah is located in McMinn County, Tennessee, it's not surprising that two of the (sponsor?) ads in the cookbook are for Tennessee-produced products. Like so many other humble food companies of the past, these two brands are now owned by mega corporations, Reily Foods and J M Smucker, respectively.

I was surprised, however, to find the ads there at all. And while the majority of the recipes call for generic ingredients, there are recipes for White Lily Buttermilk Biscuits, White Lily Self-Rising Biscuits and White Lily Baking Powder Biscuits. No recipes using JFG coffee though, but the company slogan is there: "JFG Special Coffee -- The Best Part of the Meal".

This cookbook also has a nod towards the World War II sugar rationing, something many U.S. housewives had to contend with in the years leading up to the publication of this book. There is a small section in the Cake category that addresses this situation:

Sugar Saving Tips from White Lily Flour

In home baking, delightful cakes, cookies and other good things can be made
using sweeteners other than sugar. Molasses, sorghum, honey, light and dark corn
sirup*, and maple sirup are available and are excellent substitutes.

All of these sweeteners contain some water since they are in liquid or "sirupy" form. Therefore a few changes in recipes must be made when these are used. Cut out these rules and past them in your recipe book:

1. Never substitute other sweeteners for all sugar in baking recipes. Equal parts of sugar and other sweetener gives excellent results. One-fourth sugar and three-fourths other
sweetener gives good results.
2. When using molasses or sorghum, reduce liquid one-fourth cup for each cup of molasses or sorghum used. Allow 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda for each cup of molasses or sorghum.
3. When using honey, reduce liquid 1/4 cup for each cup of honey used. Use slightly lower oven temperatures to prevent oven-browning.
4. When using corn sirup, reduce liquid 1/4 cup for each cup of corn sirup used. Light corn sirup is better for light cakes, breads and cookies. Dark corn sirup is good in spice and other dark cakes, cookies and breads.
* (as spelled in the book)

So even though this book was not published specifically as a promotional item by a food company, I can rationalize and fit it into my advertising cookbook realm. After all, it DOES have those three brand-specific recipes. And I'll stretch it further and consider it to be somewhat of a wartime cookbook, as it does have suggestions to compensate for the shortage of sugar.

A triple play. I like that. (I am so easily amused.)