2-D Celebrities

    I thought today we might just glance at three celebrities who can be remembered by heir postcards.  Each was responsible for a lot more cultural baggage than that: bits of our language, tie-in merchandise, musical history, and all that.  But even at that, they are nowhere NEAR as big as once they were.

    E.F. Outcault was looking for fame: it helped make his case.  One of the first successful; cartoonists (The Yellow Kid, considered by many to be the first American comic strip, was his) and he was also the one of the first cartoonists to go to court to discuss whether the characters je created belonged to him or to the newspaper he worked for.  His plans did not involve a lot of sharing with the newspapers.

    When he had his next hit with Buster Brown, he went all out.  No one had really explored the paths into merchandising that he mapped: both Buster Brown and Tige, his dog, were seen on dozens of different products, of which the Buster Brown shoes were the longest lived.  Outcault was not blind to the appeal of postcards, either, and advertised his lectures with cards people would recognize even if they didn’t recognize his name.

    Buster Brown, though it may be difficult to see here, was considered wildly cute by dozens of readers, an everyday boy who, despite the advice of Tige, would get into trouble every day, and generally wind up getting spanked, finishing the strip off with a half-mock explanation of why he deserved the spanking.  He’d do things differently today.

    Also cute, and also constantly in trouble was F. Burr Opper’s happy Hooligan.  His antics made the word “hooligan” a part of the national lingo, and made him one of the first comic strips adapted to live action movies (though Charles “Bunny” Schulze’s Foxy Grandpa beat him to that). 

His outfit even made a popular Halloween costume, as seen here..

    Even his side characters got into the act, with Alphonse and Gaston and their odd insistence that the other go first, entered the language as well.  So did one of their other running gags, their habit of crying out “Oh, would that I had remained in dear old Ottawa, Illinois!” or “How I desire at once to be transported to that lovely old Dundee, Iowa!” when confronted by angry lions or pursuing police, or both.  This habit weas immortalized in the song “Oh, How I wish I was in Peoria!”

    Cuteness and mischief being key, there was no doubt that Bonzo would hit it big.  At first a character acter in the full-page cartoons of George Studdy, he branched out into animated cartoons (perhaps beating Feliz the Cat to the punch.”  From his debut around 1922, he provoked choruses of “Awwww!” from all who beheld him.

    Exactly what breed of dog Bonzo is remains a mystery, though both bull terrier and pug have been suggested.  Bonzo figurines, Bonzo Dog Food, and Bonzo place settings were available throughout the civilized world.

    He also inspired any number of cartoonists to produce Almost-Bit-Not-Quite Bonzo cartoons.  And anyone who remembers off-the-wall rock group The Bonzo Dog Doo=Dah band (“Urban Spaceman”) will know just how far cuteness will carry a character.

Sales of Yesteryear

    Maybe, Mincemeat Macaroon, I have been going about this the wrong way.  Maybe we can gently ease the conversation away from food and back to the world of postcards, taking baby steps.  So I thought I would fill a blog with a few things I learned about kitchen and household ways of the past through postcards *and one vintage blotter.)

    I saw a number of these business correspondence cards featuring something called Nine O’Clock Washing Tea and wondered what it was you were going to wash with tea.  This is easily explained: the product for sale is, in fact, laundry soap.  It got its name because the manufacturers advertised that this was a revolutionary new soap that would make the housewife’s life so much easier that by nine o’clock on Monday morning, the laundry would all be washed and hanging on the line, and she could stop for tea.  The product is remembered today not for the amazing qualities of the soap but because the company produced product tie-in clocks with the name of the product running along the outer rim of the face and the numbers farther in.

    Advertisers were looking for things that attracted attention, not things which followed logically with the product.  We are more scientific these days, and do not pull this kind of trick.  (Just occurred to me: what DO emus have to do with insurance?)  Swift Soap and Washing Powder introduces us to the little boy writing endorsements of the product, making hen scratches on the paper, so that his shadow…okay, you got the joke.  (Swift was one of the big meat-packing companies, by the way. A LOT of packing companies handled soap on the side; they were often careful to keep their name off of it, as the association of soap with animal fat does not sell soap.)

    I thought Uncle Ben had a monopoly as a dried rice product spokesman, but he actually had to share his own product with this little stick man…or rice man.  The little fellow, who doesn’t seem to have had a name, saluted you from the box for decades (symbolizing how the individual grains of rice could be seen, not becoming mushy, or something like that.)

   This gag is pretty obvious: the counter attendant is serving his wurst to the worst sort of customer.  The thing about the gag that interested me (though it made me gag) was the nickel’s worth of “Hot Liverwurst”.  Coming from a region where liverwurst is often called Braunschweiger (though in other parts of the world they are completely distinct) I am familiar only with liverwurst served cold.  This does seem to be how it is served through most of the world: either in thick slices on a plate with plenty of pickles or sliced on rye bread with plenty of onions (and/or pickles.)

    I never developed a taste for this (I think I am the only one in my immediate family with this phobia) simply because my parents tended to SPREAD it on bread, and spreadable meat struck me as something otherworldly.  But I think perhaps I would prefer that to eating it freshly steamed.  Yet, searching the Interwebs, I found a few brave souls who do eat their liverwurst hot, mainly serving it just as cold liverwurst is served.  One or two, though, actually chop it and fry it with potatoes.  In dread fear I went hunting for…but no, I could not find a liverwurst pizza or liverwurst burrito anywhere online.  Perhaps a few boundaries wait for other heroes to cross them.

   Oh, on the subject of spreadable meat, my mother declared frequently that tapioca meatloaf was properly done if you had to serve it in a mug and eat it through a straw.  No, I didn’t, to tell you the truth.  I’d wait until the next day, when the leftovers had congealed, and I could slice it onto a sandwich.

Vital Vittle Volumes

    Since you asked, I will answer, but we MUST get back to postcards one of these days.  But being a blogger and thus not shy about sharing my opinion, I will pass along some thoughts on Iconic American Cookbooks.  This is not a Top Ten because I haven’t got room for ten and, anyhow, I’d be bound to leave something out, as most of my own cooking is done by the Toss-Salt-On_=it-Put-It-In-The-Oven method.  I rely for these notes on what I learned selling books at the Book Fair, especially from listening to the Cookbook Lady, Penelope Bingham, who lectured the length and breadth of Illinopis (at least) speaking on what we can learn about our history from cookbooks.

    One of the things that fascinated the Cookbook Lady was expressed in a question guaranteed to start a conversation: What cookbook did YOUR mother cook out of?  She was fascinated to learn that once she got more than five miles out of urban Chicago, the hands=down winner of this was generally FARM JOURNAL’S COUNTRY COOKBOOK, a mssive volume (over 1,000 recipes is what it declared) first published in 1959.

    But in Jewish households, she found it was THE SETTLEMENT COOKBOOK.  This came out of the Settlement House, a center for the assistance of new immigrants in Milwaukee, who at the start of the last century were mainly either Jewish or Italian.  The cooking was robust and popular, but the Board of the institution jibbed at the price of printing a cookbook (it was 1901; the publisher wanted eighteen bucks) so its author had to sell it by subscription.  Within a few years, the Settlement House, now known as the Jewish Community Center, was heavily supported by proceeds from the book, which had become a basic reference for Jewish (though not fully Kosher) cooking.

   Irma S. Rombauer was 53 when her husband committed suicide.  Ger children suggested she write down her recipes and thoughts on cooking to deal with the trauma, and in 1931, the first edition of THE JOY OF COOKING was published.  For many people this is a basic reference, and it inspired thousands of sometimes surprising followers.  (The author of The Joy of Sex called it that because the first cookbook he queried turned him down.)  I was amazed, at the Book Fair, to run into people who detested The Joy of as time went on, the editors introduced the “Action Method” of writing recipes, in which each ingredient is introduced to the conversation when it is added to the recipe, instead of the Traditional Method, where you get a list of ingredients at the top and THEN are told what to do with them.  (I prefer Erma Bombeck’s more basic excuse for disliking it: everyone wanted to spell her name with an I instead of an E.)

    THE BOSTON COOKING SCHOOL COOKBOOK, also known as the Fannie farmer Cookbook was a follow-up to Mary Lincoln’s Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cookbook.  What set Fannie’s 1896 volume apart, and led to HER status as a basic reference was her insistence on measurements.  Before Fannie, a pinch of this or a handful of that might do, but it was Fannie who defined the level teaspoon, and asked that a certain number of ounces of butter (instead of “a lump of butter as big as a goose egg”) be used.

    Anybody out there need to be told anything about Julia Child, who had a more massive following than any television chef up to her time?  Didn’t think so.  Her MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING is a massive set, even if you bought only the original volume (the sequel is just as big, and you really need both.), and the one I had the most comments on at the Book fair from people who had lent their copy to a friend or given it to a grandchild, and regretted it, wanting it back.

    Craig Claiborne revolutionized the art of writing about food for a newspaper; he was the first male ever to be put in charge of a major newspaper food section.  Along the way, he edited THE NEW YORK TIMES COOKBOOK, a new generation’s Joy of Cooking.  A customer came to me once at the Book fair with tears in her eyes.  She had never expected to find a copy of this book in her price range, and yet here it WAS.

    We are running out of space, and I have not mentioned James beard, or any of the Good Housekeeping cookbooks, or The Silver palate Cookbook, La Technique, The Victory Garden Cookbook, How To Cook Everything, The Cake Doctor, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Dr. Garbee’s Wild Game Cookbook, and Mexico One Plate at a Time, all of which have their supporters online.  Then too, as I learned from a lady who begged me to find a particular issue of Gourmet, the most important cookbook in your home is always the one which has THAT recipe in it.

    For example, the Minute Tapioca cookbook is probably the source of the family Tapioca Meatloaf…oops, just out of space.

Crisp and Unclear

    We had apples at our house.  There were other fruits, though not as many as you may suspect, as this was back in the last century and no one had invented Star Fruit or Kiwi or such other modern contraptions.  My father had half a grapefruit with his breakfast, we ate enough bananas that our potassium levels must have been very healthy (though I don’t believe potassium was invented until I was in high school), and there were frequently oranges.  There was also canned fruit and even boxed fruit (raisins, mainly).  But there seem always to have been apples.

    We ate these as they came, often right off the tree (the man who built our house also planted an apple tree we had experimented with over the years, grafting on bits of other trees until it produced seven different varieties of apple.)  We also ate them in apple salad (Waldorf salad to you city types), apple pie, and apple crisp.  She never produced Apple Brown betty or Apple Pan Dowdy.  NOBODY in our neighborhood made either of those exotic dishes (we were a land of culinary conservatives, where my mother was considered a little suspect for putting cinnamon in her apple pie/  Fortunately, someone moved to town who used nutmeg, and the burden of stigma shifted to that innovator.)

    So when dealing with a number of postcards dealing with apples, I was moved to investigate these two strange and wonderful dishes and, because my life is not difficult enough, I looked around to find out the difference between apple cobbler and apple crisp.

    America’s interest in Apple Pan Dowdy arose in 1946, when Dinah Shore recorded the song “Soo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy”, both of which dishes are associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch (who, like the Dutch children on vintage postcards, were originally German.)  the Interwebs experts do not exactly agree on what Apple pan Dowdy IS (and you can get into a fine fuss over whether it should be spelled Apple Pandowdy.)  Some make it as a sort of apple cobbler, while others produce an apple crisp.

    Apple cobbler seems to be the oldest of these recipes, produced, according to the Interwebs, by English colonists who were homesick for the puddings of their youth but unable to get all the ingredients or cook them the way they wanted on makeshift fires.  So they stewed up apples and sugar and put a biscuit type of crust on top.  Some, not all, of the writers go on to say this biscuit dough must be dropped onto the apples in circular globs, resulting in a top that looks like a cobblestone road.  Over the years, some people added a crust on the bottom, to, produced a sort of open-sided pie.

    Then came Apple Crumble.  Some of these recipes started to be called Apple Crisp around the era of World War I, but Apple Crumble came first.  I was informed by one online writer, with some severity, that if the crumbled topping (or streusel topping) on your apples contains nuts, it MUST be called Apple Crumble, though not all Apple Crumble recipes involve nuts.  But Apple Crisp NEVER does.

    If that streusel topping is primarily made of crumbled bread, particularly wheat bread, then what you are making is Apple brown Betty.  Some Apple Brown Betty recipes involve pouring boiling apple cider or boiling syrup over the apples before adding the streusel topping, but this also depends on how you were brought up  Apple dessert recipes are not as strict as, say, pizza, where a Chicago Pizza is not a New York Pizza is not a New Haven Pizza, etc.

     I was going to tell the story about an aunt of mine who was so suntanned when she started Kindergarten that the other kids called her Betty (for Apple brown Betty).  She told me with some satisfaction that “They only did THAT for one day.)  But I am running out of room, and I never did discuss the actual apple postcards (since this is a blog mainly about postcards.)  I will simply add that my mother’s recipe for Apple Crisp is as traditional as you please, coming from The Joy of Cooking, one of three or four cookbooks which MADE American cuisine in the twentieth century.  Um, if you look for it, you’ll need to look under Fruit Paradise, since the topping can be applied to any fruit you have handy (and is very good even on something like canned fruit cocktail, about which I feel I am going to have to consult the Interwebs again.  Stay tuned.)

Half-Baked Blogging

    No, we are not going to pause for any more food trivia.  We are going to discuss postcards again and not get bogged down in side missions involving this or that bit of culinary history.  Those of you who asked about the two Ms in M&Ms will just have to…oh, all right: it stands for mars and Murrie, Murrie being a Hershey executive who…no, we will NOT go into who first put them in cookies.  We’ll  just move from there to Baby Ruth (NOT named for Babe Ruth, by the way) and we will not be discussing postcards.  This is postcard only day: no food history.

    Of course, you can’t have cute little ethnic stereotypes on your postcards without occasionally making fun of a group’s food.  Here is another of the highly popular Dutch children sending his love by comparing his affection for you with his affection for his national foodstuffs.  The line between the Dutch and the Germans (Deutsch) is stretched a little thin here, as sausage was frequently associated with the Germans, generally with sauerkraut.  But coffeecake?

    Well, see, coffee cake is called that because the Germans (or, to be more accurate, probably the Austrians, but people who didn’t bother with the difference between the Deutch and the Deitsch were not going to worry about that) had something they called kaffeekuchen, which pretty much translates as Coffee Cake.  There was no particular recipe for it: it was any kind of cake you ate with your coffee.  It apparently remained something of an exotic novelty in some parts of the country./;  In any case, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, an explorer who went as a young man on the second trip Major John Powell made down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, recalled a coffee cake adventure during that trip.

    It was Dellenbaugh’s turn to cook while the other men were out exploring, so he decided to surprise everyone by varying their diet with coffeecake.  He had no notion what it was, but he’d heard about it, and figured he could fake a pretty decent one by combining a dozen eggs with a pound of sugar and a pound of flour AND a pound of coffee, and baking the result.  Not only were the guys not especially thrilled by the result, but they also had the nerve to complain about the waste of so many of their supplies on a failed experiment.  You’d think people who go traveling through the Grand Canyon would have more of a spirit of adventure.

    This was one of a large series of very popular postcards telling people about things they didn’t need to do, mainly in some sort of romantic situation.  Among the many there were admonitions that Uneedn’t Worry, Uneedn’t Gamble, Uneedn’t Say yes to Everyone, and so on.  It loses a little of its humor due to the disappearance of one of the greatest all-time American brand names.

    Crackers were an omnipresent food product, used as a bread substitute, or something to break up in soup, or something to spread butter on for a quick snack or something to crumble up in a bowl with milk for a breakfast or a food for someone with a queasy stomach.  Every bakery made crackers, and you would, in the days of unbranded foods, just go to the store with a bag and fill it up with crackers from the cracker barrel.  In the late nineteenth century, Nabisco decided to change all that, less for sanitary reasons than because there was money in them thar barrels.  They came up with a kind of waxed paper sleeve which would hold a row of biscuits and decided to give it a name people would remember.  And the Uneeda Biscuit was born.  No, they did not make them in Oneida or anything like that.  The name meant just what it looks like it means, as they made clear in their slogan “We say it yet lest you forget: Uneeda Biscuit!”  (Why biscuit and not cracker?  The use of words like cookie, biscuit, and bun is a whole nother blog.)

    The first packaged cracker in America, and the first made by Nabisco, it survived world wars, the Depression, the postwar world, and even the merger wars of the 1990s, but finally in 2008 succumbed to the absorption of Nabisco by Kraft, which decided you might need a cracker, but you didn’t need a Uneeda Biscuit.  Although Amazon still lists them, they have been “currently unavailable” for some time now.

    There!  It was nice to get back to postcards, wasn’t it?

When and Why

   Would you stop now, Bluebrry Baked Beans?  This is not a foodie column, as anyone who has heard me speak of my mother’s Tapioca Meat Loaf and my own landmark Turkey liver Pizza will attest.  There are other places on the Interwebs which can provide you this information, and I wanted to get back to postcards.  And if you keep asking me questions which make me wonder about the answer, I’ll never get there.

    Anyhow, the Interwebs could not provide me with a very coherent answer to your inquiry about ketchup and French fries?  (Or catsup.  Or Freedom fries.  Or tomato sauce and chips, if you hail from across the Interwaters.)  They all blame diners and other fast drive-ins in that brace new world which followed World War II.  (They also passed along what I should have guessed: that Ray Kroc bought into McDonald’s and made it what it is today because he really liked their fries.)  But no one will say when or how we started wanting ketchup on fried potatoes generally.  I ate at a spot this month which provided ketchup with the has browns, which strikes me as a sign of some deep obsession.  They tend to get bogged down in the history of ketchup, and never get to the real question.  (The first ketchup packets were developed in the late 1950s, if you needed to know that.)

    They also have to fill you full of the history of salt (so valuable to our ancestors that the word “salary” comes from it; nothing to do with putting salt on celery.)  And black pepper was most valuable too,. at least until red pepper was discovered.  But it was apparently the fault of Louis XIV, a notably finicky eater, that we think of salt and pepper as the essential table seasonings.  His tummy was bothering, and he ordered that in his palaces, he wanted nothing but salt and pepper (and maybe a small dish of parsley) be set out on his table.  So salt and pepper it was on all other fashionable tables, and that is why those two little porcelain pugs on your table are not a trio or a quartet.

   I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned Chex Mix Rice Krispie Treats.  Several people did point out that since I had outlined the history of one half of that forbidden union, I should explain the other.  Back when Ralston Purina was making human foods, they introduced Shredded Ralston, a healthy wheat cereal somewhat similar to the one we know as Mini-Wheats.  Rice Chex began appearing around 1950, and as Ralston’s name started drifting away from the cereals Shredded Ralston changed its name and recipe to become Wheat Chex..  Betting is that these crunchy cereals were added to snack mix long before the recipe became official, but the first known appearance of Chex Mix was in a 1952 ad in Life (the magazine, not the similar=-looking cereal.)  The original recipe still appears on the Chex boxes (Corn entered the merry band later) though people who have the time and the old cereal boxes have observed that the original recipe on the box now is not the same as the original recipe you’d have seen in the 1980s or the original recipe you’d have found in the 1960s.  A lot of people I knew toss in M&Ms for their own special recipe, and I have known plenty of people who added lots of peanuts.  (I believe that’s how my piano teacher, who called hers “Stomach Ache medicine”, created her mix.)

   We have just time for one more piece of food history, and for this I direct your attention to the book shown at the head of this column.  This is a little volume of stories published in German for the purpose of teaching German children how to read English.  It was [put together in the 1920s by Stephen Southwold, who wrote several of the stories, and took others from various children’s annuals of the 1910s.  Some are fairy tales, some are motivational stories, and one explains how they invented….

    The king had ordered his chef to prepare a wonderful wild game pie for the guests at the Christmas banquet.  So the chef began stewing the filling, creating a great pot of simmering savory broth with plenty of meat in it.  While that was cooking, he prepared the dough for the pie crust.  Just as he was ready to start assembling the massive pie, though, the king called him up for a consultation about the desert, or the pielettes to be made with the leftover dough, or something.  While the chef was out of the kitchen, one of the page boys who had been busy with a snowball fight in the yard, ran inside to get warm.  Spying the big pile of dough for the pie crust, he of course thought of making doughballs, which he could throw without mittens, since they wouldn’t chill his hands.  He’d be the best shot in the game.  He had just finished making the entire pie crust into dough balls when he heard footsteps, and heard the voices of the king and the chef.  Suddenly aware that he had been playing with royal foodstuffs, he panicked and, not knowing where else to hide them, threw all the doughballs into the stew.

    The chef was showing the king how everything was ready when he suddenly realized his pie crust was gone.  The king, meanwhile, had been examining the stew, wondering why it had all these round white islands in it.  “What the hotel bill is this?” he demanded.

    The chef knew enough about cooking to realize what side his bread was buttered on, and said, “Oh, that was a surprise I was making for the Christmas dinner.”

    The king sampled one of the islands, and was enchanted by it.  “Has this wonderful tidbit a name?”  On learning the chef had not (truthfully) thought of one, the king announced that “Since your name is Simon Dump, we shall call these Dumplings!”  And so the dumpling was….

    Well, no it wasn’t, actually.  But I have to blog SOMETIMES about things which come out of books, and not the utterly factual Interwebs.

Since You Asked

   Well, Butterscotch, Brisket, I had intended to go back to talking about postcards I have sitting around, but I have had a few questions about some topics I glossed over in the last column, and they were interesting enough to make me go out and run down the information.

    Rice Krispies hit store shelves in 1923, and Rice Krispies Marshmallow Squares came along fifteen years later.  We will not be discussing the whole history of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, who were just words in a radio commercial until about 1933, and went on to world fame.  And we are NOT going to discuss Nestle’s Crunch and other items which have crisped rice in them.  Kellogg’s is not paying me to become the world’s fount of wisdom about…no, we will NOT be discussing fried rice!

    Back to the marshmallow squares, or RKTs, or whatever they called them when you were growing up.  Something similar had been in cookbooks since 1918 as Puffed Rice Brittle, or Puffed Wheat Squares.  You took the cereal, added sugar, molasses, vinegar, and butter, and mixed ‘em up.  Remember, though, that there was a product called a Slanket before the Snuggie came along and wiped it off the map.

    In 1939, a Kellogg’s employee and Camp Fire Girl leader named Marjorie Day was looking around for something her troop of girls could make and sell as a fundraiser.  At this point, Camp Fire Girls tended to sell packages of Campfire Marshmallows.  Feeling this made life easier—marshmallows were less sticky to work with than molasses, she said—she dropped the sugar, molasses, and vinegar mixture from the recipe, and used Rice Krispies both from company loyalty and because she figured customer in Michigan would feel te same way about Kellogg’s.

    The world was never the same again.

    People had no trouble at all buying as many of the squares as the troop could make, and word spread, so that just two years later, Kellogg’s started printing the recipe on the box.  For reasons which have not been explained to me, it was not until 1995 that they returned to the original concept and began selling pre-packaged Rice Krispies treats, which are so omnipresent in stores that the modern generation may not know at all that we used to have to make these ourselves.

    They certainly taught me one of the basics of kitchen work when I was a kid: nothing is ever as simple as the recipe would have you believe.  Marshmallows take FOREVER to melt (especially when you’re nine years old) and the muscle power required to drag a wooden spoon through a pan of melting marshmallows and cereal would probably propel a child to a career in the NFL or WWE.  I DO believe the homemade squares taste better than the packaged ones, but that’s what ALL ancient, decrepit people say.

    Since you asked for my opinion (you’ve read this far, haven’t you?), I also do not approve of any of these IMPROVED recipes for the Treats.  Some of these begin by switching out cereals.  Froot Loops Treats are just not the same, believe me, and some creepy mad scientist actually produced a recipe combining two the great cereal snacks with a Chex Mix Marshmallow Square.  I’d just as soon go buy Cracker Jacks, if you don’t mind.

   And I understand, honestly I do, the impulse to toss in chocolate chips, or a bunch of peanuts, or a scoop of peanut butter.  I promise you, I do not judge you if you like Rice Krispies Squares which have been dipped in chocolate or forsted with strawberry jelly.  But surely you realize you need to go back to the purity of the original, after you’ve had your fling.  (I did now someone who liked to mash up Rice Krispies Treats in a bowl and pour milk on them.  HER I’m willing to judge.)

    By the way, at my house, we used the same pot for Rice Krispie Treats that we used to make my mother’s macaroni and cheese, the recipe for which took some…ah, I’ve reached my limit of words for one column.  Maybe some other blog.

Food Fashions

    I was worrying a bit more about things we eat and drink this week and, of course, once again turned to the Interwebs for answers.  I was about as successful as I am with anything on that fickle ocean, but I did pick up a few vague answers to go with my vague questions.  (The illustrations are merely food-related postcards that were sitting around, and have nothing to do with the text, a policy one or two readers have wished they had followed.)

    The online experts divide easily into three groups when one asks why menus across the nation suddenly picked up Sweet Potato Fries.  One group traces this fashion to some point in the early 1990s, but no one knows where it began or why.  The second group goes all ethnic and points out the long tradition of frying sweet potatoes in Guinea, as if they don’t understand that once humans learned about frying, nothing weas safe, and of course, sweet potatoes were as likely to wind up in the hot fat as anything else.  The third group just says “Ooooh, sweet potato fries!  How healthy!”

    And no, I am not going to be lured into any discussions of frying vs. pan-broiling, the merits of air-friers, or the question of deep-frying Twinkies, ice cream, Snickers bars, or anything else.

    I had a colleague who, in becoming an expert on the question “How did Midwestern Cooking get so bad?” tried to get at the origin of Snickers Salad.  She came out pretty much where she went in.  The Midwest is not unique in its ability to mix ingredients in either mayonnaise or whipped cream (or a combination of the two) and calling it a salad, but we are renowned for it.  She found out that the concoction known as Snickers Salad not only has no agreed-upon inventor, but also no agreed-upon recipe.  Apparently any salad you chunk candy bars into can be called Snickers Salad, and the police will do nothing about this.

    Cedar-Planked Salmon, however, can be traced to the Pacific Northwest, where cooking salmon on a cedar plank (well-soaked) is said to come from the traditions of the natives of that region, who found that this imparted certain flavors of the cedar to the salmon./  Those of you who would not consider this a blessing have apparently never tried it, though my father suggested to me one that anything which might keep salmon from tasting like salmon HAD to be a good idea.

    Moving back to the Midwest, I know a person who grew up outside this tradition who was stunned on visiting her first large Midwestern potluck dinner not by the number and variety of casseroles, but by the even larger number of what she called Congealed Salads.  Yes, I told her, putting things like orange sherbet and/or shredded carrots in Jell-O is a great American tradition.  My colleague who researched Midwestern cuisine blamed this on this rise of Home Economics Departments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These, she said, were largely sponsored by food companies, which would pay the graduates of such courses to come up with dozens of ways to use Jell-O, Cream of Mushroom Soup, and/or canned vegetables in new and interesting ways..  This sort of thing has never died away, she said, but saw its crowning achievement in the hors d’oeuvres and party salads celebrated in cookbooks of the fifties and Sixties, where lime -flavored gelatin, cream of celery soup, and canned sausages were forced to do things in public that would have made our Pilgrim ancestors shudder.  She also noted with a shudder what she called Ethnic Stereotype cooking, in which adding pimiento to any dish made it Italian, a quarter teaspoon of chili powder made it Mexican, and canned pineapple made it Polynesian.

    I am out of space, and haven’t even begun to consider Roasted Beet Salad, Applewood Smoked Bacon, and sunny-side up eggs on pizza.  But we can tantalize our appetites with those in some other blog someday.  (Hey, did I tell you about the time I tried to track down my mother’s recipe for macaroni and cheese, and found out…okay, next time.)

Days of Yore

    So, just a touch over 130 years ago, a man named Brown and a man named Bigelow started a company called Brown & Bigelow, a company known to this day for putting pictures on things.  Art prints, but also using same images on decks of cards, cigarette lighters, clothes, and, especially, calendars.  Helping companies do their advertising with calendars pushed them into the world of giving advice on advertising campaigns and the art of making promotional products/

    A lot of their clients ran to blue collar industries: garages, gas stations, plumbing companies.  So among their most famous (and valuable) products were their girlie calendars, featuring pictures of scantily clad damsels, sometimes in distress, by Rolf Armstrong, Gil Elvgren, and the ceiling-breaker Zoe Mozert, a model who found out what the artists were getting for painting pictures of her, picked up a brush, and cut out the middle man.

    More family friendly products featured artists whose works, on calendars or as framed prints, were eventually seen all over America: Maxfield Parrish (though the Parrish print your grandmother had in her house was probably one HER grandmother got by sending in boxtops from chocolates), Norman Rockwell who produced years and years of official Boy Scout calendars for them, and Louis Icart, whose work straddles the line between Girlie Art and Wall Art.  (Wall Art is the rather sniffy name applied by critical types to the kind of art people buy for the walls of middle-class homes, dentists’ waiting rooms, and lobbies in senior centers.  Come the revolution, these sniffy types will be lined up against a wall right next to people with wall art, and we’ll all go down together.)

    But they covered all themes you might expect on calendars: nature scenes, baseball players, old cars, golf, cars, and, um, the main thing I was looking up when I started this search of the Interwebs.  They gave us the works of Kashus Koolidge.

    Cassius Marcellus Coolidge wash a painter and cartoonist who sometimes signed his work “Cash” or “Kash”, or, as noted, “Kashus Koolidge”.  There wasn’t a lot of material about his personal life, beyond the fact that he came from a strict Quaker family, but grew up to make art history.  Or whatever you call it.  He drew editorial cartoons and painted comic foregrounds: paintings for people to hold up in front of themselves for photographs (a picture of a muscled boxer standing triumphant over his opponent in the ring, say, only he didn’t have a head so when you put your face in the right place…you get the idea.)  And at the ripe old age of fifty, he made art history, or whatever you may call it, by painting the first in a series of paintings for Brown & Bigelow, called Poker Party.

    Poker Party featured four St. Bernards of various dispositions sitting up to a table and playing cards.  It was popular enough that Brown & Bigelow asked for more, and Mr. Coolidge obliged and, yes, Kashus Koolidge is the man we have to thank for the whole Dogs Playing Poker genre, whether on canvas or black velvet.  He produced about sixteen paintings of dogs involved in human occupations, half of these involving the poker table, as in the postcard seen above, called “Only a Friend Needed”.

    So any time you are expressing gratitude for (or screaming about) pop culture and popular tastes in art, you must remember to mention Cassius Marcellus Coolidge and, as well, Brown & Bigelow.

Shades of Drinking

  All I really wanted to know was why raspberry-flavored things are blue.  The problem with these things you really want to find out, in these days of the Interwebs, is that you are led along so many other avenues which take you in other interesting directions.  Come to think of it, I was like that in the days when I had to open the cabinet which held the Collier’s Encyclopedia, so there’s no sense blaming the electronics.

    Did you know, for example, that pink lemonade has been associated with circuses for over a hundred years.  Half a dozen different vendors from the middle of the nineteenth century through the era of World War I have all claimed credit, claiming that they accidentally added cinnamon candy to the mix and people liked it, or they used water the ladies had used to wash their tights, or someone stole the lemon they were using that year and all they could find was a tomato, or….

   The English-speaking world is divided, by the way, one lemonade generally.  I had heard already that in Australia “lemonade” is always carbonated, but the Interwebs tells me that is true throughout the UK: some folks call it specifically “fizzy lemonade”, although other experts say that British fizzy lemonade is the lemonade which is NOT carbonated.  Meanwhile, in India, Canada, and the United States, lemonade is non-carbonated, and known by the experts as CLOUDY lemonade, to distinguish it from the carbonated, or CLEAR, variety drunk where the language was invented.

    Pink champagne is not, as I was taught in grade school, a cheap and frivolous variation on the real thing.  (It is possible that my teachers had bad memories of occasions which champagne, but they did not share these.)  It is actually harder to make than regular champagne, since it involves fermentation and/or mixing which may leave you with a brown wine, known in the trade as “ick”.  Pink champagne, known as rose champagne by those who actually know what they’re talking about, apparently got its frivolous reputation from being available only to the very rich, and from the association of champagne with special sorts of parties which ended in a great deal of giggling.  (You can do this with still wines.  In fact, our ancestors preferred to do things this way, and in the regions where champagne originated, people spent years trying to get the bubbles OUT of the wine.)

    Some articles have been written about the love of Louis XIV for champagne—he thought it was good for his gout—and how someone chilled it on ice which had been made out of water in which some of the ladies had been washing their pink tights and the ice got in the champagne and…these have been written by people who are confusing their notes, and should be ignored.

    Getting back to blue raspberry things, the definitive research on the subject was published by Bon Appetit in 2016.  Apparently it comes about because of two problems that were working simultaneously.  People who made ostensibly fruit-flavored treats, particularly the frozen variety, were stumped by the fact that they simply had too many different flavors which came from red fruits: cherry, strawberry, raspberry, and sometimes watermelon, with occasional ventures into fruit punch and/or passion fruit.  (I was assured by a chemist once that most flavors called “passion fruit” are actually fruit punch/tropical punch flavors under a different name.)

    They tried to deal with this by using slightly different shades of red.  This did not work, as far as one consumer growing up in the twentieth century is concerned.  Kool-Aid and Popsicles came in Grape, Orange, Lime, and Red, as far as I was concerned.  I did not notice any particular difference in the different reds, and I imagine I would be much the same if offered different vintages of pink champagne.

    At the same time, people were getting nosy about the health effects of food additives, and one of the first targets was Red Dye No. 2, also known as “Amaranth” (though it contained no amaranth; if you’ve stuck with me past the lemonade discussion, you can swallow that as well.)  Red Dye No. 2 was the shade of red used by several manufacturers for their raspberry products.  So what to do?

    Well, blue dyes were hardly used at all, so this seemed a good substitute.  And who thought of it first?  Well, Icee has a claim on it, and Otter Pops, pioneers in squishy frozen stuff pushed out of plastic envelopes, also makes a claim.  But Bon Appetit has found that Gold medal, which produced Sno-Kone machines, was already bringing out blue raspberry syrup for Sno-Kones before the red Dye No. 2 kerfuffle debuted.

    So that, children, is why raspberries are blue in the freezer and on the shelf but not in nature.  (Several people point out the existence of a fairly scarce blue raspberry, but these are the sorts of people who use the phrase “rose champagne”.)  And I see we are out of space for today, so we can save the discussion of white chocolate for another day.