Slowly I Turn, Inch By Inch

For the first time this year I was actually able to land a job when I returned from working in Alaska.  This is a good thing of course but working full time has it's disadvantages, namely I don't have as much free time to devote to the blog and it's driving me crazy.  Unfortunately, pursuant to this I think I'm going to have to drop down to 3-4 articles a week that I can write in my free time on one of my days off.  Days off, what a misnomer that is, it's not really a day of rest, just a day of chores and errands you can't get done on the days you're working because you're scheduled for a mid shift, the bane of retail.  I'm not complaining though, the job is good, if not hectic, and I'll be eligible for benefits after 90 days.

Beauty Without Airbrushing

Sometimes I come across some really amazing artwork for vintage ads like the one above from 1910 for Kelloggs Cornflakes.  The artist is B. Tichtman and unfortunately his information was not available online but he apparently was an artist in the style of Gibson and his famous Gibson Girls that were so popular in the early 1900's.  Tichtman was prolific in his work producing not just ads but calendars and postcards as well.

What strikes me most about this artwork is the beauty without the use of airbrush makeup that is so prevalent today... or am I dating myself there?  I think photoshop is used more often these days to make impossible beauty out of the models used.  Such things upset me because it changes societal perceptions of beauty into something that has women spending untold amounts of money in the pursuit of flawless beauty.

Kelloggs  seems to have used this ad style for only a short time and I have not seen it used by any other advertisers.  As for Mr. Tichtman, it is unfortunate that he is relegated to obscurity since his art still fetches a decent price when it comes up for auction.

A Hannibal Lecter Smile

Creepy Armour salesman guy would positively love to sell you some of his sausages, just don't ask what they're made of... really.  With that Hannibal Lecter smile would you buy processed meats off of this guy?  Apparently this was a 1917 version of an award winning smile but nowadays it's a "You're going to the funny farm smile".  From the look of the ad Armour used to be into salting, curing or canning anything they could get their hands on.  Not surprising really, it's 1917 and refrigeration was just getting off of the ground.  Everyone still used iceboxes and foods had to be preserved in a non-refrigeration manner.  Of course this also involved the copious use of salt in preservation which meant the average person consumed roughly 5x the present day RDA of sodium.  Oddly enough though, for sodium being the great bugaboo of heart attacks that the FDA says it is, I rather think people back then had them less often than is currently the case.

Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco

I love it when ads chime on about so called experts and how they are singing the praises of whatever product being offered like a barbershop quartet.  Of course these were the days before we were so cleverly informed by our government of the alleged dangers of smoking.  All of the experts today agree like lemmings that smoking damages the health, but once again who are these experts?  For the sake of the ad they were the members of the tobacco buying consortium in the South so of course they're going to sing the praises of tobacco.  Lucky Strike differentiated themselves from the other cigarettes of the time period because they were made of 100% toasted burley tobacco rather than flue cured virginia.  What does this mean in laymans terms?  Burley has nutter slightly cocoa taste and a heavier nicotine kick while virginia tobacco is lighter and grassier with a new mown hay smell.  Before you ask, I know all this from being a pipe smoker and having smoked both types of tobacco in their purest forms. 

Belated Birthday Post

Yesterday evening I posted to the blog's Facebook Page that it was the one year anniversary of the Vintage Recipe Blog.  Honestly I've been so busy with "life" lately that I almost forgot about it.  I never cease to be amazed at how far we have some in just one year.  I've been able to post 225 articles that received 238 comments and had 48,000+ pageviews.  This is just the beginning though.  I plan on a re design of the blog in the next week or so (hopefully) and I'm going to expand out the subject matter that I deal with.  Of course I'll still post about the vintage ads and recipes but I want to go more in depth into what it is truly like to live "vintage".  It's gone from an interest to a hobby to almost an experiment.

The experiment part is what intrigues me most.  I had fun following a blog called "365 Days of A" where the guy did an experiment to see if an old Ford Model A car could be used as an everyday driver today.  His ups and downs were entertaining to follow and at the end of the experiment he did indeed prove that the old Model A's could stand up to modern driving conditions.  I've been interested in taking it a step further.  Maybe some of you remember the PBS mini Series "1900 House", well I could do it as an experiment on 1932-33 living, wearing the clothes they would have worn, eating (generally) the food they would have eaten and giving up on modern fripperies like the television.  Of course I have to stay with the internet, but only for the purposes of writing articles for the blog and doing research.  I'm just in the formative stages of such an endeavor, I'd like to hear from you, your thoughts on the matter.  Someone has started calling me "Mr. Vintage" on the Facebook page and I think with this experiment I could truly earn the title.

Cincinnati "Skyline" Style Chili

I've been wanting to write about this recipe for a long time now but of course life has gotten in the way and I've been reduced to a full week of "Bisy Bakson" syndrome (read the "Tao of  Pooh" if you want to know what I'm talking about, I highly recommend it.)  I became familiar with Skyline Chili when I was passing through Cincinnati years ago as part of a work related conference.  It's an interesting take on chili as it involves no beans in the recipe like we're used to with the Tex-Mex style chili's.  Invented by Nicholas Lambrinides in 1949 and so named because he could see the Cincinnati Skyline outside of his first restaurant, it incorporates spices and flavors he learned from watching his family cook back in Kastoria, Greece.¹  When done right, the spices meld together in a intense dance of flavor on your tongue.  While the original recipe remains a secret, I have been able to piece together what I feel is the closest recipe to the original.  Dad, who is also very familiar with Skyline Chili, gave it two thumbs up.

Refreshing Welch's Grape Juice

Ah 1924, unless you went to a speakeasy you couldn't get beer and wine anymore so what was the younger generation to do for fun?  Drink Welch's grape juice of course!  The savvy hostess, in serving Welch's was "sharing one of Mother Nature's oldest secrets of hospitality."  Funny, I figured that secret was the product derived after the fermentation of grape juice.  Oh well, it was the Prohibition era and advertisers had to be politically correct, even back then.