Mock Tenderloins

Depression era cooking is a fascinating aspect of vintage recipes.  Much of the recipes that have survived are frugal recipes that cook for a family using very little money yet still striving to stay healthy.  The others are what I call "make do" recipes that are often in imitation of something that would have been more expensive.  Such austere recipes were often tasty in their own right, even if they fell short of what they were trying to imitate.  Here is one such recipe, mock tenderloins of course are a frugal replacement for true tenderloin that would have hit the purse hard for someone not making as much as before.  This recipe comes from 1930 or 31 and luxuries such as this would be fondly remembered after '32 when the depression was at it's worst.  Today we are locked in the Great Recession, sugarcoating what is otherwise a repeat of the last great depression.  We've much to learn from these frugal recipes of yesteryear since they are every bit as cost effective now as the were then.

The Pervy Sages Come Home to Roost

Between 2007 and 2010 I lived in Philippines, only leaving to work Summers in Alaska.  While there we borrowed the term pervy sage from the Naruto television series and applied it to any number of gross old foreigners who come to the Philippines to play around with the young (18-20 year old) girls.¹  Now that I've laid that out you can understand the application of pervey sage to the men in the ad above, especially the one on the left who seems quite fascinated with Psyche's bared breasts. There's actually an interesting story as to how this particular artwork became the trademark of White Rock spring water.

Kraft, Good "eatin' cheeses"

I'm not really sure why this ad has eatin' cheeses in parenthesis but usually that's the mark of a word that doesn't really mean what you think it does.  If I say cheese I'm talking of fermented milk that's cooked and makes lovely assortment of dairy products.  If I say "cheese" I might be talking about cheez whiz, 10% cheese, 90% whiz, i.e. a product that contains the name cheese but is anything but the real deal.  So when Kraft describes their cheeses as good "eatin' cheeses" I can only assume they are poking fun at the fact that they sell cheese like substance.  Well now, I think for the purposes of this ad that what Kraft used to produce and/or import was actually real cheese.

Not Everything is Better With Jell-o

In the 1950's Americans were so concerned with the threat of nuclear war that they saw fit to make even the food blast proof.  Jell-o answered the call and millions of housewives soon learned to encase their food in a Jell-o forcefield capable of withstanding the most punishing nuclear blasts.  Husbands soon tired of the Jell-o mania and started throwing the gelatinous concoctions out of house windows giving rise to a new UFO hysteria as innocent bystanders witnessed the unidentified flying dinners soaring across the sky.  By the early 1960's the Jell-o mania had subsided in favor of real dinners that did not need to be incarcerated in ground up hooves.