Community Cookbooks Offer Recipe for History

Everyone has at least one of them somewhere at the back of a kitchen cabinet or tucked into a drawer with old cookie cutters and canisters of McCormick spices: that simple, spiral-bound community cookbook with a kitschy cover and homespun title. The kind you turn to when you want comfort food on a wintry day, a dish to share at the church potluck, or a gooey dessert for the family reunion.

Now on display in the Oak Lawn Centennial Exhibit at the Oak Lawn Public Library are several community cookbooks representative of Oak Lawn's churches, schools and civic organizations. The cookbooks contain more than just recipes — when read end-to-end, they also are history books that reflect the people, places and social mores of past eras.

Household Hints From 1939

The earliest of these may have been handwritten on oilcloth and tied together with ribbon, but most early edition community cookbooks, such as the 1939 Oak Lawn PTA Cookbook, were typed, sometimes hand-illustrated, and then mimeographed and bound with staples.

Recipes read in paragraph form, like a short story. The language was  "folksy" and friendly, like two women talking over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, with toast crumbs still left over from breakfast. They contained language and terminology that would be unfamiliar to later generations of cooks. It was assumed back then that a reader had learned to cook at her mother's side and understood the meaning of a "moderate oven" (stoves of the time had no way of regulating temperature), that there are 60 drops to a teaspoon and that "one cup of hydrogenated fat plus ½ tsp salt equals one cup of butter."  

These books appealed to the homemaker of the time who had few of the helps and conveniences that their daughters and granddaughters would have. They often included a housekeeping section, with savvy advice such as this from the "Hints & Helps" section of 1939 Oak Lawn PTA Cook Book:

• When you have any leftover cake icing, spread it between graham crackers. The children — and the menfolk, too — think they are a special treat.
• If buttons that come off are sewed on with dental floss, they need never be sewed again unless, of course, the buttons break.
• If you must take bitter medicine, rub your tongue with ice. The taste buds scarcely function when they are chilled.
• 3 lb shortening cans make lovely canister sets.

Necessity the Mother of Invention

These early community cookbooks also contained local advertising for products and services that are today out of fashion or no longer needed, such as Wm Brandt  & Son's Coal Delivery and live chicks and ducks from the Oak Lawn Feed Store (phone 230). Other ads would today make us long for a simpler time when one could call up Smilde's Food Market for "frosted foods" delivered promptly, or pull one's new $628 Chevy Coupes into Holstrom's Shell Service Station at 5110 W. 95th and have a nattily dressed attendant fill the tank, wash the windows and put air in the tires — for no extra charge.

When Mrs. Guy Culton, homemaking "chairman," coordinated the Oak Lawn PTA Cookbook committee it was 1939. This was still during the Great Depression when "waste not want not" was on everyone's tongue and cheap cuts of animal (veal, pork, beef hearts, lamb kidneys) filled their bellies.

Meat dishes that were molded into shapes (typically a loaf or a ring) or baked into a casserole were a great way to stretch the food budget. Veal, then a cheap byproduct of the dairy industry, was a popular staple. Combined with ground pork and supplemented with Creamettes macaroni, cereal grains and other filler, these dishes were a reasonably nutritious way to get the most out of a typically meager meat supply. Mrs. Carson's mushroom veal loaf on page 26 of the 1939 Oak Lawn PTA Cookbook was a delicious example of the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention."

Chicken was a luxury food. If you kept chickens in your backyard, they were for egg production, not butchering. The Oak Lawn PTA Cookbook of 1939 contained only one recipe that included poultry — Mrs. Rathje's Chicken Delight, which included a quart of chicken cut into very small pieces, doctored with breadcrumbs and corn and baked into a casserole.

More often than not, meatless dinners were the norm. Creamettes provided the main ingredient for recipes such as Mrs. Brown's Noodle Ring, Mrs. Leonard's Creamettes Supreme, and Mrs. Schoob's Macaroni Imperial — old-fashioned baked macaroni and cheese that today's kids, accustomed to the bright orange imitation in the blue box, would scarcely recognize.

Experiments With Sugar

What was lacking from the diet in the way of meat was more than compensated for in sugar. Sugar prices during the 1930s were so low, and "down on their luck" Americans were so hungry for any form of escapism, that sugar per capita consumption was at its highest rate before or since. This encouraged women to experiment, and the result was the creation of all kinds of desserts, cakes and cookies with imaginative and purposely happy-sounding names, such as Mrs. Callan's cheery Sunshine Cake with whipped cream frosting, Mrs. Roberts' Daffodil Cake that is so rich and delicious it "needs no icing," and chairman Culton's Humpty-Dumpties — chock full of raisins, fudge-frosted and topped with a "nut meat" (which in 21st century terms is merely the inside or edible part of your nut of choice).

Before there was Martha Stewart, Mrs. Stouffer, Rachel Ray and the Food Network, there was Evelyn O'Brien, Mrs. Howatt, Aunt Lydia and the ladies of the 1939 Oak Lawn PTA. When it comes to pairing comfort and food, it was these women, and others like them, who wrote the (cook)book.

Mrs. A. Carson's recipe for mushroom veal loaf,  from the 1939 Oak Lawn PTA Cookbook:

2 ½ lbs ground veal

½ lb ground pork or ham

1 beaten egg

¼ tsp salt

1 cup cracker or bread crumbs

6 strips bacon

½ tsp pepper

1 cup mushrooms

4 tbsp catsup

1 grated onion

Saute mushrooms in butter and mix all ingredients together and shape into a loaf. Lay three strips of bacon on bottom of pan and three strips on top of loaf. Bake in a moderate (350 degree) oven for 1 ½ to 2 hours. 

Oak Lawn's community cookbooks through the ages are on display in the Local History Room in the Oak Lawn Public Library. Many of them have been scanned into the library's online local history collections and can be accessed by visiting the Local History Documents page at the library's website and selecting the subject of "cookery."