Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Except for the Date Sticks the recipes aren’t impressive (so far). But the presentation is fascinating.

I have no idea how recipe-based advertising campaigns were designed in the heyday of promotional recipe books at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the best such recipes I’ve seen is a Dromedary/Hills Brothers recipe for maple coconut candies, which I’ll be talking about later when I get to some of those cookbooks. It was one of three recipes in an ad for their Dromedary Fresh Keeping Cocoanut, a coconut-in-a-can product.¹ It’s an amazing candy, and yet I’ve never seen it in any of the contemporary Dromedary cookbooks. Did they have separate recipes for their ads? If so, how would they choose which goes in a book and which in an ad? Would they use their best recipes in the ads or in the cookbooks?

Presumably, they had their own ideas about advertising. And, like oven terminology their ideas were different than ours in profound ways. One of the most fascinating relics of the era are these two sliding recipe cards from the Rumford Company. Recipes for Cake and Cookie Making is from 1926, and Recipes for Biscuits, Muffins, Rolls, Etc. doesn’t have a copyright date but, judging from the code, is from 1929.

Is this an easily securable space? (Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0)

One of the great things about Texas is that there are so few places that are safe for showboat killers. The reason you hear mostly about schools is that they’re among the very few such places. It’s also why you hear about mass murderers having driven hours or more to reach a movie theater or a church: so few of those locations have been made safe for mass murderers. It takes work to find places in Texas where only criminals are allowed to carry firearms.

Recently, the State Fair of Texas has decided to add one more vulnerable population to the list: the millions of visitors to the annual State Fair.

Guests will be channeled through weapons detection technology which screens for dangerous weapons in the presence of a licensed and trained security officer.

Not wishing to see such a prime target made safe for mass murder, I wrote a very short letter:

The decision to prohibit lawful carriers from defending themselves and others at the Texas State Fair is very disappointing and potentially very dangerous. By only allowing criminals to carry firearms at the Fair, the Fair meets all the classic requirements of showboat killers: dense crowds of young media-friendly targets, maze-like surroundings, and effective self-defense banned.

The critical flaw in their policy is that it amounts to only allowing criminals to carry at the Fair. An outdoor fair is not amenable to effectively screening visitors for weapons. Screening in such an environment is unnecessary for non-criminals and ineffective against criminals. The new policy is nothing more than a deliberate inconvenience to Texans visiting the fair (my guess is that the people running the fair are not the kind of people who go to an agriculture-themed, fried-foods-friendly State Fair). It won’t be any inconvenience to criminals for whom a giant open fair where everyone else is disarmed is prime hunting ground.

The Fair’s response was a canned text that addressed none of the dangers:

“Maybe batteries aren’t the best way to store energy.”

Francis Turner has a slightly different take than I did on What will a useful electric car look like?. But he starts from a very similar observation, that most writers on battery-operated vehicles “are missing the point. We don’t want batteries, we want efficient energy storage.” And there is a mountainous difference between the energy storage needs of portable electronic devices and transportation devices, i.e., cars.

He also goes into something I only mentioned tangentially, which is that energy storage for evening out intermittent power sources such as wind and solar is so many orders of magnitude different than portable electronic devices that it’s crazy we’re even considering using the same storage technology to handle it. The money we’re spending on trying to shoehorn traditional batteries into storing grid-level power would be far more effective using other energy storage techniques—and unlike the energy storage needed for battery-powered vehicles, we already know what grid-level storage techniques can look like!

He also comes to the conclusion that, because gasoline is so comparatively useful at energy storage, the best “battery” for electric vehicles will be “synthetic hydrocarbons”, that is, man-made gasoline created from the energy generated by intermittent sources. I suspect that this overlooks how incredibly poorly-matched modern wind and solar technologies are to mass energy generation (in his defense he’s explicit about not discussing this), but when we do find a good means of generating mass intermittent power synthetic gasoline probably will be the best way to store it. As I wrote in a footnote to my post, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the eventual winning ‘battery’ technology ends up looking a lot like a synthetic gasoline.”

Three different kinds of potato chip cookies: sandies, brown sugar, and chocolate chip.

National Potato Day is Monday. You might think that I would eventually run out of unique ways to highlight potatoes on their special day. That is the retrograde thinking of someone who does not appreciate the wonders of potatoes. If you feel that way, you might as well stop reading now!

This year I have a very unique cookie from the seventies, made with a very different potato chip than they would have been made with then. Back in the seventies and even early eighties, these would have been made with everyday thin potato chips, such as Lay’s or an off-brand, or, perhaps, to use up the dregs of a Charles Chips can before the next can arrived. By the time you got to the bottom of the can, they were pre-crushed, perfect for baking!

One of the amazing potato innovations over my lifetime has been the slow takeover of the potato chip industry by kettle-style chips. They’re better all around: crunchier, greasier, and more flavorful. I don’t know specifically when they first started appearing, but I do remember the first time I had a real kettle-style chip. It was in Los Angeles in 1990, on one of the side streets connecting Hollywood and Sunset. The chips were “Krunchers! Jalapeño Chips”, cooked in peanut oil. They had just a faint flavor of peanuts to go along with the jalapeños, something that Borden, sadly, viewed as a flaw and corrected soon after.

I always wondered where these chips were going… (Ezrawolfe, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

When I tell people that I want to stop acquiring more cookbooks and start using the ones I already have, this is one of the things I mean: researching weird cooking through the ages. About a year ago last April, I was looking over the clearance rack at one of the grocery stores I frequent, probably Big Lots!, and I came across a bunch of kettle-style jalapeño potato chips for $0.62. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to try one of the ostensibly stranger cookie recipes that I see regularly in community cookbooks, potato chip cookies.

It occurred to me that if potato chip cookies are good, jalapeño potato chip cookies would be even better.

Why did I write A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book (PDF File, 10.0 MB) (also available in print on Amazon^• and on Lulu)? This is not why: a few years ago, a friend told me after a particularly great vintage dish I’d made for game night, that:

“You should write a cookbook.”

“Would you really want a cookbook filled with other people’s recipes?”

“Yes.”

This was, of course, a clamor of one, and did not result in my writing a cookbook. It only provided the working title—Other People’s Recipes—and that only after I’d come up with a focus for the book.

It may not be obvious browsing through the recipes, but this is a very focused and specific book.

Despite the fact that I enjoy finding obscure cooking pamphlets and making them public again, I have never had any desire to write my own cookbook. My focus was in scanning these old cookbooks so that they’re available for anyone to download and enjoy.

But I did have one habit that allowed me to share my favorite recipes for making while traveling. When I found a recipe that I particularly wanted to remember while visiting friends and family, I would photograph the recipe and keep the photograph on my phone and tablet. This meant not only that I’d be able to make it while traveling, but that when a particularly popular dish elicited requests for the recipe, I was able to easily share it.

I don’t think you can get more emblematic of the modern beltway class than this notion that US troops should be sent overseas and should not protect US borders. It fires on all cylinders: What they used to call imperialism is now the only moral use for the army. And that farm and industrial workers should make less money by undercutting their jobs with people coming here illegally and forcing those jobs overseas.

They denigrate Americans as lazy and snobbish for not wanting to do the jobs that they themselves have made it almost impossible to hire Americans for.

My mom used to do some of those “jobs Americans won’t do”, which in our farm-based area meant picking asparagus and other fruit and vegetables. Many women did that to pick up extra money to improve their families’ incomes and save for their kids’ education.

She did not stop doing it because she didn’t want to do those jobs. I’m pretty she never wanted to do those jobs, but she did them anyway. She, along with the other women, stopped doing it because the farms stopped hiring them.

She wasn’t alone. An Ace of Spades commenter writing under the nom de plume notsothoreau wrote about their experience in farm work:

I used to work cherry harvest. Typically you work 10 hour days straight for about 21 days. When I started, high school kids could still work there. Then Washington passed a law that kids under 18 could only work up to 60 hours a week and there were also limits on the hours in the day they could work. It wasn’t worth it to the company and they stopped hiring them.

The farms stopped hiring people like my mom because it became progressively more expensive to hire part-time workers due to the regulatory burden per employee. They stopped hiring people like “notsothoreau” because they were no longer allowed to hire high school kids for short bursts of long hours—arguably something teenagers are well-suited for, and which many prefer over longer-term commitments.

The paperwork and other added regulatory expenses made it too expensive to hire the Americans who wanted to do these jobs. The paperwork for hiring someone here illegally is by necessity a lot less than for hiring citizens and legal immigrants.

It’s an interesting relic of the shortening wars, even if it’s not a great cookbook.

I considered saving this post until Christmas, but the fact is I was not very impressed by this book, which doesn’t make it much of a Christmas present. Call it Christmas in July.

“Aunt Jenny” was a semi-made-up character much like other characters of the era. She was more real than others, however, being played mostly by a single actress, Edith Spencer. That said, I’m not sure that the photograph-like drawing (or drawing-like photograph) on the inside cover is of Spencer. She has surprisingly few photos online, and none in that particular pose. Most make her look older and wiser, with glasses to emphasize her auntie-ness.

Aunt Jenny was the spokescharacter for Spry shortening. Spry shortening was a product of Lever Brothers Company, and was probably Crisco’s major competitor. While they never reached Crisco’s market share, they did take a significant percentage. You can’t get Spry anymore, although there are rumors of shortening with its name on it in some foreign lands, so the most appropriate replacement is probably Crisco. The best replacement is probably butter, or, depending on the recipe, lard. But I can’t say that with certainty because all three of the recipes I tried from the book were not particularly flavorful, despite using very flavorful ingredients.

I bought this book realizing it was a Christmas book, obviously, and that it was some sort of a Spry book, but not exactly how it was a Spry book. My copy doesn’t have the outer cover, making it look like the title is A Cookie Wonderland from Santa’s Kitchen.

Because my copy doesn’t have the outer cover, I apologize for the quality of the first two and final two pages. Not having them, I couldn’t scan them, so I found a scan online at another blog that tried out these recipes.

I should add that none of these recipes were bad. They just weren’t impressive, and I’ve come to expect that of Christmas books focused on cookies, especially vintage ones!

“Fight!” (Photo by Evan Vucci)

An assassination attempt against a former president and current candidate must not be forgotten.

• Mark Steyn: “The other night my youngest expressed a wish to see The Manchurian Candidate—the original, of course. And, as great as it is, its famous ending seemed an artifact of a lost and somewhat innocent age: a man is able to stroll into a political rally and access easily a high-up vantage point with a direct line of sight to the nominee. Couldn’t happen now… And yet it just did.”
• Austin Ruse: “Good Lord Almighty, that man is a legend. He gets shot, gets up almost immediately, with blood running down his face, throws his fist in the air and shouts ‘fight, fight, fight.’ Donald Trump is a legend.”
• Julie Kelly: “The party that claims ‘political violence’ and ‘domestic violent extremism’ pose a dire national security threat has not mentioned the July 13 attempted assassination of the former president.”
• Judicial Watch Statement on the Assassination Attempt on Former President Donald Trump: “Americans can be assured that Judicial Watch has already initiated an independent investigation into today’s events.”