Food Friday: Cooking with the General Petroleum Girls Club

Today's recipes are from the Cooking in General cookbook from the General Petroleum Girls Club (Los Angeles, 1951).

What is  the General Petroleum Girls Club? To be honest, I have no idea. It appears to have a connection to a gas company. My guess is Mobil Gas since the Pegasus icon is on the title page.

Their explanation about  the proceeds from the cookbook make it sound as if  the group had something to do with a company.

Tamale Pie sounds good right about now and this cookbook provides a few pages of recipes. The first says "Very Good" in the title line and notes that it has been served to club members and they all want the recipe. The last one includes canned tamales, something I grew up with, and raisins. The recipe says to remove the husks on the tamales but in the canned tamales that I have had, that would actually be a plastic wrapper. I have ate  a similar casserole at a bowling league potluck once but it was a mixture of  canned tamales and canned chili.

Were you or someone you know a member of the General Petroleum Girls Club? Please leave a comment below. I would love to hear more about this group.

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Food Friday: Chocolate Drops and Newspaper Recipe Contests

I'm envious of those who are lucky enough to have inherited their grandmother's or even great-grandmother's handwritten recipe cards. I'm not so lucky but I have had the pleasant surprise of finding these treasure in cookbooks that I own or that have been given to me.

The New Delineator Recipes cookbook was published by the Butterick Publishing Company in 1929 and unlike most of my Food Friday entries, it is not a community cookbook. Chock full of recipes, this cookbook not only provides you with ideas for what to cook, it even includes food facts like how to use recipes and testing fat for frying. Pre-planned menus help to take the guess work out of meal planning. And like any good vintage cookbook there are some great recipes like Pigeon Casserole.

My parents found this cookbook at a yard sale and bought it for me. Inside was about a handful of recipes written on scraps of papers and index cards. While some include the first name of presumably the woman whose recipe it was, most do not include any kind of identification.

I do know that this cookbook was owned by what looks like a  Mrs. A. L. Shermoley. I love her signature with the flowing ends.

One of the recipes included is a newspaper clipping for the column Recipe of the Week. Of course like any good newspaper clipping (like an obituary) this is closely cropped and reveals nothing about the date this article was published. However, flipping the article over reveals a drive-in movie schedule including such classics as Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Kirk Douglas, and Her Twelve Men with Greer Garson. All movies  from the year 1954.

Today's recipe is Chocolate Drops submitted to Recipe of the Week by Mrs. G. Joel of Pasadena.

Today's Food Friday is a good example of how women's names can be found in the newspaper but not always where you think they should be .

For more on newspaper recipe contests, see my article on the GenealogyBank blog entitled "Newspaper Recipe Contests: Was Your Ancestor a Contest Winner?"

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Food Friday: The Problems of Skinny Children Solved!

I love the title of today's cookbook, Food 'N Folklore. Really when you think about it, it's not just the food that's important in our family histories but also the stories about the food.

As I was looking through this cookbook, I came to a section on home remedies. In an era before increased access to physicians, women's abilities to heal their families was vital. Most women had recipes for different types of tonics and salves that could help their family with whatever ailed them.

One of the recipes for a home remedy in this book reminded me of a remedy my own maternal grandmother had.

You see, when I was a child we would go and visit my grandmother every year at her home in the mountains of Arizona. We would stay a week and enjoy the cooler weather, slower paced life, and family gatherings. One year, my grandmother decided that my brother had worms.

Yes, worms.

Not the kind of worm that has burrowed in your skin but like a worm that was inside his stomach causing him to be be too skinny, in her estimation.

I will preface the rest of this story by letting you know that I personally have never suffered such an ailment. So I was never in any danger of having to consume this remedy.

(c) 2013 Gena Philibert-Ortega

So my grandmother told my mother that she must feed my brother a dosage of salt. Yes, salt. Like take a spoonful of salt, or more,  to get rid of his "worms."


Now, my brother owes my mother big time because she refused to give him salt for his "worms." I on the other hand was begging my mother to listen and honor  her mother by feeding my younger brother salt. I was about middle school aged at this point and it sounded like a good way to torture my younger brother.

So imagine my surprise to see this cure for children's worms.

Makes taking a spoonful of salt seem not so bad.

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Good Friday: Green Tomato Pie

I love it when a cookbook is more than just a cookbook. Today's Food Friday comes from Bellaire's Own Historical Cookbook. Bellaire Women's Civic Club, Bellaire Texas. 1969.

This is the type of cookbook every community should publish, full of histories, vintage images and names. Oh and there are recipes, in fact the recipes are in a few chapters of this book including one entitled Early Families with Their Recipes.

So today's Food Friday is courtesy of Bellaire pioneer Mrs.  H. Z. Kelley.

I love how the recipe ends "Bake as apple pie and you will be surprised." I love fried green tomatoes and pickled green tomatoes so I'm sure I would love this.


Have a family from Bellaire, Texas? Email me and I would be glad to do a look up for you.

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Food Friday: Lox Spread from Florida

I was pleasantly surprised this week when a package arrived with some community cookbooks sent by my friend and fellow genealogist Debbe Hagner, AG.

One of the cookbooks she sent was this one with a title no one can resist, The Happy Cookers from Temple Ahavet Shalom Sisterhood, Palm Harbor Florida. You've got to love a cookbook with a sense of humor. Plus there are over 300 pages of recipes.

Besides the names associated with each recipe, there is also a list of those who served on the cookbook committee.

So for Food Friday, I thought I would feature a recipe that I would love to try. One of my favorite breakfast dishes would be bagels and lox and of course lox spread is equally delightful .

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Food Friday: Tacos with Ketchup from Illinois

Oh tacos, our family loves them. We often have a taco night where we set up a taco bar with everything that can make a taco great like meat, lettuce, tomatoes, cilantro, onions, guacamole, and sour cream. And of course, glorious shredded cheddar cheese.

Now, everyone has an idea of what makes a great taco. I have spent almost my entire life in Southern California and have traveled to Mexico. I've tasted great tacos. Let's face it, people travel, they like a dish and want to make it for their family but may lack the recipe or even the ingredients to make it like the original.

That's where What's Been Cookin' in Bureau County. Bicentennial Cook Book comes in. I've highlighted this cookbook last year and its recipe for pickled eggs. There's a lot to like about this cookbook from the Ladies of the Bureau County Home Extension Association (1975). Aside from recipes are some history snippets with drawings of historical buildings.

And then there's recipes. I will admit that there's a few that seem very 1970s to me, maybe even 1950s, including one that calls for a lot of cream soup, cheese, pimentos,  noodles and pork. For the sake of the recipe author I won't say more. But then there are the taco recipes, both unattributed so no one needs to worry that I am making fun of anyone.

My favorite instruction has to be to add the cheese and then if it needs color, add ketchup. Ketchup does cover a magnitude of sins. I will say the addition of baked beans is not one I would recommend.

You know, life changes, people grow, tastes mature. These odd recipes serve a purpose. They show us the types of foods made by our families with what they had access to and they show some creativity.

So when you put together those family cookbooks, make sure to add some of the more weird interesting ones. They help tell your family history story.

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Food Friday: Pass the Root Beer and Japanese Chop Suey

Today's Food Friday comes from the Woman's City Club Cook Book. Compiled by the Library Committee of the Woman's City Club of Chicago, 1923. This book is available on Internet Archive's Cookbooks and Home Economics Collection.

This cookbook provides us names associated with recipes and no other genealogically relevant information.

It includes a faux recipe, along the lines of what I wrote about last week. This one is specific to Chicago.

Fridays seem to beg for a simple recipe. And no recipe is simpler than this one provided by Sue Seeley.

I've written about American Chop Suey in my book From the Family Kitchen before. This version of Sukiyaki is called Japanese Chop Suey, maybe to give American women some context to better understand it. Sukiyaki is a soup or stew that includes meat and vegetables with soy sauce and sugar. The website About.com Japanese Food has a recipe.

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