The Vanished Larder
This book shops. Almost nothing in it is cooked; nearly everything in it is opened, and what gets opened is a snapshot of an American grocery store around 1930. Some of these things were discontinued, some were renamed, and one of them turned out not to be food. The notes are ours.
Individual Vegetable and Vegex Salad
Vegex was a yeast extract sold in the United States from the 1920s as a savoury spread and a vegetarian substitute for beef extract — a close cousin of Marmite, and the reason a teaspoonful of it creamed with butter reads as a seasoning here rather than a joke. It is off the shelves; Marmite or Vegemite is the nearest thing, used far more sparingly.
Lemco Celery Salad
Lemco is the trade name of Liebig's Extract of Meat Company — the concentrated beef extract Justus von Liebig developed in the 1860s, and the direct ancestor of the Oxo cube. A tablespoonful in a pint of boiling water is doing the job a beef bouillon cube does now.
Koumiss
Koumiss is properly fermented mare's milk, drunk across the Central Asian steppe. Western pharmacies of this period sold a cow's-milk imitation, made exactly as it is here — milk, sugar and a piece of yeast cake, bottled under a patent stopper and left to work — and prescribed it to invalids and consumptives as a tonic. It is a mildly fizzy, faintly alcoholic sour milk, closer to kefir than to anything on a modern drinks list.
Mayonnaise Maigre
"Good for a reducing diet" because mineral oil — liquid paraffin — is not digested, so it was sold in the 1920s and 30s as a calorie-free salad oil. It is also a laxative, and it carries the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K out of the body with it. Mineral oil is not used as food today. Make this one with olive oil or not at all.
Bird's Nest Salad
Petsai — pe-tsai — is the Chinese cabbage now sold everywhere as napa or wong bok. That a 1930 party book reaches for it without explaining it says something about how quickly it had arrived in American greengrocers.
Alligator Pear Salad
The alligator pear is the avocado. The older name, from the Spanish *aguacate* by way of sailors' English, was still the commoner one in American print into the 1930s; California growers spent the decade pushing "avocado" precisely because "alligator pear" was not selling fruit.
Stuffed Figs
Marshmallow whip is jarred marshmallow creme — Marshmallow Fluff had been made in Somerville, Massachusetts since 1917 and was ordinary pantry stock by the time this book was set. The book keeps a jar of it on the Emergency Shelf.
Pineapple Fluff
Those "leaves of angelica" are candied stems of the angelica plant, bright translucent green, and they are the reason so many desserts of this era have little green leaves on top. Candied angelica is still made, mostly in France, and mostly for exactly this job.
Whipped Milk
Chilled evaporated milk stiffened with a pinch of gelatin was the standard stand-in for whipped cream between the wars, when cream was dear and would not keep in a hot kitchen. The book is candid about it: "very good for emergencies, when you cannot get cream."
Grape-Fruit
"A tablespoonful of rum flavoring which is sweetened" is not coyness about breakfast drinking — it is a bottle of non-alcoholic rum essence, the kind that filled American kitchen cupboards under Prohibition. The same book, a few pages later, pours real Italian vermouth into a punch bowl. Which of those two habits the book was written under is one of the few clues we have to its date.
Cheese Fruits
Cream cheese modelled with butter paddles into little apples and carrots, cloves for stems: the sort of trompe-l'œil garnish that ran right through 1930s entertaining and disappeared with it. Butter paddles were ridged wooden hand-paddles for shaping butter, sold in every hardware store.