Dainty Dishes for dainty ladies?

Davis Dainty Dishes 1932

The 1920s and 30s saw many commercial food manufactures distribute cookery booklets that included the term dainty or promoted a distinct feminine aesthetic. Both Nestle and the Davis gelatine company produced cookbooks that emphasised daintiness and femininity and featured elaborate and time consuming dishes. The Asparagus Tip Salad, from the Davis Dainty Dishes cookbook, involved encasing asparagus tips and the white hearts of celery in gelatine and setting them in a fluted mould. A deft touch would have been needed to reproduce the dish as illustrated in all its quivering glory in the book.

There is more to Copha than Chocolate Crackles

There are many strange and wonderful cookbooks at the Mitchell Library and you never really know what you will find once you start delving through their catalogue. This promotional booklet for Copha recipes from the 1950s entitled What Shall I Cook Today? proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are many more things that you can make with this ingredient than Chocolate Crackles.

The recipes in this book include such delights as a Copha mayonnaise and kidney pudding with Copha. I dare you to resist the temptation…

Mock Brains

Brown & Polson's Cornflour, Uncle Toby's Oats recipe book: containing tested recipes for the preparation of many delightful summer and winter dishes, sauces, biscuits, puddings, etc. C.1930

One of the most prevalent types of cookbook to appear in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century was that intended to promote a particular service or product. These have been estimated as representing 46 percent of the overall market. Companies like Uncle Toby’s and Sanitarium produced many cookbooks to promote their wares. The Seventh Day Adventist Church, the owners of Sanitarium, even had its own publishing house; the Echo Publishing Company. They saw great value in cookbooks as a means to disseminate the church’s particular approach to diet and to cross promote its manufactured food products to a wider audience that might not otherwise have come in contact with them.

Many of the recipes in these types of promotional books tried to expand on the traditional uses of their products. Uncle Toby’s Oats, for example, saw oats as more than just a breakfast dish and provided recipes for lunch and dinner dishes. This recipe for Mock Brains comes from a 1930s cookbook published in conjunction with the manufacturers of Brown & Poulson’s Cornflour. I leave it up  to you to decide if this is a dish you wish to serve up to your family!