I picked up five more items for the collection at the Brimfield Antique Show yesterday.  I was particularly taken with this one, which I think is from some time in the 1920s:

It’s one of many recipe/advertising booklets produced by the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company of Lynn, MA (producer of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, amongst other patent nostrums).

I was going to write a thing about it, but in searching for info I determined that I can’t do better than what Meg Favreau has said.  Go on, click through and read her piece.  No, wait – are you eating anything?  Don’t be eating anything.

Back?  Sorry about that, but I did warn you.  I’m thinking of trying the “Potato Candy,” or possibly the “Carrot Fudge” that’s on the same page.  That recipe goes:

Put 1 cup each of corn syrup, grated carrots, milk and light brown sugar into a deep saucepan.  Add 2 tablespoons butter and any flavoring you like.  Cook carefully until it hardens in cold water. Pour into buttered plates and cut into squares.  This fudge may have cocoa or chocolate added and may be beaten until creamy.

Because the carrots make it healthy!  Right?  Right.

Okay, the next pamphlet isn’t anything like Mrs. Pinkham’s company’s, honest.  Even though it sort of looks like it might be “interesting.”  And is also pink.

Alas, the author – Irene Garfield Abbott (identified in a 1930 newspaper from Southington, CT as a “world famous dietician and food expert”) – was interested in spicing up the menu only with things like adding color and texture contrasts to standard meals.  So let’s take a look at her proposed menus for Thursday and see what she thought was, well, not exactly “kinky” in American foodways.

Breakfast
Sliced Oranges
Unusual Poached Egg*
Thin Buttered Toast
Grape Jelly
Milk or IGA Coffee

Lunch
Fig & Orange Salad*
Fluffy Omelet
Ginger Bread with Whipped Cream
Tea

Dinner
Melon Ball Cocktail
Baked Ham
Scalloped Potatoes
Fruit Salad
Five Threes*
Cookies

So what’s “unusual” about the poached egg?  It goes like this:

Unusual Poached Eggs
6 slices buttered toast
Anchovy paste
6 eggs
2 tea sps. IGA prepared mustard
2 ta. sps. butter
2 ta. sps. flour
2 cups milk
1/2 tea sp. salt

Spread toast with anchovy paste generously.  top with a poached egg and cover all with the butter, flour, salt and milk made into a cream sauce, to which has been added the mustard.  Garnish with parsley.

Yes, it would definitely be “unusual” if I were to make a cream sauce for a breakfast dish and then garnish it with parsley.  And even more unusual if I included anchovy paste.

The “Fig and Orange Salad” is much as advertised – “Shred the green outside leaves of lettuce.  Place orange slices on top.  And on the sliced orange place a canned fig, which is stuffed with cottage cheese.  Children like this salad for luncheon.” Figs are not very large, you know.  How could one possibly stuff one with cottage cheese?

But what you really want to know is what “Five Threes” is, I’m sure.  And it is … a frozen dessert!  Ah, the days of family dinners with two desserts … but I digress.  The recipe:

Five Threes
3 bananas
3 oranges
3 lemons
3 cups water
3 cups sugar

Use only the juice of the oranges and lemons.  Add bananas after mashing them thoroughly.  Make a syrup of the sugar and water by boiling together 3 minutes.  Add to fruit and freeze.

So basically a fruit juice ice with banana in it.  It could work.  It might be really nice during the middle of summer.

Maybe I’ll even give it a try to find out.