Mary Margaret McBride

Other than asking my grandmother, I suspect nobody will recognize the name in the title of this post.  This name, however, was located on the spine of a cookbook that my mother decided I should have.

It is: Mary Margaret McBride - Encyclopedia of Cooking - Deluxe Illustrated Edition (Regular Hard Cover Binding).  The book was published in 1959 with over 1500 pages.  It was apparently released in several forms, including a multi-book, truly encyclopedic version.  I suspect the editor, Anne London, did most of the work on this because Mary Margaret McBride was a very well known radio show host.  Anne London also did a large cookbook of Jewish American recipes.

Though my copy is missing a cover and all of the copyright pages (it starts at the useless table of contents) as well as horribly stained, it contains an amazingly valuable amount of recipes and food knowledge.  It does, however, contain the suspected weird 1950s food items that could make your stomach turn.  For example, aspic, mousses made from meat, loafs and molds of various mixed food items, and more tongue recipes than you knew existed.
As I was pondering the possibility of actually trying some of these oddities, I considered the reasons why people made these things in the late 50s.  Radio was still big but TV was booming.  Air travel was just overtaking boats for oversea voyages.  The space race was fully on.  People had refrigeration, but not so much in terms of microwaves (they existed but were still being perfected).  The economy was more local.
Several sections of the book are dedicated to what to do with cake mix, biscuit mix, and hot roll mix.  Food was switching from classic methods of preparation and preservation (like aspic) to the new modern conveniences.

Speaking of hot roll mix, I had no idea that it existed before now.  I thought, perhaps, that it was a product that was no longer around.  Apparently it is still manufactured, primarily by Pillsbury.
  
Basically, it is a mix containing the all of the dry ingredients you need for a basic white yeast dough, with a separate instant yeast package included in the box.  According to their website, it can actually be bought at all of the Hy-Vee stores in the area despite my never ever noticing it before.

I have no idea if the copyright on this cookbook is still valid (copyright law is zany), so I won't be posting any recipes directly, but I will try to post my adventures as a 1959 housewife as soon as I can.  Tim wants to make a bunch of the ickier looking things :-P

Oh, also, there's totally a recipe for avocado ice cream in here.  Not a very new concept then, eh?