Nude-vember at AEET is certainly one way to a man's heart, and so is horror comics! Okay, but what I meant to say was vintage guitars and pinball machines! And yes, also food-- duh! This "Your Range Cook Book" from The Gas Service Company (1938) has one of the hardest to photograph covers, but is also chocked full of incredibly cute key art illustrations (some of which I've supplied here in today's post), as well as tons of delicious sounding recipes (none of which I've supplied here in today's post.) So please enjoy this gallery of fun visuals, they definitely make this one of the better old time cook books here in the 'ol Karswell Collection! And with turkey day right around the corner in just a few short weeks, maybe you'll be inspired to get cookin' too!
9 comments:
For the first picture of the little girl opening the toy stove, and the twelfth with the guy holding a cup in one hand and a book in the other, I remember seeing those images in a cookbook we once owned. For the twelfth image in our cookbook the guy was a saying "I'm struggling with the instructions, I'm sweating from the heat, but there's one consolation, I love to eat. I can't recall if the other images were in that cookbook, which has disappeared after so many decades ago.
As for the great but challenging to photograph cover- blue was for the longest time a color that was a photocopier's Kryptonite. Copying anything blue was a bridge too far for most 1970s-1980s copiers until scanners appeared on the scene.
My late father used to sell stationery, and he told me how one customer bought several dozen blue highlighters for his church. The reason- they used them to fill out their 1040 forms, making it near impossible for the IRS to copy their returns. This won't work nowadays since the IRS has scanners that can pick up any color. What he found amusing is when the customer filled out the order form to send the highlighters to his church- "You belong to The Church Of Louie?" my dad asked, actually the name was The Church of Love but he never forgot the name The Church of Louie.
These have a wonderful type of advertising fever dream to them; the hungry heads floating over the pie, the food items dancing around the angry or confused pig, the vegetables dancing on the spoon.
This is the kind of just "we need lots of pictures" and turning an artist loose. I suspect these were used across many products and often repeated.
OK, it's also interesting to learn about the problem with blue, I never knew that!
Omg I love the ice cube and coffee cup!!! And the awesome hotdog images :)
I think you should have added a recipe. In fact, I think you should have cooked a recipe and taken pics and done a review. That's what you should have done
The story of me: Scrolling through, I came across the picture of that kid with the question mark. That's a pretty good image, frankly, because I, too, have no flipping idea what the heck that kid is being asked to eat. Looks like a fried bat on a mashed potato volcano, so let's go with that. But what do I actually think? I think, "hey, that looks like the Big Boy mascot." And so I have to wander over to the search engine and look into where and when each sub- sub-franchise of Bob's Big Boy's operated across the US (and Japan), who had which brand (in North Carolina, we had Shoney's, which eventually turned out to be the largest Big Boy licensee), and when they all broke back apart again. It's a fascinating history that I've just learned all of!
So like an hour later I'm back and finally scroll on to that image of the king fish and his friendly lemon girl. That's plenty weird, too. So's the onion cheese soup chap, who seems to be making music with his utensil. I can go on and on (like that cupid, for example), but I've already spent well over an hour on this.
Typically, the illustrations reflect a recipe that’s on the same page or underneath the art, somewhere nearby anyway. The Cupid, as well as Santa and the Easter bunny, etc., are all reflective of holiday themed recipes in the book.
That kid is definitely eating a bat on a mound of mashed potatoes, though, for sure! ;)
The thing about that cupid is that he looks like he's peeing on the wall. He's up on his tippy toes trying to keep it off his feet. I can't unsee it.
A bat served with mashed potatoes, Ozzy Osbourne as a kid? That might explain his unique appetite, RIP Prince of Darkness and king of rock and roll.
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