comicalcookbooks.com Blog

The Spry books are one of the earliest additions to my comical cookbooks collection, they’re pretty well known due to their somewhat bizarre-looking (by current standards) illustrations and photographs.  There is also a running theme about how digestible it is.  FYI, Spry was a now defunct vegetable shortening, similar to Crisco.

This particular vignette follows the cooking tips of “Aunt Jenny”, a rosy-cheeked older woman who reminds me of a long deceased great aunt of mine.  A few highlights:

An obsession with how digestible Spry is.  As compared to what?  Were previous ingredients used in shortening undigestible?  Were the older shortenings the Olestra of the day?  The cover photo caption mentions how digestible Spry is.  So does the inner cover.  So does page 1.  Page 3…the caption shows Aunt Jenny sharing with the other ladies how she makes tender, flaky, digestible pie crusts.  It’s not my underlining, Spry feels it’s so important that they underlined it.  Have you ever had a pie crust that you had difficulty digesting?

Page 18 has kind of a creepy caption.  I really don’t want to know about Uncle Calvin’s “licking the spoon” and how they aren’t much different than little boys.

One of the nastier pictures is on page 31.  Aunt Jenny recommends brushing your meat or potatoes or fish with Spry.  The picture shows some kind of meat that I can’t identify, half covered with Spry.  The meat has more Spry on it than I would spread butter cream frosting on a cake.  And I love butter cream frosting!   So basically, cover your steak with a 1/2″ layer on all sides with Crisco for better flavor.  Yuck.

Page 33 has a nice captioned picture showing Aunt Jenny feeding some poor “old bachelors” a good home-cooked meal.  “Poor men don’t get any good home cookin’ at the diner down by the depot”.  Down by the depot?  Old bachelors, or just not out of the closet?

Finally, the last page has to cover the main point of Spry yet again.  A cute retro-picture of an all-American kid eating a plate full of donuts.  “My grandson, Tommy, tuckin’ away Spry doughnuts.  They’re so light and digestible a child can eat ‘em”.  Well I sure hope so, since you’re stuffing donuts down your beloved grandson’s gullet, I hope he can actually digest it.

This one was a no-brainer to buy once I saw the cover.  The cover shows a fancy-schmancy appetizer plate with a hideous purple orb with olives, onions and pineapple jammed onto it with toothpicks.  This cookbook was a huge national security blunder.  Five years later, the Russians would launch the appetizer-inspired Sputnik into Earth orbit.  It would take years before the Americans would catch up in the space race.

Page 13, Jellied Melange: pretty much sums it up.  A bunch of leftovers in gelatin.  I would love to know what the per capita consumption of gelatin was in the 50s. 

Page 17, Herring on picks.  Nothing more than 1″ square chunks of pickled herring and a small pickled onion on a toothpick.  I know it’s hard to come up with 500 recipes, but come on..  Ditto on the per capita consumption of herring and some other odd items that I see with alarming regularity in these books.

Page 20 has another recipe that is clearly a stretch.  It doesn’t sound gross, but it is a bit unusual.  “Almost anything you like can be rolled in pacon, oven or pan-broiled and served on picks”.  Normally, I’d agree, I love bacon.  But this bacon roll receipe is nothing more than uncooked bacon covered with peanut butter.  Roll up and broil.

Two of the items I see a lot of include chicken livers and anchovies.  Do they dare combine them both?  Yes!  Chicken liver-Anchovy toast.

Another on the offal front on page 24: Liver patties.  “Baked liver patties can be a party especially served with the Spring’s fresh greens.”  Yeah, to me, nothing says party like liver patties.  It’s ground liver shaped into patties and baked.  Even the piece of canadian bacon or bacon wrapped around the patties can’t salvage the fact that it’s ground liver.

Aspic items are perhaps the largest amusing category in all of the old cookbooks.  There are SO many items in aspic (gelatin) that I really have to be selective on the aspic choices.  If I didn’t, I could have another site just for funny or gross gelatin recipes.  This one still rises to the top:

Jellied bouillon with frankfurters.  It’s just beef stock and gelatin in a mold.  In the gelatin are sliced eggs and hot dogs.  Nothing says party food like hot dogs in jello.  I’m sure it’s economical, but so what.

The other favorite jellied item in this book is the very creepy-looking hard cooked eggs in jellied bullion.  It’s just gelatin with a slice of egg on top, but the white and yellow of the egg look like an eye.  So you’re eating an eyeball.  Unnervingly, the eye appears to follow you wherever you are.

Again with the herring on page 34: Herring salad.  I think we brought the herring to the brink of extinction during the 1950s based on the number of recipes I see with herring.  Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

We finish our journey with two repugnant fish salad recipes.  If anything will scare children off of salads, I think these would do it.  Anchovy Beet Salad, and Smelt and Vegetable Salad.  In the latter, they still manage to get beets into that salad as well.