Time to browse The New Art:

This cookbook/wish book showcased kitchens with GE appliances, and included recipes. It includes the recipes from the earlier Silent Hostess cookbook, along with other recipes to play to the strengths of other GE appliances besides the refrigerators.

First, they give you a few new 1934 model kitchens to drool over:

Wow, that double-wide Monitor Top in the first picture would be luxurious!

Then, a before and after kitchen remodeling image:

The old kitchen meant “lost youth and beauty, and impaired health.” Yikes! Better upgrade, to a “lifetime investment,” that is, until it’s out of style in a few years. How about this new range?

I’d buy one of these today. What a gorgeous stove.

What about a mixer, or even a dishwasher?

“No more tell-tale ‘dishpan’ hands”! And it washes all the dishes in 5 minutes!

And then there’s the newer model of the classic Monitor Top fridge:

…just what we need to make this colorful Melon Ball Cocktail, or the Ginger Ale Fruit Salad.

Of course, this was 1934. The world was in the depths of the Depression. The average family could only dream of a kitchen with a dishwasher and all of the other bright and shiny new GE appliances.

Let’s try the ginger ale:

GINGER ALE FRUIT SALAD

2 tablespoons gelatin
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup boiling water
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup chopped nuts
1 cup ginger ale
1 cup grapes
1 banana
1 apple
2 oranges

1. Soak gelatin in cold water five minutes and dissolve in boiling water. 2. Add lemon juice, sugar and ginger ale. 3. Cut grapes in halves and remove seeds. 4. Slice banana. Peel and chop apple. 5. Separate oranges into sections and remove membranes. 6. When ginger ale mixture begins to thicken, fold in fruit and nuts. 7. Turn into molds and chill. 8. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves with Fruit Salad Dressing.

Then again, I am still recovering from the last experiment with gelatin. Maybe I’ll wait to try this one later.

Once you’ve bought your electric fridge, you’ll be able to make recipes like this one, from the 1930 GE cookbook The “Silent Hostess” Treasure Book:

Chocolate Ice Cream

• 1 1/2 oz. unsweetened chocolate (1 1/2 squares)
• 2 cups rich milk*
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup cream
• Few grains salt

Melt chocolate and add scalded milk very slowly. Mix cornstarch with sugar and add to chocolate mixture. Cook ten minutes, stirring until thickened. Cool, add vanilla, turn into tray of Super-freezer, and freeze to mush. Fold in whipped cream and return to Super-freezer until proper consistency to serve.

(*”Rich milk” is essentially what we now call “half and half”.)

We couldn’t. Our fridge is now one of these:

(Photo by Phil Urwin)

…a late 1920s or possibly early 1930s GE Monitor Top refrigerator, the fridge that made it “safe to be hungry.” Seven cubic feet of frosty cold storage, and I do mean frosty. We have to defrost frequently, though it’s not terribly difficult.

For most people who acquired one of these Monitor Tops when they were new, it was the first electric refrigerator they ever owned. Even if they had an ice box before, they couldn’t have used it the same way a refrigerator would be used; ice boxes weren’t good at keeping consistent low temperatures. They certainly couldn’t have easily made ice cubes to cool their drinks.

General Electric came to the rescue with cookbooks/manuals like this one:

This “Silent Hostess” Treasure Book was published by GE in 1930, and includes illustrations, recipes, and instructions on how to properly use (and defrost) a Monitor Top refrigerator (though they never use that phrase).

Filling the refrigerator properly was important.

It was also important to know and use the different features of the Monitor Top correctly: the Cabinet, the Chiller, and the Super-freezer (always capitalized and in italics).

The Super-freezer is the small evaporator, which has room for a couple of ice cube trays and not much else. It does chill a can of pop very rapidly. The Chiller is the glass tray just under the Super-freezer, a good place to keep things that need to be extra cold, and also a place for the melted ice to drip into when defrosting. The Cabinet is just the rest of the fridge.

The housewife (yes, the book assumes that women will do all the cooking) with a new Monitor Top would then be able to entertain her guests with such cool and tasty treats as lemonade, with the suggestion “Serve with colored ice cubes or serve a spoonful of grape juice that has been frozen to a mush in each glass.” I like the grape juice idea. Unfortunately the picture doesn’t show the colorful ice cube suggestion.

The book also contains a lot of gelatin recipes: lots and lots and lots of aspic. The 1920s was the heyday of the gelatin salad. In the salad chapter, almost every recipe includes gelatin. Tuna Fish Salad? It’s what we would think of as tuna salad… surrounded by gelatin and molded. Summer Salad? Cucumber and onion in Lemon Aspic. Golden Salad? Carrot in Lemon Aspic. Tomato-Celery Salad? Celery, green peppers and olives in Tomato Aspic. The modern leafy green salad simply did not exist in this cookbook.

The book also contains suggested menus. Thanksgiving is coming soon, so here is the suggested Thanksgiving Dinner menu:

Shrimp Cocktail*
Roast Turkey
Mashed Potatoes            Chestnut Stuffing
Carrots in Butter                 Cranberry Jelly
Tomato Jelly Salad*
Saltines
Mince Tarts with Vanilla Ice Cream*
Nuts          Fruit          Mints
Coffee
(Menu items marked with * are recipes that are in the book.)

Thanksgiving is perhaps the most traditional of meals, so this isn’t too strange to our eyes. But there it is, gelatin again — Tomato Jelly Salad. Tomato Aspic, in individual molds, unmolded onto crisp lettuce and served with mayonnaise dressing. I can safely say that I don’t think this is part of most modern Thanksgiving meals.

We may try this one for the heck of it. 1920s gelatin-based salads are a bit off-putting to our modern tastes, but we are curious whether there is any good reason they were popular. Stay tuned.

(Edited to add — I just found this lovely picture of a modern “tomato jelly salad.” Whether the version in the “Silent Hostess” cookbook will look that nice (and taste good too) is yet to be determined.)

(Want to see more Monitor Tops? I set up a Monitor Top photo pool on Flickr.)