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.

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.)

“Another thing Sally hardly ever uses is my chopping bowl. She had Max plane off a square board that she keeps lying on the kitchen table. When a vegetable is to be sliced or chopped she simply holds it on the board and cuts it down with a heavy, sharp knife.”

Surely cutting vegetables on a cutting board — such a basic kitchen operation — couldn’t have been unusual back then, could it?

I had never actually heard of the term “chopping bowl” before. Here’s one — a wide, shallow wooden bowl with a mezzaluna blade chopper. You can buy these today,but they aren’t standard equipment in the kitchen as they once were. Once you could buy the chopping board mezzaluna knife at the dime store, but it’s probably not quite as universally accessible these days. (Nor are “dime stores.”)

Even more than 100 years ago, chopping bowls had begun to be thought of as out-of-date. Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, had this to say in 1887:

“There is the old fashioned and, I hope, now entirely obsolete, chopping-bowl and its odd-shaped knife. With bowl on lap and the chopping-knife making its regular strokes, now and then stopping to shovel whatever is being minced into the centre of the dish, for hours the patient woman would keep at work. The famous ‘Patience on a monument’ would be impatience and irritability compared with her at work upon a task more irksome and wearying than that of the woodchopper.”

Dun’s Review, November 1912, gives us a hint to the causes behind the chopping bowl’s fall to relative obscurity:

“No one regrets the passing of the chopping-bowl, with its long and wearisome manipulation of its semicircular knives, since its place has been taken by the so-called chopping machines, which will do more and better work in five minutes than could be done with a bowl and knife in an hour. Many a ‘left-over’ that was formerly thrown away is now transformed into an attractive croquette or other tasty dish because of the ease with which it can be cut to any desired degree of fineness by one of these machines.”

Ah, new technology!

American Agriculturist, October 1884.

The meat chopper, easier and faster to use than the chopping bowl, was the food processor of the late nineteenth century. Of course, it was used for meat. But as the article I quoted in How Sally Did It (in 1920) mentioned, it could be an all-purpose tool:

“And I never saw anybody put the food chopper to so many different uses; instead of grating the lemons, and her fingers, too, she takes a sharp knife and pares off the rind, then runs it through the food chopper. Cheese is treated the same way, and she can prepare vegetables in a ‘jiffy,’ and they cook quicker, too, for the fine cutting. Once when we were late at starting supper and I didn’t think there would be time to cook potatoes, she had them peeled and run through the food chopper while I was worrying what to have in place of them. They fried in a few minutes.”

Good Housekeeping, ran this letter in March 1898:

“Editor of Good Housekeeping.
I have read with interest your recipes for sandwiches in the September number of Good Housekeeping. Will you allow me to suggest the use of the meat chopper or grinder instead of the chopping knife, in preparing the meat for sandwiches. I also use the meat chopper for meat for hash. The potatoes need to be chopped with the chopping knife, but the meat mixes better and is more satisfactory when ground. Corned beef of course is the best, but by the addition of a very little one put through the grinder with the meat, any other meat, or two or three kinds of meat make a very good hash. The flavor of onion must be very very slight for a breakfast hash. I also use the meat chopper for crumbing dried bread for croquettes, etc. I find the chopper an indispensable implement of kitchen furniture.”

As with many other new technologies, there was a backlash. American Cookery published “The Art of the Chopping-Bowl” in October 1919:

“Old things give place to new. With the coming of the meat-chopper or, more properly, crusher, the chopping block and bowl have been discarded and one rarely hears of or even sees a chopping-bowl in the homes of today.

“…The poor way is the quick way. The good housewife will not sacrifice good food and health for speed, but will do it the better way. Hash is a fine dish, or should be, which the majority of people turn up their noses at because it is made from meat-gristle, cartilage and bone forced through the meat-crusher; this fines it in a certain way, but when the unseemly mixture is mixed with potato and heated up, it is anything but a palatable dish, because one is constantly biting into a piece of gristle or bone.

“…Every home should have at least two chopping-bowls. One for meats, nuts, etc., which should never be used for chopping onions, etc.”

Nowdays, we don’t really tend to use meat-choppers in most kitchens — and if we do, we call them meat grinders and just use them to make ground beef. But many of us do use food processors, and often use them for the same reasons cooks turned to the meat-chopper in the nineteenth century. Most of us also do a lot of cutting directly on a flat cutting board. I can see the advantage to a chopping bowl for a lot of things, though. Cutting up nuts, or other items that are likely to scatter. I may have to get one.

As for the meat-chopper, I don’t have one of those because the only meat I eat is fish, so it never seemed useful. But I can see that it could also be handy occasionally for other things. Maybe I’ll get one of those, too.