Very Pinteresting!

This is the 1952 version of Pinterest: women sharing inspirational photos and ideas about food with each other through the newest medium: telephones. Today our communications are wireless, but this cover emphasizes the connection these women have literally through the phone lines tying them together.

This booklet suggests that women have nothing better to do than chatter, and that they have no external interests outside their kitchens — much like criticism leveled at Pinterest.

Meat Recipes You’ll Talk About, National Live Stock and Meat Board, 1952

Insides-Out

 In 1543, Andreas Vesalius published one of the foundational texts in all of human discourse, De humani corporis fabrica, On the fabric of the human body. It is based on his series of Paduan lectures on anatomy which were, unusually for the time, illustrated with the performance of actual dissections. His remarkably accurate and detailed illustrations show for the first time what the inside of a person looks like, and corrected many erroneous assumptions about human anatomy that had persisted since Galen.

Anatomy classes aren't conducted like this anymore.
For one thing, the dogs aren't allowed in to carry off scraps that fall from the table. 

Folks are pretty common. How come we were so clueless about the plumbing for so long? Because Roman Law disallowed dissection  (Galen used monkeys instead, assuming them to be just like humans on the inside) and the Church frowned on cutting people up to take a look. Eventually, they decided that executed criminals were fair game for medical science, because they weren’t expected to make an appearance at the Pearly Gates, so could be dismantled with impunity.

 But it is not the dissections that Vesalius is known for; it’s his illustrations of them. Advances in printing meant that he could print drawings in exquisite detail that did justice to the minutiae he uncovered. In death he leant his subjects a dignity they had been denied in life, picturing them in the poses of classic art, even as they held open their peeled-back skin and muscle to reveal what lay inside. They lean against plinths in rustic settings, or hang from an invisible pulley, their bones and joints labeled the way livestock is on butcher’s charts.

 The Church did not like to think of the human as an animal, being concerned, as they were, with the soul, but we have no such reticence about drawing a tasty beast up into sirloins and flanks and ribs and chops as if their bodies were Bingo cards.

The beautiful book of household management that sadly lacks an identifying cover that this illustration of a bullock comes from is one such playscape. Part 5 is a “mouse round.” Part 1 is, of course the cheek. Unlike Vesalius’s illustrations, carving charts generally feature living animals, the divisions superimposed or printed onto the skin. As such, they are the exact opposite of how most people buy they meat these days, as slabs of red flesh packed onto a polystyrene tray bound in plastic wrap, its origin a mystery to most. We like our protein anonymous, without the specter of a face glaring back at us — our own, perhaps, reflected in the supermarket’s fluorescent lights.

A copy of De humani corporis fabrica housed at Brown University is bound in human skin, which seems appropriate. It might give one the heebie-jeebies to handle though. If it had been bound, as most books were, in vellum, no-one would turn a hair.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Queen’s epic opus is 5 minutes and 55 seconds of pure crazy-ass genius that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and remains to this day one of the most complex recordings in popular music, having been recorded over three weeks on so many overdubs the tape was nearly worn through.

You have to have an enormous, swaggering pair of cajones to think you can get away with singing it in concert if you are not Freddie Mercury; those who do and can pull it off are rewarded handsomely by a raucous crowd of happy hand waving headbangers judging every single note.

The song’s impenetrable lyrics have been subject to much speculation, ranging from the most jargon-entwisted academic intellectualizing to Mercury’s own admission that they were just “random rhyming nonsense.”  

Until now. Here, for the first time, is the culinary catalyst upon which “Bohemian Rhapsody” was surely based. To wit:  Homes and Gardens’ monstrous book Meals With A Foreign Flair’s section on “Stout German Fare.” 

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Behold the glory that is the Hausplatte, a veritable symphony of meat served on a wooden trencher alongside tankards of beer. It surely is a meal for someone teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown who thinks that “nothing really matters.”

MAMA just killed a man,

Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead

MAMA, life had just begun,

But now I've gone and thrown it all away

We are eased in to the opening movement (in which the protagonist confesses to murder, says he doesn’t want to face the consequences, and wishes he’d never been born at all) by the Duchesse potatoes edging the platter, keeping all the meat in and providing an ever-present context for the meal’s theme. Who among us would not wish they’d never been born when faced with his dish? Who would not be driven to shoot someone in the head?

I'm just a poor boy nobody loves me

He's just a poor boy from a poor family,

Spare him his life from this monstrosity

Easy come, easy go, will you let me go

Bismillah! No, we will not let you go

(Let him go!) Bismillah! We will not let you go

With a sudden change in tempo, the thudding of a lone piano introduces us to a hysterical dialogue between the protagonist and his demons, here represented by the myriad artery-bursting array of animal proteins that form the plate’s centerpiece. The sausages, as Scaramouche, appear ready to do the Fandango in one’s mouth, while the boiled beef plays the part of Galileo, trying to tell the truth about meat’s essential nature. The weinkraut in the middle are surely Bismillah, the Arabic god with whom the protagonist enters a crazed dialogue begging for and denying his freedom. Before all hell breaks loose, Beelzebub, the devil himself, appears in the form of pig’s knuckles anchoring this sordid tale at both ends.

Beelzebub!.. has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me

Once any diner has commenced engorging him or herself in this orgy of meat, the music, and heart races. One can hear it begging:

Oh, baby, can't do this to me, baby,

Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here

Once safely removed from the table and no longer a threat, the diner slouches in a chair, sated, greasy juice dribbling down his or her chin and soaking into the napkin tucked into a collar. Eyes rolled back, is it any wonder the song ends with this final sentiment?

Nothing really matters, Anyone can see,

Nothing really matters,

Nothing really matters to me

Any way the wind blows.

The metallic chime of a gong — the bell that tolls for thee — finds echo in a long and gratifying burp.

Meals With A Foreign Flair, Better Homes and Gardens, 1963

Also from this book: Sweet-Sour Pork, Vive La Cuisine Franglais!

Raw Meat

Best served with tankards of foamy beer and a few sprigs of watercress. 

Guests like it that way. 

They always say so at other people’s houses. 

“She’s keeping true to her Tartar nature,” they say. 

“She’s a direct descendant of Genghis Khan,” they say. 

“Well, she’s got great ta-tas,” they say. 

“You know, I also noticed that,” they say. 

“I’d rather chew on those,” they say. 

“Another few pints and she might let you,” they say. 

“Really?” they say. 

“So the rumor goes,” they say. 

“Great in the bedroom, rubbish in the kitchen,” they say. 

“No kidding,” they say. 

“Like all Plains people, she’s an excellent rider,” they say with a wink. 

“Likes her meat,” they say with another wink. 

“I’m trying to think of something witty to say with the word bleu in it but I’m coming up short,” they say. 

“I think you just did,” they say. 

“Everyone’s a descendant of Genghis Khan nowadays” they say. 

“It ain’t nothing special.”

Fondue On The Menu, Western Publishing Company, Inc., 1971

Also from this book: The Joy of Fondue