Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Baking Cookies

     My dad and I baked some sugar cookies from scratch, last night. As he was pulling the ingredients out of the cupboard, he whipped this out:

     I was struck by how old it looked, and dad said it had been grandma's (who has not been with us for almost twenty years). So I had a look at the can.

     Ooh! Special recipe book offers? Do tell!

     Okay, I know you can't read this, so here's what it says:

TWO EXCITING RECIPE BOOKLETS!
BAKER'S CHOCOLATE AND COCONUT FAVORITES
This beautiful collection offers our 200 most famous chocolate and coconut recipes (many illustrated in full color) for Cakes, Cookies, Pies, Candies, Beverages, and Frostings. To get yours, send $.25 in coin with your name, address, and ZIP code to: (They're old address, which I'm not putting down.)
CALUMET'S TREASURY OF HOME BAKING
To get more than 20 illustrated pages of plain and fancy recipes, pretested by General Food Kitchens, send $.15 in coin with your name, address, and ZIP code to: (Same as the first one.)

     How amazing is that? Fifteen cents for a book? And they wanted you to put the coins through the mail? Who does that?
     On a side note, there is actually a cent sign after the "25" and the "15" on the can, but we don't have that sign on our keyboards anymore. Weird, huh?
     So I did a little research on this product. The can says it's made by General Foods Kitchens, which I was fairly certain no longer existed. It turns out it was owned by the founder of Post Cereals, but was taken over by Phillip Morris (now Altria-- they sound less evil that way) in 1985 and then merged with Kraft foods when they got Kraft. There's some really interesting back-story on all of that, including centuries-old products, biblically-offensive cereals and suicide, which I will let you read on a separate page devoted to it: General Foods History. So this product is at least twenty-four years old, but I would guess longer, considering the prices for the books.
     As for the cookies, we over-baked a tray of them. The ones that were safe seemed a little off. But the good news is no one died from eating cookies with 40-year old ingredients!


1 comment:

The White Spy said...

Wow! That is an old school can! Very cool!
PS: I'm glad no one died in the making/eating of the cookies. It always spoils the holidays when people are killed in cookie accidents...