Stretching Meat: The Betty Crocker Way
I am not making this up:
The above graphic, believe it or not, comes from a 1943 booklet published by General Mills corporation under the title of Your Share: How to Prepare Appetizing, Healthful Meals With Foods Available Today. Despite a full-page forward by Betty Crocker herself (never a real person), the meat-stretching advice is not as exciting as any ErosBlog reader would hope.
See also “Stretch Your Meat With Cream Of Wheat” — a booklet offered in the same year via advertisements in Life magazine and elsewhere:
A heavily-watermarked inverted-colors graphic based on the “Stretch Your Meat” booklet achieved brief internet notoriety via Boing Boing back in 2007, but there doesn’t seem to be a true/complete copy or image of the booklet available anywhere. If an ErosBlog reader knows better, please share!
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=34749
Looks like there are some samples here:
https://recipecurio.com/stretching-meat-recipes/
And I also found a script for a radio presentation on “Stretching Your Meat” with Dick and Betty:
https://archive.org/details/CAT31322981/page/n1/mode/2up
Old cookbooks can be fascinating!
One of the best finds I had was a cookbook I later gifted away. It was written by a cook who worked in a logging camp in Maine in the 1900s. Men, largely farmers, would go out to camp for the winter, and cut trees with axe and handsaw and horses. Some estimates are that they were eating and burning 6000 – 8000 Calories a day! And there were often forty to a hundred men working at each camp. So the recipes often start: “Take ten pounds of beans and an equal amount of salt pork and soak them overnight in fresh water.”