Every meeting of the Edelweiss Club included a delightful luncheon of some kind. Sometimes it was a salad, sometimes an ice, sometimes a two course luncheon.
I wish I knew what the delicious foods prepared were, but I do not. I looked at some old recipes and realizing that most of these meetings occurred in the evenings after work on a weeknight and that they did not have cooks to prepare the delightful treats, they or a female relative must have prepared the meal. What delightful luncheon can I find?
Dyanne Dillon of the blog Backsies is What There is Not suggested in the comments for “C” that congealed salads may have been on the menu. In the cookbook “Dainty Desserts for Dainty People” by Knox Gelatine, published in 1917, I found not only desserts but main dish recipes like the one below.
Some of the ingredients needed for tuna dish underlined in red
My sister suggested pimento cheese sandwiches and my daughter suggested cake. These delights will be covered in future posts.
I make a salmon mousse recipe similar to the recipe you found for the tuna fish salad: it is made with tinned red salmon, gelatine …It could easily be made the day before to take to a party.
You use the word luncheon but then mention weeknights – to me luncheon is always in the middle of the day – do you use the word differently to me in Australia?
There were quite a few recipes like that, substituting different meats.
I noticed that too. I think we use the word the same way. Will have to check to see what time school was out.
Good option for preparing ahead of time as long as the lettuce didn’t wilt. I’d never heard of a congealed salad so went off to Google where I found lots of recipes. I’m enlightened.
I had never heard of one either! They could add the lettuce at the last minute to avoid it being soggy.
This takes me back to tomato aspic to which my grandmother added cabbage or maybe cole slaw (I remember it being crunchy and a bit sweet). Not sure that would make a delightful luncheon. The tuna looks much better.
All I remember that is at all remotely tied to this recipe is the jello my mother sometimes made with shredded carrot in it. Green jello with orange carrots.
Squeeeee! Thank you for the shout out, Kristin! I have a wonderful book called “Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads” that you might enjoy. It’s by Sylvia Lovegren and starts in the 1920s. I used a recipe from it that was popular at ladies luncheons for a progressive dinner salad course (that was NOT just ladies). You can find the recipe for that if you look on Google, but if you look it up, just know that I added two cream cheese balls rolled in toasted coconut to the salad….
Thank you for the resourse. I will look for it! Those cheese balls were quite an add.
Ha! Love that title, “Dainty Desserts for Dainty People”! Wonder who their target audience was? Where is the ad for Sellers Grocery from? Was that a local store?
I think the target audience was women looking for desert recipes. Yes, the add was from a local store. It appeared in “The Montgomery Times”. I did combine two adds from the same paper and store.
On TikTok, I discovered B. Dylan Hollis, a young man who loves to bake and is very much into old cookbooks. He ranges from the 1800s to the 1990s, and sometimes, he comes up with very strange recipes, LOL. I should say that sometimes he’s surprised by how good come of them are, but some other he can’t even take a morsel.
I love his videos 🙂
I will have to take a look. I must admit, I’ve not tried any of the recipes I looked at for this post. I looked through quite a few recipes from local newspapers but they didn’t seem fancy enough.
Sorry, the comment above is mine. I forgot to put in my name!
That’s okay.