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New Fashion Plates
Call number: TX715. N22 1932

Published by the Planters Edible Oil Company in Suffolk, this booklet extols the virtues of cooking with peanut oil from "the sandy, sunny tidewater section of Virginia and North Carolina…the finest, most flavory peanut in all the world." Many of the recipes called for frying foods the modern cook probably would not consider, such as macaroni, carrots, and pineapple. View enlarged image

When Do We Eat?
Call number: TX749. W56 1937

This advertising pamphlet was published by the Indianapolis business Kingan & Company, "purveyors of fine meats and other foods since 1845." Kingan's was one of the oldest meat packing businesses in the country, and the company had a wholesale market located on 15th and Cary Streets in Richmond, Virginia. The text states that meat is a healthy choice and that "there has been more or less a vague prejudice against meat in favor of a purely vegetarian diet. But the cult of vegetarianism is fading into the obscure region of exploded theories, before the facts of sounder scientific knowledge." View enlarged image

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Country Cooking Tips from the 6th Annual Virginia Pork Festival (Lawrenceville, 1980)
Call number: TX749.5. P67 C856 1980

Local businesses (Gwaltney of Smithfield, J.P. Beale & Son, Smithfield Packing Company, and Piedmont Pork, Inc.) donated thousands of pounds of pork products for the 6th Annual Virginia Pork Festival. Included in this booklet are several different recipes for chitterlings (hog intestines), most of them calling for the pork to steam for 18 hours before deep frying in lard. One recipe warns that "Chitterling eaters are born, not made." View enlarged image

Selected Recipes for Cakes, Biscuit, Muffins, etc. Prepared by the Ladies of Virginia
Call number: TX765. R968 S3

Starting in the early 1900s, there was great competition among makers of baking products to get consumers to use their products. Rumford Chemical Works published Selected Recipes as a promotion for their brand, Horsford's Baking Powder. To help persuade women to use their product, Rumford compiled recipes from the "ladies of Virginia." Testimonials from satisfied customers were printed, including one from the Sisters of the Visitation at Monte Maria convent in Richmond. "We have used for some years Horsford's Self-Raising Bread Preparation in making bread, cakes, pastry, etc., and found it equal, if not superior to any." View enlarged image

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