I was poking through the bookshelves in the Trinity Episcopal Church Thrift Shop a few weeks before Christmas, and I turned up this handsome booklet, which was published in 1947 by the United Fruit Company. The cover, reproduced as a full spread here, shows a nice big hand of bananas in a pressed-glass banana stand, an item that became popular in the 1890s, the booklet tells us, when bananas first became widely available. I like the almost-symmetry of this cover; if you look at just the front cover, it is particularly striking. The design is elegant and simple, especially compared to most food-company cookbooks. But the interior is a sheer descent into madness.

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This little book, which I picked up in the Caritas thrift shop in Geneva years ago, suddenly seems relevant again. It was published in 1942 as a guide for housewives contending with shortages and rationing during World War II; my edition, which is clearly translated from German, was apparently a premium from the Compagnie Genevoise des Tramways Electriques.

Switzerland was not a direct participant in World War II, of course, but as all the surrounding countries were at war, they experienced shortages and rationing just as their neighbors did. (Also, the Swiss have a bit of a bunker mentality—to this day, residents are required to keep certain food rations on hand at all times, more as a hedge against inflation than to ward off starvation.)

This little book actually packs quite a bit of information into a small space. The author, Madame Helen Guggenbuhl, includes instructions on how to can, dry, and pickle food, remake clothing to accomodate changing sizes as you lose weight, and make soap substitutes out of things like beef trimmings, potato peels, and ashes.

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(One more scan from the Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls Cook Book)

I used to see eggplant in the supermarket when I was a kid, but I could never figure out what people did with it. It was a complete unknown to me: What did it look like under the skin? Which part did you eat? Where did the eggs come into it? All this remained a mystery, because we literally never had eggplant in our house.

Eventually I learned that this was no accident.

My father’s mother, whom he called “Ma,” was an excellent cook. In fact, she was a professional cook before she married my grandfather (”Pa”), and although there were eight kids in the family, and it was the Depression, the food was always plentiful and good.

Breaded pork chops were one of Ma’s particular accomplishments. Nobody makes breaded pork chops any more, because they are pretty much the definition of unhealthy food, and that’s a shame. Ma taught my mother to make them, and they were one of our favorite foods when we were growing up. After my sister got married, her in-laws used to drive 100 miles from the Chicago suburbs to South Bend just to have Mom’s breaded pork chops.

Back to Dad’s childhood trauma: One day, probably in the late 1930s, Dad sat down at the dinner table to what appeared to be a large platter of breaded pork chops. No one told him otherwise, so it wasn’t until he bit into one that he discovered that his mother was trying a new dish: breaded eggplant.

From that moment on, eggplant was anathema to him. We never, ever had it in our house, not even in the vegetarian-friendly 1970s, which were arguably the glory days of eggplant. The first time I ate eggplant, I was in graduate school. A guy who was trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to win my affections fixed me a big pan of eggplant parmesan from his family’s traditional recipe.

And reader, I loved it.

I got this book as a birthday present when I was 7 or 8 from my good friend Steve Stasheff (I suspect his mother picked it out, actually). I don’t remember doing much cooking when I was a kid, but I did spend a lot of time reading this book, and I memorized a lot of the pictures. Even today, when I make pancakes or meatloaf, the images from this book are lurking in the back of my head.

First of all, I was fascinated by the test kitchen cooks whose faces and comments were sprinkled throughout the book. Who were they, and what did they know that I didn’t, that they got to get their pictures in the book? They looked kind of nerdy, but they were in a book and I wasn’t. That didn’t seem right.

The book started with a section on Beverages, the whole concept of which just puzzled me. Why bother? The only beverage I was interested in was pop, which we seldom got. I used to squint over the recipes, trying to figure out if they had slipped in a recipe for pop, but all they had were nauseating concoctions like Red Rouser (vanilla ice cream and cranberry juice), Choc-o-Nut Milk (milk mixed with peanut butter and chocolate syrup), and Cheery Cherry Drink: Stir maraschino cherry juice into milk and then “drop a maraschino cherry ’surprise’ into each glass.” I didn’t think a bright red blob would be a good surprise in a glass of milk.

In the Salads section, the Betty Crocker folks rolled up their sleeves and got down to business, which in this book meant one thing: Making food look like something else. In the Betty Crocker cookbook, “Rocket Salad” did not involve arugula; it was a banana, set upright in a slice of canned pineapple and topped with a “nose cone” of half a maraschino cherry.

The salad section relied heavily on such artifice. Canned pears become bunnies (with almond ears and tails of cottage cheese). Carrots cluster, points inward, around a clump of olives to form a black-eyed Susan. And someone even made a Raggedy Ann Salad, using a marshmallow for the head, shredded cheese for hair… I’m going to stop there.

With the exception of the hideous “Ham” Loaf Hawaiian (the scare quotes say it all: It’s Spam, studded with pineapple rings and baked), the section on main dishes is pretty solid. The food stylists did go a little nuts on Meat Loaf a la Mode (meatloaf baked in a pie tin and topped with scoops of mashed potatoes), but other than that, it’s straight-up home cooking. The cookies are pretty basic as well. But then we get to the cakes.

This is the Enchanted Castle Cake, and I wanted it. Bad. I used to sit and look at the little chocolate bar doors and just desire that cake. I never got it, of course, which is probably just as well as there is no way that reality could live up to that image. This one was too freakish for me, though:

I could never figure out what that creature in the center was supposed to be, but it didn’t look appetizing. And note the popcorn-ball clowns lurking in the background. The entire scene just screams “forced gaiety.”

I leave you with the best page of the whole book, a chocolate cookie recipe that really works—my 12-year-old daughter uses it when she bakes cookies, and they are still delicious. But what makes it perfect is the dollop of sarcasm added by my sister at the very end. Happy eating!