“Canned vegetables are not only a great convenience to the housewife, but when fresh, young products are used and canned under careful supervision by modern methods; they retain more of their food value and vitamine content than most freshly cooked vegetables. This has been recently proved by investigations carried on in nutrition laboratories.
Therefore, the housewife who is watchful for the health of her family, will see to it that their diet contains carefully selected canned vegetables.” – Delane Brown
In the late 1920′s a local purveyor of “fine foods” published a little cookbook featuring recipes for the products they produced and distributed. “Delane Brown’s Cook Book: Good Things to Eat and How to Serve Them” is decorated on the cover with an illustration of faceted plates fit for a fine occasion. Below the title is a shelf of containers which surely contain only the finest spices and the purest, freshest ingredients.
Delane Brown boasted that the Purity Cross products they carried were “carefully selected” and “packed the very day they leave the farm.” At the time of this book’s publication, regulation had weeded out most of the outright toxic and mislabeled food products, leaving the market to sort out what consumers wanted other than to not be poisoned. The quest for purity reached ever onward and upward and canning technology advanced steadily.
Delane Brown promotional mailer
Where a generation before was probably content to survive the winter without scurvy, consumers of the 1920’s faced an exciting array of options ranging from novel fruits of other climate zones to New Jersey-based Purity Cross’ signature shelf-stable cream sauces in the form of “Lobster á la Newburg,” “Welsh Rarebit,” and “Chicken á la King.”
Delane Brown encouraged housewives to carefully prepare Purity Cross canned delicacies in presentations that presaged the comical heights of mid-century home-making, complete with toast points, parsley sprigs, “little triangular slices of lemon”, and served (of course) with Delane Brown’s own “Sweet Ku-Kumber Rings.”
The aspirational tone of some of the recipes in the book may be amusing in light of a modern middle-class distaste for canned food, but adventurous cooks have always aimed to impress and to adapt to new ideas.
This little cookbook has consumed a completely disproportionate amount of my time; my research bordered on obsession. Who the %*&! is Delane Brown? What do these products look like? Whatever became of Delane Brown?
What little I did find is that:
- In 1924, “down in Baltimore, a chap by the name of Delane Brown [was] apparently doing a good business selling salted peanuts by mail,” according to a peanut industry publication.
- A trip to the Maryland Historical Society to get a glimpse of the face of Delane Brown led to me staring at several photos of a box of figs and nothing more. Since this photo had been kindly retrieved for me and I had donned the requisite nitrile gloves, I stared at these figs for as long as possible with a feigned sense of purpose
- The person behind Delane Brown actually appears to be a businessman named George Dugdale, who has been quoted in a number of trade publications about the mail-order business and advertising.
- The address in the cookbook is ‘1501 Guilford Avenue’; Delane Brown’s business was located in the famous “Copy Cat Building”
- The company later moved to Towson, and probably went out of business in 1956
- George Dugdale passed away in December 1960
- George Dugdale’s wife was named Dorothy Elaine. “D. Elaine.” This is what I wasted hours of my life for?!?!?!
- Mrs. Dugdale was an avid golfer
I didn’t go all out and make one of the more fancy or bizarre recipes in “Good Things to Eat.” I live in a world where canned Welsh Rarebit is difficult to find on short notice. I opted instead to make a dish involving another item distributed by Delane Brown, Smithfield Ham, combined with a classic Baltimore canned product, hominy.
I couldn’t find Manning’s hominy at Safeway. I was going to write a little bit more about hominy but look how much space I’ve wasted already. We’ll save that for another day. I served the dish with canned green beans, undoubtedly picked at their peak of freshness. They tasted like salt. I also took a stab at Delane Brown’s “new way” of making a jelly roll, filled by my choice with lemon curd, hand-curdled just moments after falling from the tree.
Recipes:
Casserole of Ham and Hominy
- 3 cups cooked hominy
- 4 tb butter
- 4 tb flour
- 2 cups milk
- ¼ cup chopped onion
- 3 cups chopped Smithfield Ham
Make a white sauce from the butter, flour and milk and add the onions to it. Put a layer of hominy in a buttered baking dish, cover with a layer of the white sauce and spread with ham. Repeat the layers of hominy, sauce and ham until all are used, having the hominy on top. [yeah I failed this part – ed] Bake in a moderately hot oven – 350 to 375 degrees – for thirty minutes or until beginning to brown. Serve hot.
Jelly Roll
- 3 eggs
- 3 tb sugar
- 3 tb flour
- ½ tsp baking powdr
- 1 glass jelly
Beat the egg yolks until very light and foamy. Add the sugar and beat again until well blended. Sift the flour with the baking powder and add to the egg mixture. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold in. Pour the batter into a well buttered shallow pan about ten inches wide and about twelve to fourteen inches long. Bake in a moderate oven – 350 degrees – for eight to ten minutes, remove from oven and turn pan upside down until cold. Then lay on a sheet of paper. Spread with jelly and roll up. Sprinkle the outside with powdered sugar or spread with icing. This recipe defies all the old rules for jelly roll, but try it once and you will not want to use any other. Do not add any more sugar or flour even if you think then amount given is too small.
An emphasis on purity and finery continues
Recipes from “Delane Brown’s Cook Book: Good Things to Eat and How to Serve Them”