Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #18 - Descriptive Food

 

18. Descriptive Food January 25 - February 7

We all know those recipes that come attached to interesting and imaginative names - slumps, crumbles, buckles, trifles, flummery. Pick a historic recipe that has a descriptive title.

 

Can you imagine a world without computers?  Smart phones?  Television?  If you are our age it doesn't seem that long ago that files were metal cabinets, phones had a long cord attached to a wall, and television (if your family had one) was only broadcast in black and white.

 

Thank goodness we are beyond that!  But the memories of what we enjoyed as children were all brought back with a rush as we looked through our CBS Homemaker's Exchange Recipes booklets for the perfect recipe for the Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #18 - Descriptive Food.  We found our recipe in the January/February/March 1951 issue.

 

 

The recipe is for a sandwich called a Bumsted.
 

 

There may be other historical reasons for this sandwich to be called a Bumsted, but for us it is because of our comic strip character Dagwood Bumstead.
 

 

Dagwood Bumstead is a character in comic strip by artist Chic Young.  The name of the strip was Blondie and it dates back to 1933.  As the story goes, Dagwood was the heir to the Bumstead Locomotive fortune but was disowned by his family when he married a flapper, Blondie Boopadoop.  Dagwood works as the office manager at a construction company owned by J.C. Dithers,  The Bumsteads first baby was originally named Baby Dumpling and later changed to Alexander.  The younger sister was named Cookie by the comic strip's readers through a national contest.  The family has a dog named Daisy.  The origin of both Dagwood's last name and Daisy's name came from Chic Young's long-time friend Arthur Bumstead and his dog, Daisy.

 

Dagwood was famous for his refrigerator raids making mile-high sandwiches from anything and everything on the shelves.

 

Our sandwich recipe would bring Dagwood running to the kitchen.

 

Our recipe.

 



Our ingredients.

 

Flaked tuna, chopped onion, chopped hard boiled eggs, and cheese.  Combine with a little mayo.

 

You might notice here that there is a lack of pickle in our ingredients.  Patrick hates pickle!  Here in North Carolina there has been a new snack of deep-fried pickle.  (They will deep-fry anything, I swear!)  While we were waiting at the airport one day we ordered lunch.  Patrick bit into what he thought was a hush puppy to find it was a deep-fried pickle!  The look on his face sent me into epic fits of laughter!  Ok, back to the recipe, hold the pickle.

 



Butter the buns.

 

Pile on the spread.

A sprinkle of paprika and into a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes.

While we wait for our Bumsted sandwiches to warm and melt in the oven we talk about our Sundays as children.  The huge Sunday paper would be delivered and Patrick remembers taking out the comic strip section and leaving the rest of the paper for his father.  Patrick would spread the "funnies" on the floor, prop himself down on one knee with his chin on the other knee and read the section from front to back.

Television cartoons took the place of the "funnies" as we grew older.  In 1948, before either of us were born, there were just over one million televisions in US homes as a result of continued invention by multiple people over the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The first national color television broadcast was on January 1, 1954 with the Tournament of Roses Parade.  By the mid-1960s color television had started to sell and the last network color conversion occurred in 1972.  Quite a leap in our lifetime!

Our sandwiches are ready and it's lunchtime!

A high-protein and delicious lunch!  Four thumbs up!

From this Dagwood and Blondie,

Enjoy!