2019 Update!
I’ve added a few more ads that have turned up. They’re at the bottom.
What to cook for those Lenten meals? Such a dilemma!
Me, I always have dreams of various interesting vegetable-based stews and soups, but you know what it always ends up being?
Cheese pizza. Lots and lots of cheese pizza. With maybe some pancakes and eggs tossed in there for variety.
For some reason, I went on a bit of a rabbit trail last night..I have no idea how I happened to think that there might be a treasure trove of Lenten-themed vintage food advertisements out there…but there is. It’s at an advertising design archive website, and, yes, there is a “Lent” keyword, although several of the ads in that category are Valentine-themed, but who knows.
But then I thought, Wait. The Era of Regrettable Food was also pre-Vatican II…when Catholics abstained from meat every Friday anyway…what were the Lenten regulations right before the Council? Why would Lent-themed advertising even be a thing if Catholics were going meatless on Fridays all year?
Turns out that it was: fasting every day of Lent except Sunday, of course, fasting and abstaining from meat on all Fridays and Ash Wednesday, and on the other days, meat allowed in one of those “one regular and two small meals” of the fasting days. So that explains the advertising directed at helping the cook be creative within those constraints since less meat would be consumed for several weeks…hence Lima Loaf.
(Too bad they changed that. Really. It lends a sense of greater body/soul continuity to the season, in my mind. It’s also kind of insulting that they thought we couldn’t handle that mild of a regime any longer, but what else is new. )
Of course, not all of this is regrettable. Some is just quite normal – vegetable soups, hot cross buns and pancakes and such. Some is surprising – using Lent to even advertise peanuts! – and a reminder of a time in which religious practice was just considered…normal and as amenable to commercial exploitation as any other part of life!
So enjoy, and may these be an inspiration…
of what not to cook during Lent, that is….
(You should be able to right click on each ad for a larger version)
Bring on the Cranberry-Fish Souffle Salad, the Velveeta Jelly Omelet and the Individual Tuna Dreamboats!
Even peanuts get in the Lent game!
Because everyone want prawns, pineapples and egg scramble.
Or a tuna-olive-cream of mushroom soup biscuit ring.
Penance!
2019 Update. Here are a few more. None quite match the Tuna Dreamboats, in my mind, but they’re fun nonetheless. And interesting – again, from a time when the family needing to eat Lent-centric food was a worthy market to pursue.
I was also looking over all of these again and was a little puzzled by the Birds-Eye ad above – why is it a big deal to eat CORN during LENT? And then I realized – well, that’s because people ate far more seasonally then, and so the sales pitch here is that frozen corn during Lent would be a treat because it would give you the fresh taste you wouldn’t expect until summer. Supposedly.
And notice the contrasting appeals between the Banquet and the Knox Gelatin ad – Banquet echoing St. Basil the Great and encouraging us to “give up cooking for Lent” and rely on their frozen meals – and Knox suggesting “While you’re keeping Lent…make unusual dishes!”
It’s not obvious, but the Lent angle on the Quaker corn meal ad is over on the right – it’s a “Young Idea for Lent.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Click on images for full screen version.)
On a less gruesome note, there were, in that era (as there are in ours) many cookbooks and handbooks to help a Catholic homemaker make her home…Catholic. Some are still in print and are very good. One that I have was published by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. I have a post on it here, with a reader evaluation of a modern reprint. But in case you don’t want to head over to that old post, here’s the first page of the Lent section, so you can see how substantive it is:
If a healthy penitential attitude is to grow with our children, it should be fed with their daily Lenten bread.
…or tuna-olive-cream of mushroom soup biscuit ring.
I would imagine Valentine ads popped up because of the “Lent” in Va-lent-ine!
Oh my gosh, yes. Of course!!
“Cheese pizza. Lots and lots of cheese pizza.”
Head East, lose the cheese, and embrace beans and rice. Heh.
Very…very interesting ads in so many ways…the 9 Velveeta recipes may give me a bad dream tonight. I bought Central American red beans today which are soaking overnight in the frig…just warming up for food I love less than ideal. But Sunday I will use a gift card to a Darden restaurant for my own private tummy Rio carnival…prior to Lent. And I picked up frozen cod and flounder
at Stop and Shop. That Christ actually fasted totally for forty days is mind boggling. Hence this was prophesied in a hidden way in the proportions of the ark of Noah which had to be 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits. Augustine too quickly said in the City of God that these were the proportions of a human body….height being 10 times the chest depth and 6 times the torso width. Yes and no. They are the proportions of a very slender man…Christ after 40 days of no food..just as the ark suffered 40 days of rain. A flood separates man from earth and fasting in a deeper sense separates the faster from holding onto this earth. Augustine was right that the proportions predicted Christ but they also predicted His fast and his resultant slenderness. I’m seeing ribeye steak Sunday and kale will undo the chloresterol…best if kale is steamed 7 minutes as to that specific effect.
Note how normal lent was — as well as meatless Fridays.
Exactly….another era. Sadly.
Creamed peas and tuna on toast. White sauce, canned tuna, canned peas and toast. It was actually pretty tasty if you could get past the way it looked.
And who can forget…or, who wants to remember…”hot dogs” made with tuna?
If you’re Polish, you can have pierogi. Just don’t get mass-produced ones. They’re a real penance.
We do meatless Fridays in our house. I have three kids 10, 8 and 3. We are still required by the church to give up something on Fridays as a remembrance of the suffering and death of Christ so going back to the old practice of giving up meat seemed a way to get back in touch with the traditions of the church. Obviously, in a society that has so many vegetarians it makes sense to let people choose what to give up instead of a mandate but unfortunately most people don’t give up anything. One of our favorite Friday meals is shells and cottage cheese. Sautee some onion and garlic in butter. Pour over cooked pasta shells (you can use any shape we just like the big shells b/c they hold the cottage cheese) and add cottage cheese salt and pepper. Yummy! I have to admit though we do have lots of cheese pizza. We make everything from scratch which makes it all the better and better for you. But the combinations are endless. I like pesto, olives, feta, tomato, and basil. Hard to beat but really doesn’t feel like a real sacrifice.
Macaroni + grated cheese + vegetarian refried beans + salsa = nachos pasta.
We had fried mush with Karo syrup sometimes.
We would have tuna noodle casserole or salmon patties. Got tired of the fish sticks with macaroni & cheese as a child. I enjoyed the meatless Fridays
I suspect those sort of meals might promote greater fasting. :)
I’m inspired to add a hard-boiled egg to all my meals this Lent!
“How to keep ’em content in Lent”. Hmmm… seems to be missing the point of Lent.
[…] and blogger Amy Welborn recently posted some vintage Lent-inspired advertising related to meatless meals that may not inspire our taste buds, but is still worth checking out. In […]
Nothing appeals to me on that list. Glad for the present day and better choices!
Creamed peas on toast are comfort food now. Herring in cream sauce is still a New Year’s Eve delicacy!
As a long time fan of James Lileks’ “Gallery of Regrettable Food”, I absolutely loved this post! Happy Lent!
Many of us Catholics, old and new, still follow the Lenten fast as envisioned by those advertisements, and mainly one meal a day, and a snack or two, and pretty much avoid meat as much as possible…you might be suprised by the number of folk trying to be true penitents….LOTS.
And it ends up sticking throughout much of the year…
[…] for fun: here is a “Gallery of Regrettable Lenten Food” to show you what not to cook during those Fridays of […]
Tuna noodle casserole with some kind of crunchy breaded coating on top. Thanks, mom. It was perfectly awful, but better than going to bed hungry.
Mmm…”Thrifty Lima Loaf”…
Oh my! This is an exhaustive piece of research and a trip down memory lane! We ate a lot of waffles and mac and cheese. I agree, some of these make fasting look good. With all the vegans and vegetarians these days, abstinence is standard diet. We never left the old abstinence and fasting guidelines. Our Muslim friends were surprised to hear that their Ramadan fast wasn’t “the only one in town”.
Omg yes these are oldies, we do lots of black beans and rice, can’t go wrong with rice.
I always looked forward to potato pancakes during lent . . . the only time my mom went through the messy process of clamping the meat grinder to the table and grinding a mess of potatoes for the pancakes, then cleaning up all the juice that flowed from the grinder and managed to miss the catch basin. With our modern food processors, it should be easy to make them now, but I think removing the juice in this way probably made them better.
Skip the peas in the creamed tuna, they are too overpowering and don’t belong anyway.
But to my real point — eggs and pancakes WITHOUT bacon???