The Business of Being A Housewife

Title: The Business of Being a Housewife: A Manual to Promote Household Efficiency by Armour and Company

Location: Google Books       Date: 1917

The diversified product lines of  meatpacking giant Armour and Company are clearly illustrated in this early twentieth century cook book. If it could be eaten or drank, Armour had it! While products such as ham, bacon, lard and other animal related foods are expected from the stock yard giant, what is surprising is Armour’s beverage and canned fruit lines.

This how-to guide featured recipes,  household hints and suggested menus with a strong emphasis on using Armour products including their Veribest line of  packaged and canned goods. What is particularly appealing about the book are the illustrations. But, some of the food descriptions are not to be missed!

Armour’s Dry Sausage

Armour and Company, as the world’s largest manufacturers of Dry (or Summer) Sausage, produce many millions of pounds yearly. There are nearly a hundred kinds—in sufficient variety to satisfy the tastes of every nationality.

Dry Sausage is a tempting delicatessen dainty; seasoned with the finest spices, it is very nourishing and appetizing. For these reasons it has held a high place in European dietary, served with other relishes as the first course of a meal, or, as an economical principal meat course.

Most travelers return from Europe with a keen relish for the various sausages they have eaten during their travels—sausage d’Aries, or Lyon, in France, the slightly garlic-flavored Milan Salami in Italy, or the Gothaer and Summer sausage of Germany. The excessive cost of importation, however, placed these delicacies among the luxuries of life, until the American manufacturer, seeing the growing demand for dry sausage and the possibility of reducing its cost by improved methods of manufacture, proved that it could be better made here than abroad.

Dry Sausage is most practical as well as one of the most delicious of meat products. There is not a scrap of waste; it requires no cooking or preparation of any sort; it will keep almost indefinitely. For the emergency shelf, the impromptu late supper, the children’s lunch box or the automobile hamper, the housewife will find many calls for this delicious product. Its use as an hors d’ceuvre, sliced thin and garnished with olives, radishes, etc., and served before the soup course, is also rapidly growing in this country.

Following are a few dry sausage favorites: Summer Sausage (sometimes called Cervelat), German Salami, Gothaer Cervelatwurst, Goteborg, Landjaeger, Farmer Sausage, Holstein, Milan Salami, Sopressata, Genoa, Lyons, Mortadella, Gold Band.

Note—The appearance of mold on the container of dry sausage in no way affects the quality of the product.

Chicago, Satan’s Sanctum

Title: Chicago: Satan’s Sanctum by L. O. Curon

Location: Internet Archive      Date: 1899

It seems Obi-Wan was wrong. There was a more retched hive of scum and villainy and its name was Chicago.

An utterly different sort of book is “Chicago, Satan’s Sanctum,” by L. O. Curon (Chicago: C. D. Phillips & Co.). It is a sensational description of the crime, immorality, police inefficiency and political corruption of Chicago. We are not in a position to say that the picture is exaggerated, though the author cites no corroboration for most of his statements save newspaper articles. Whether he writes throughout from personal investigation or largely from hearsay he does not say. The language he uses is brutally plain, and readers of sensitive nerves would better leave the book alone. What removes such a book, hastily thrown together and unrestrained in its superlatives, to the opposite pole from Jacob Riis’, is the fact that the author sees no bright side, recognizes no progress, proposes no definite and practical remedy. What he says, in effect, is “The city is going to the devil and the devil laughs at the people who don’t know it.” Two classes of people are likely to read the book, and neither class will derive much benefit from it: the morbidly curious will perhaps learn a few new sorts of wickedness to investigate, and the Christian citizen will look in vain for any suggestion “toward the reform of the evils described.

From: The Standard, Volume 47, 1900 (a Baptist Newsletter)

The following selection from the book is actually the very first sentence – and I mean that literally. The book opens with one sentence describing the history of Chicago and what it has come become. Amazing…

Chicago, with its world-wide fame as the most marvelous product of American enterprise among municipal creations in the nineteenth century, with its wonderful growth, from an Indian trading post in 1837 to a modern city of the second size in point of population in the year 1898, with the record of its stupendous strides in reaching its present commercial and financial position among the commanding trade centers in the world, with its strong civic pride, its numerous and admirable religious, educational and charitable institutions both public and private, its cultured development in literature, music, the arts and sciences, with its memorable disaster in the great fire of 1871, its speedy recoupment from that disaster, and its brilliant achievement in the organization and management of the magnificent “White City,” the wide range of the classified exhibits of which covered the entire and progressive contributions of mankind to all that goes to make up the civilization of the age from the earliest period of the commencement of that civilization, this Chicago, grand, philanthropic and patriotic, suffers, as for years it has suffered, from the most extensive and persistent advances in political power, along the lines of their respective crimes, of the criminal classes, until, from the wealthy bribe-giver to the lowest sneak thief and sexual pervert, these classes carry elections, corrupt the corruptible in the Common Council, sway justice in the forum of the lower courts, and govern the police force until it has become a municipal aid to the perpetration of crime.