Category Archives: Hartman Center

Turkey leftovers? Problem Solved.

Need something to do with the turkey leftover from Thanksgiving? One of our 1950s advertising cookbooks put out by the Poultry & Egg National Board had 33 suggestions, including turkey and corn casseroles, turkey macaroni loaf, and something called “Turkey Red Devils.” However, the Home Economic Staff of the PENB Laboratory Kitchen (pictured below) really got creative when it came to putting turkey in salads. Tied for grossest in my book are the Jellied Turkey Pineapple Loaf and the Turkey Mousse. Which wins your vote? Let us know below, or suggest a third choice in the comments!

Turkey Mousse:Cookbook from the Poultry & Egg National Board

  • 4 envelopes unflavored gelatin
  • 1 cup broth
  • 1½ cups boiling turkey broth
  • 2 cups finely chopped or ground cooked turkey
  • 1 cup finely diced celery
  • ¼ cup finely diced sweet pickle
  • ¼ cup finely diced green pepper
  • 1 pimiento, chopped
  • 1 cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
  • ¾ tsp. salt
  • ¼ tsp. white pepper
  • Dash of cayenne
  • 2 to 3 tbsp. lemon juice
  • 1 cup heavy cream, whipped
  • Parsley or celery leaves
  • Deviled egg halves

Soften gelatin in the cold broth. Dissolve thoroughly in boiling broth. Chill until jelly-like. Combine turkey, celery, pickles, pepper and pimiento. Add mayonnaise, seasoning and lemon juice. Add thickened gelatin mixture. Fold in the whipped cream. Taste and add more seasoning if necessary. Pour into a 1½  to 2-quart mold. Chill. Unmold. Garnish with the greens and deviled eggs. 10 to 12 servings. Increase gelatin to 5 envelopes in warm weather.

Jellied Turkey Pineapple Loaf:

Pineapple Layer:

Home economists debating a turkey
"Have some Turkey Mousse. I molded it into a turkey shape." "It's beautiful! Too bad I've already had dessert in the form of a Jellied Turkey Pineapple Loaf!"
  • 1 package lemon gelatin
  • ¾ cup hot water
  • 1 cup pineapple juice, drained from a No. 2 can crushed pineapple (2½ cups)
  • 1¼ cups well-drained crushed pineapple
  • ½ cup grated carrot

Turkey Layer:

  • 1 package lemon gelatin
  • 1 chicken bouillon cube
  • ¾ cup hot water
  • 1 cup cold water
  • Grated rind of 1 lemon
  • 2 tbsp. lemon juice
  • 1 cup finely chopped cooked turkey
  • 1 cup finely diced celery
  • ¼ cup sliced stuffed green onion
  • ½ tsp. salt, or more

Pour hot water over lemon gelatin. Stir until gelatin is dissolved. Stir in pineapple juice, pineapple and carrot. Blend and cool until mixture is thickened. Pour into a 1½ quart mold. Chill until set. Pour turkey layer on top. To make turkey layer: Dissolve the gelatin and the bouillon cube in the hot water. Add cold water stirring constantly. Cool until mixture is thickened. Add remaining ingredients. Season to taste with salt. Pour mixture over top of set pineapple layer. Chill until firm. Turn out of mold on lettuce or other greens. Serve with salad dressing. 8 to 10 servings.

Now that you’ve perused and possibly tried them both, we want to know: Turkey Mousse or Jellied Turkey Pineapple Loaf? Vote now! Or, peruse the Emergence of Advertising in America cookbooks and find your own options for turkey leftovers.

Post contributed by Liz Shesko, Intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

Soup or Salad? Sealtest Suggests Soup.

Sealtest Recipes CoverToday’s Thanksgiving menu comes from a 1940 advertising cookbook published by Sealtest Dairy, which was a division of the National Dairy Products Corporation, a predecessor to Kraft Foods. They marketed their dairy products as having “scientific supervision unsurpassed,” and printed recipes developed in their Laboratory Kitchen. Despite the cover image showing turkey, a creamy soup, and cheesy potatoes, their dairy-heavy Thanksgiving menu had pork as a main dish:

  • Pea Soup Supreme with Cheese Croutons
  • Roast Stuffed Shoulder of Pork
  • Mashed Turnips
  • Buttered Broccoli
  • Hot Rolls with Butter
  • Orange Salad with French Dressing
  • Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream and Ginger
  • Coffee with Cream

Pea soup, you say? Why yes, complete with a quart of milk, butter, and cheesy croutons!

Thanksgiving menu
Sealtest's Thanksgiving menu, featuring pea soup and pilgrims

Pea Soup Supreme with Cheese Croutons

  • 1 cup diced potatoes
  • 1½ tbsp. chopped onion
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 No. 2 can peas
  • 2 tbsp. butter
  • 2 tbsp. flour
  • 1 quart milk
  • Few grains pepper

Combine the potatoes, onions, salt and water in a saucepan. Cover and cook until potatoes are tender. Add the peas and liquid and heat thoroughly. Drain and boil down the liquid to ¾ cup. Press vegetables through a sieve. Melt the butter in a double broiler, add the flour and mix well. Add the milk gradually and cook, stirring constantly until thickened. Add the pureed vegetables and liquid. Reheat. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with Cheese Croutons made as follows: Sprinkle small toast squares with cheese and place under the broiler until cheese is melted and lightly browned. Serve on the soup. Serves six.

You can find more recipes to complete your meal in the Hartman Center’s Emergence of Advertising in America cookbooks!

Post contributed by Liz Shesko, Intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

A Thanksgiving Menu from the Hartman Center

In honor of all the cooking and eating we’re planning to do for Thanksgiving, we wanted to share a few menus and recipes from Thanksgivings past. Over the next couple of days, look for delicious posts drawing from the Hartman Center’s extensive collection of advertising cookbooks.

Today’s recipe comes from a cookbook published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company in the 1920s. The following Thanksgiving menu, the author suggests, is perfect for “the average woman, who must prepare for her parties alone or with one maid to help,” without making everyone “uncomfortable” by becoming “a flushed and worried hostess.” I think we’d all appreciate the help of that maid this year!

  • Assorted canapés
  • Turkey with chestnut stuffing and giblet gravy
  • Baked onions
  • Baked squash
  • Caramel sweet potatoes
  • Mashed potatoes
  • Molded cranberry jelly with celery and olives
  • Orange delight salad
  • Pumpkin pie
  • Caramel Nut Cake
  • Salted Nuts
  • Bonbons

The featured recipe – Caramel Nut Cake (pictured below) – of course contained Calumet Baking Powder. The picture doesn’t look too appetizing, but it sure sounds good. And where can I get one of those mini turkeys?

Caramel Nut Cake

  • ½ cup shortening
  • 1 cup sugar
  • ¾ cup milk
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 cup sifted flour
  • 2 level tsp. Calumet Baking Powder
  • ¾ cup chopped nuts

Sift flour three times with baking powder. Cream shortening, add sugar, gradually add egg yolks and nuts. Add dry ingredients alternatively with milk. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Bake in 2 layers in a moderate oven  (375 degrees F.). Ice with caramel icing, sprinkle the top and sides of cake with chopped nuts.

You can check out more images like these in the Emergence of Advertising in America digital collection. Stay tuned for more recipes later this week!

Post contributed by Liz Shesko, Intern for the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Marketing, and Advertising History.

In the Lab: Scrapbooking for Victory, Part Two

In 1918, the week of November 11-18 was not only a celebration of the end of World War I, but was coincidentally also a week of massive fundraising by the United War Work Campaign to support troops and boost morale until their work was done.  The scrapbook of posters and pamphlets from the campaign was described previously in the post “Scrapbooking for Victory.”

The scrapbook has been undergoing treatment in the conservation lab for the last couple of months.  As a paper conservator, I’ve been collaborating with book conservator Meg Brown to treat the album’s myriad problems, from the damaged binding to the fragile items glued to the pages.  The scrapbook has been a challenge because of its large size and the awkward folding items it contains.  The conservation problems have required hands-on treatment, lots of brainstorming sessions, and ongoing dialogue with curators to understand how the scrapbook will be used.  It’s a popular item with librarians, professors and researchers, and it’s no surprise; it’s a wonderful book!

Before Treatment: Tears to a Poster in the United War Work Campaign Scrapbook

Meg cleaned, consolidated and relined the spine to make the text block stronger, and she used the spine lining to securely attach the text block to the cover.  I’ve been mending tears and flattening creases in the posters and leaflets, many of which have broken at the folds from handling and from insect attack.  A few of the damaged booklets will be lifted from the pages and housed in pockets for easier, safer access.  The largest poster in the book unfolds to 82 x 41 inches (208 x 104 cm), so I’ve had to commandeer extra table space.  It’s especially useful at times like this to have a table on wheels that adjusts in height!

Grace and a Very Large Poster

When the treatment is finished, a storage box will be made, and the scrapbook will be sent back upstairs to the Rubenstein Library for all to enjoy.

For more photos of the scrapbook, and its restorative sojourn in the Conservation Lab, visit the “United War Work Campaign Scrapbook” set on the Rubenstein Library’s Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Grace White, Conservator for Special Collections, as part of our ongoing “In the Conservation Lab” series.

Travel Grant Season is Open!

Wish you were here? We do too! The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for our 2012-2013 travel grants.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History will award up to $1,000 per recipient to fund travel and other expenses related to visiting the Rubenstein Library.

The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists living outside a 100-mile radius from Durham, NC with research projects that would benefit from access to the centers’ collections.

More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website. Applications must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than 5:00 PM EST on January 31, 2012. Recipients will be announced in March 2012.

Standard Gas Stations Billboard Proof.
Standard Gas Stations Billboard Proof. From the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives.

Some of last year’s recipients include:

At the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture:

  • Marika Cifor, a master’s student in History and Library and Information Science at Simmons College, who used the Bingham Center’s lesbian pulp fiction collection for master’s thesis research on the historical relationships of lesbians and prostitutes in the United States, 1869-1969.
  • Jennifer Nelson, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Redland, visited the Bingham Center to conduct research for a book on community health reform movements from the mid-1960s to the present using the Feminist Women’s Health Center Records.
  • Emily Thuma, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley is visiting this week for post-doctoral research to revise her dissertation, “Not a Wedge, But a Bridge”: Prisons, Feminist Activism, and the Politics of Gendered Violence, 1968-1987. (Check out this blog post for details about Emily Thuma’s upcoming talk.)

At the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture:

  • Ira Dworkin, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, The American University in Cairo, for research on African Americans in the Congo, particularly George Washington Williams.
  • Nina Ehrlich, master’s student, Department of History, Colorado State University, for a study of relationships between black and white women during the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Tyler D. Parry, Ph.D. candidate and master’s student, Department of History, University of South Carolina, for dissertation and article exploring slave kinship in the Antebellum South.

At the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History:

  • Leif Frederickson, an independent researcher from Missoula, MT for research on “From Public Pedagogy to Business Branding: The Development of Green Advertising, 1950-1995.”
  • Janet Golden Professor at the Department of History, Rutgers University to research “The History of American Babies.”
  • Laura Phillip, a Ph.D. candidate at the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia for research on “Marketing of the Fair Trade Message.”

Post contributed by Kate Collins, Bingham Center intern.

Haunted Library Screamfest

Date: Halloween, Monday, October 31, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM-1:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Rachel Ingold, 919-684-8549 or rachel.ingold(at)duke.edu

Have you ever wandered around a library’s stacks in the dark? Or wondered what might go bump in an archival box?

Stop by the Rubenstein Library’s Rare Book Room for a special Halloween “eeeks”-ibit and open house. We’ll be dragging out some of the creepiest and most macabre items from the shadowy depths of the library’s vaults—including the thirteen unlucky items below.

This event is free and open to the living and the dead. There will be candy. Lots and lots of candy.

49 Glass Eyeballs
49 Glass Eyeballs. From the History of Medicine Collections.

1. A travel diary written by John Buck, a young American who found himself face-to-face with Bram Stoker (before he wrote Dracula)

2. Letters to Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory describing the 1949 poltergeist case that became the basis for The Exorcist

3. Opera Omnia Anatomico-Medico-Chirurgica by 18th century Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, featuring illustrations of fetal skeletons playing instruments  among “trees” made of veins and arteries and “rocks and stones” that are actually organs, gallstones, and kidney stones

4. An entire box of glass eyeballs (49, to be exact)

5. “Jack the Ripper” and “Cthulhu by Gaslight,” two board games from the Edwin and Terry Murray Role Playing Game Collection

6. Artists’ books Mountain Dream Tarot by Bea Nettles and Femmes Fatales by Maureen Cummins. Tarot cards and pictures of medieval torture devices!

7. Brochures and advertisements for coffins and other funeral-related paraphernalia from the Advertising Ephemera Collection

8.Two copies of Henry Milner’s 1826 melodramatic adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the very first illustration of (the actor portraying) “the Monster”

9. Bela Lugosi’s signature

10. Maps and photographs of the Rigsbee Graveyard (yes, the graveyard in the Blue Zone)

11. Comics Review #1, 1965, which includes  Stephen King’s first published story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,”  from the Edwin and Terry Murray Fanzine Collection

12. Halloween postcards (complete with spooky messages . . . or invitations to Halloween parties) from our Postcard Collection

13. Trixie Belden and the Mystery of the Whispering Witch by Kathryn Kenny, 1980

Which one will give you nightmares come the witching hour?

Halloween Postcard, 1908.
Halloween Postcard, 1908. From the Postcard Collection.

Happy North Carolina Archives Week!

It’s North Carolina Archives Week, a weeklong celebration of North Carolina’s cultural heritage repositories and the wonderful researchers that use them—that’s you!

Stop in, meet your friendly neighborhood special collections librarians, and request some archival collections and rare books—we think you’ll find that the Rubenstein Library has something for everyone! Or check out the North Carolina Archives Week’s website to find more ways to celebrate with cultural history repositories throughout the state.

Need some inspiration? We’ve gathered together a few previously-published blog posts written by our researchers:

We’ll see you in the reading room!

A very fill Rubenstein Library reading room!

Week of Students: Jenny Walters

Today is the first day of a new academic year! Here at the RBMSCL, we’re celebrating this week by taking a closer look at a few of the wonderful student (undergraduate and graduate, Duke and non-Duke) employees who help make this place run. We wouldn’t know what to do without them, and we’d have a lot less fun, too. Thanks, y’all!

Jenny WaltersMy name is Jenny Walters and I am a junior Music major here at Duke.  I have worked in the John W. Hartman Center for Sales,  Advertising, & Marketing History for the past two summers.  This year, in support of the RBMSCL’s upcoming renovation, I got to write up a lot of box lists—basically, inventories of what can be found in each box of an archival collection.  I found a lot of interesting material in these boxes! Some of the funniest things I discovered were job applications for advertisement agencies from the 1950s and 1960s. There were questions such as “Do you have initiative?” and I was surprised to see that many people had answered “no.”  While there is no way that these people would even be considered for a job in this day and age, they were obviously given jobs 50 to 60 years ago.

While I enjoyed discovering everything in all of the boxes, my favorite part of working with the Hartman Center is the advertisements.  I like visually seeing history through the years of advertisements. We even have advertisements from as early as the 1880s!

Two of the most fascinating ads that I worked with this summer were from the 1960s for Seven-Up. The two ads were exactly the same, but one consisted of white people, while the other had black people. The people were in the exact same poses, had the exact same hairstyles, and wore the exact same clothes. Seven-Up wanted to have a broader appeal, but chose to do two ads, reflecting the advertising standards of the day.

Overall, I really enjoy working in the RBMSCL! It’s fun to see all of the different projects people come in to work on and discover something new in the holdings every day.

Post contributed by Jenny Walters, Hartman Center student employee.

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Three

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Illustration from The Story of Bunny Cortex, 1915

The Story of Bunny Cortex, 1915

2010-2011 saw the beginning of a “Literature as Advertising” collection in the Hartman Center: a group of stories, poems, and similar literary works whose primary purpose is the promotion of a product or service.  The collection includes examples from the 1880s to 1950s, featuring such characters as Santa Claus (for the Golden Rule Bazaar of San Francisco), Lewis Carroll’s Alice (selling dairy products), the “Toastie Elfins” (for Post Toasties cereal), and the Pied Piper (for Pied Piper shoes).

From the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

Through July 25th, find more examples from the Hartman Center’s “Literature as Advertising” collection in their exhibit, “Look Boys and Girls! Advertising to Children in the 20th Century.”

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

Previous posts: