Desperation Pie with Sarah Archer

What would you do for a desperation pie? Kitchen correspondent Sarah Archer is here to talk with Sarah about the American food trends that marked the 20th century and how they related to the political and cultural changes of a nation in need of constant culinary inventiveness. They discuss the specialties of the barren Depression Era, the food-related propaganda and rationing of the wartime years, the meteoric rise of post-war disposability, the premade mixes and “exotic” dishes of midcentury housewives, and the special tastes of Soviet Cold War diplomacy. Throughout the episode, they discuss the messages these eras transmitted to the women in charge of the kitchen and draw parallels to our new era of trad wife cooking and carnivore dieting. Digressions include the unique features of Star Trek aliens, why cottage cheese is the Cher of foods, and how ironing sheets can be a potent tool for procrastination. More Sarah Archer:https://www.sarah-archer.com/Design for Dreaming 1956 appliance fantasy film: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/design-for-dreaming-1956/ Midcentury Menu exhibition at the MFAH: https://www.mfah.org/art/exhibitions/midcentury-menu-dining-in-the-atomic-age Meals with a Foreign Flair: https://archive.org/details/mealswithforeign00desm Edited + Produced by Miranda Zickler:http://linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonsterMore You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merch Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  Cottage cheese is just this glowing monolith, you know, doesn't matter whether you acknowledge it or not.

• 0:16Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Right About the Podcast, where we ask, what, what, what do you feel like eating today?

• 0:24Sarah Marshall?

  And Sarah Archer, I lured you on here as our kitchen correspondent to talk with me about American food trends. And we would each kind of just talk about a handful of things that we personally like and are interested in, because I think we're kind of awash in food trends at the moment. And we're kind of at peak food trend, because I feel like, do you feel like every time you're on social media, someone's like, let's try the viral recipe for a thing you've never heard of?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:54Sarah Marshall?

  And you're like, oh, yeah, of course.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Every time.

• 0:55Sarah Marshall?

  A viral recipe I've never heard of.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:58Sarah Marshall?

  And in the olden days, it took at least a few months for something, specifically a recipe, to work its way through the newspaper and word of mouth and so on. And I just, I love trends in food as a way of learning about what people were going through and continue to go through in almost hilariously repeating cycles. And so we're going to talk about desperation pies.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Oh, desperation pies.

• 1:24Sarah Marshall?

  And cake and so forth. Yeah.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I immediately love this. And is it desperation as in like the Great Depression? Or is it desperation in like more of an existential way?

• 1:35Sarah Marshall?

  Here's what's great, right? Is that I've definitely always heard about like water pie and vinegar pie.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:41Sarah Marshall?

  And Ritz cracker pie.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Ritz cracker, mock apple pie.

• 1:44Sarah Marshall?

  Which is, which is mock apple pie. Yeah. Which, which was on the box for Ritz crackers through the 90s, apparently, or until the 90s. Yeah. Which I really liked that they were like, yeah, we know, you want to make the pie.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  You're desperate.

• 1:56Sarah Marshall?

  You need to make the pie. But yeah, I have always heard of them as depression pies, but they are even more deeply within that desperation pies, because I think like the pies I just named were all being made, well, not Ritz pie, because Ritz crackers were invented and are rolled out in 1934, I think. They're a depression cracker through and through. But those pies are like desperation pies that people were also making in the late 19th century and also on the frontier, which is very interesting.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Oh, that is fascinating.

• 2:28Sarah Marshall?

  And one of the themes here is that I guess we're looking at two, two trends that I don't think are as in opposition as people sometimes act like they are, which are desperation and convenience.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  They go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

• 2:46Sarah Marshall?

  They do. And they taste good together frequently. Water pie is basically a mock custard pie where you use water instead of milk or cream. And it is apparently quite good. I realized today that I should have made all these pies so I could tell you about it with more accuracy.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can revisit that.

• 3:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let's go make the pie and come back and discuss. But tell me about what, well, first of all, tell us who you are and your kind of work in the kitchen arena and what you're going to tell us about today.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  So my kitchen obsession is mostly is kind of the middle decades of the 20th century. And I have a special affection for the world of tomorrow and gadgets and kind of American kitchen designers competing with the Soviet Union and kind of designing things sort of at the Soviet Union. And at this very moment, I'm working on a talk because there is a really cool exhibition opening soon at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston that is all about atomic age food. And it involves this like-

• 3:49Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  I know. And it's called-

• 3:52Sarah Marshall?

  Miss Archer.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  I know, I know. So it's called Mid-Century Menu.

• 3:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  That's the name of the exhibition, which is curated by the great Misty Flores, who is a decorative arts historian who normally is like a Baroque and Rococo person. So this is like, she's moving- Far into the future by doing this. And there's a really cool mid-century house that is part of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston campus called the Rienzi House. And it's a sort of post-war luxurious home that was donated. And the thing that's interesting is that the people who lived there collected like 18th century porcelain. So it's this kind of post-war, like 60s house that's full of rococo decorative arts. And then the exhibition is in there. So

• 4:36Speaker 01

  there's like a table full of fake food that Misty Flores had made for this exhibition.

• 4:43Sarah Marshall?

  I want to go. Wait, how long is this for? What are the dates here?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  It is through July 31st, 2026.

• 4:51Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, thank God. All right. We have lots of time.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's so there's bags of time. And the Rienzi House has a historical cookbook collection. So that was kind of the genesis of this, like, you know, like, let's explore sort of, you know, what this would have looked like if you were sort of entertaining in 1960s Houston at that level. I published a book in 2018 called The Mid-Century Kitchen, which is sort of more about, not so much about food, but more about appliances, right? Sort of appliances, design, and the transformation of the kitchen over time.

• 5:21Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you can't have a lot of the food without the appliances.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  That's very true.

• 5:25Sarah Marshall?

  It continues to be true. Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  And a lot of it is about the advertising and kind of mythos around the kitchen. So it's sort of less a literal study of kind of what everybody's kitchen was actually like, and more a survey of like, the ideal kitchen and kind of how that was marketed to American consumers and what it meant.

• 5:44Sarah Marshall?

  And what was the ideal kitchen at that time? And do you have a sense, I guess there's like, our culture is a lot less unified maybe today, but at least from like, you know, from an anecdotal perspective, or whatever kind of sense you have of this, like, is there an ideal kitchen today? Like, what do those look like to you?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  So I have kind of a working theory about this. I would say in terms of the post-war era, so the kitchen historically had been It was a site of work and up until about the 1920s, it tended to be either just things in your dwelling that you use to heat up food and water because you maybe lived in one room or two rooms, or you were wealthy and you had people to do that for you. So that was a room that you didn't go into. So there wasn't really this, the idea of the kitchen as a place where you hang out.

• 6:34Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Is a relatively new idea.

• 6:36Sarah Marshall?

  Well, or I guess in the sense that maybe in the like, if we're talking about, you know, let's say you and I are settling on a farm in Connecticut. And I'm imagining a scenario described in one of my favorite books, More Work for Mother. And we would like basically live in one room probably as like, you know, small farmers and kind of like cottage industrialists and people like, you know, kind of doing a lot of little different kinds of work here and there. And we would probably have like a hearth with a fire with like a big pot or a cauldron, I guess, on top of it. And we would be having some stew probably. I mean, is that fair to say?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  More or less, you might have a cast iron stove. You might have two or three rooms.

• 7:21Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And you might hang out in the room that's most warm, which is also going to be the room where you cook food. So in as much as it's sort of, it's a marker of how class in America has changed and what we expect and want for ourselves. And so there's kind of, the way that kitchen technology was presented to computer, to computers, to.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  The way that these, see, this is, this is the result of AI. The way that kitchen technology was presented to consumers, starting in about the 1930s and then really taking off in the 1950s, was that you could almost jump a couple of notches on the class ladder. And the way that they illustrated this was to show, let's say, what Julia Child would call the servantless cook, this, this sort of new thing in the world, like a person who entertains and is well to do enough to entertain and have the kind of leisure time to do so and the money, but isn't wealthy enough to have staff. And this is, again, this is kind of a new category of person. And so

• 8:23Sarah Marshall?

  And that you're like throwing a dinner party and having and like being your own staff in a way. And this is maybe like part of the consolidation of the middle class in post-war America.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. So this is the consolidation of the middle class. And so the idea that you can then, a lot of the advertising for kitchen appliances, like remember that movie that we we watched in a previous episode, it was a sort of industrial short for, I want to say it was, it was from Motorama, but it was the sort of appliance fantasia where like a masked man

• 8:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  whisks a woman away to show her all the kind of incredible.

• 8:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  You know, it was like frigidaire.

• 9:00Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it was like they were presented to women as if they were cars. And it's interesting because it feels like that the consolidation of the middle class apparently involved women pulling off even more stuff.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yes. Basically that it's like the woman, the protagonist is shown taking up hobbies. And so the implicit message of that is that you have appliances doing stuff for you that you used to have to do. Like you can time your kitchen, set your dishwasher to wash your dishes, kind of leave things to some extent on autopilot and that that will free you up to do things like play tennis or play golf, you know, kind of lounge, read, like sort of do something else and sort of become a lady of leisure in a way that would have been unthinkable for somebody from your background a generation before.

• 9:45Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it's called Design for Dreaming. I found it. It's 1956.

• 9:48Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  It's a promotional short film for General Motors Motorama and it's all futuristic kitchen. But a masked man whisks her away, like, like happens sometimes to all of us.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Ooh, thank you. It sounds very exciting. May I come just as I am?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And shows her the kitchen of the future. And the idea is that things, the kitchen of the future is so advanced that it's kind of like you're entering like a lab at IBM and everything kind of happens automatically for you and cakes appear and it's magical.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Just like a man, you give him a break and you wander up in the kitchen baking a cake. But this was a kitchen like none I've seen. Put a card in the slot and onto the screen pops a picture of just how your dish will look, plus all the ingredients you need to cook.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Then crucially, the woman is freed up to do all this other stuff.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  No need for the bride to feel tragic. The rest is push-button magic. So whether you bake or broil or stew, the Frigidaire kitchen does it all for you. Don't have to be chained to the stove all day. Just set the timer and you're on your way.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Tick tock, tick tock, I'm free to have fun around the clock.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  And so that's the part of it that I find most interesting, the idea that it's unthinkable that you would do other stuff like anyway. Like there's the idea that you would, you know, read books or play tennis or be involved in the PGA or something.

• 11:52Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and also we're seeing her like using a cabinet like a computer, but also a computer that doesn't exist yet because she's inserting a punch card and then like a color image of a cake is coming up. And it's like, you guys were bluffing.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  But you know what's crazy though? I feel like we could do that now.

• 12:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, we should do that now. And we should do it with index cards. People would like it.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I don't know why we're not doing that. It's just, yeah, like, what are we waiting for?

• 12:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And now she's got like a rotating like cake display cabinet, like a diner. I mean, this is basically promising to automate cooking for her.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Right. And now she, no, she's kind of switching off to the leisure area. So tennis.

• 12:35Sarah Marshall?

  Well, she's twirling a golf club like a baton, which seems dangerous.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Which seems odd.

• 12:41Sarah Marshall?

  But also, it's like, she's skipping around really fast, like aggressively leisurizing in different forms of leisure. And it's like, whatever happened to

• 12:50Speaker 01

  To actual leisure.

• 12:51Sarah Marshall?

  Lying around for three hours. Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  I know. It's very active, as leisure goes. It's very like, skippy and yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Jeepers, I'm exhausted.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  The kitchen of tomorrow is calling me. My cake is ready.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  I love her.

• 13:13Sarah Marshall?

  I love her and her bangs.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  I think what's fascinating about the food trends is one of the things I touch on in the book is that there is also a form of almost like virtual travel that happens because there's this vogue for, in air quotes, foreign food, starting in the late 50s and early 60s. And it coincides with the beginning of the jet age.

• 13:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, okay. Tell us about that.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So this is kind of a nifty kind of parallel. So the Boeing 707, not to like,

• 13:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  you know, complicate the vibes by bringing up Boeing.

• 13:48Sarah Marshall?

  No, I love the vibes.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  premieres in 1958. That was kind of the big, high profile new jet. And it basically, it's jet engines that replaced propeller planes. So if you, there was tourism and there absolutely were people going. But if you were to fly, say, from like, New York to London or New York to Paris in, you know, 1952, that would have taken you somewhere between 12 and 15 hours. Jet engines cut that about in half. So what we're used to, where like going from the East Coast of the US to Europe is roughly like six, seven, eight hours, something like that. That starts to be true in late 50s and early 60s. It is still very expensive. So if maybe like, 1% of the population was traveling to Europe by propeller plane and like reenacting the scene from Funny Face, walking down the steps

• 14:35Speaker 01

  of the Louvre every, you know, once or twice a year. Then a few years later, in the jet age, it's still a tiny percentage. It just means that it's kind of more upper middle class people rather than strictly just wealthy people. So, upper middle class people are going to Europe. They are taking vacations in Hawaii, which in 1959 becomes a US state. They are engaging in the fantasy of a nearby paradise like Acapulco. They're, you know, visiting the Caribbean. They, and like, all of this creates an interest and a buzz in the larger sort of American psyche. Because you can experience a version of it, like a mediated version of that, by either going to Disney World or going to a world's fair. And you can do both of those things by, you know, going to New York or going to Florida.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And when you do that, you'll encounter, let's say, you know, the pavilion from Thailand and maybe get your first taste of a version of Thai food for the, you know, the first time ever in your entire life in 1965. Or you can visit Disney World and go to, you know, the Polynesian Resort and experience a kind of fantasia of South Pacific culture, which it needs, we don't need to say this, but of course, it is extraordinarily mediated and like, kind of constructed of stereotypes. But I want to draw your attention to, can I send you some images?

• 15:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Are you familiar with the International Sandwich Gardens?

• 15:58Sarah Marshall?

  Uh, no, I assume that they're not, um, gardens full of sandwich-bearing bushes. But I sure was hoping that they, they were for a sec. I was picturing that.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  That's what I was hoping to. But so this was at the 1964, 1965 World's Fair in Queens. And the Seven, Seven Up Pavilion. And Seven Up was not quite as high-profile as Pepsi. You know, it was kind of a third banana in terms of soda, but-

• 16:25Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, let's be honest, they still are, but what a banana.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Exactly, but it's a great banana. So, take a peek at this image and maybe describe what we're seeing.

• 16:33Sarah Marshall?

  I would love nothing more. Okay, so first, we have a beautiful sign that has a little arrow that says, "Entrance to the Seven Up International Sandwich Gardens." The International Sandwich Gardens. And it's a garden where you eat international sandwiches. And they're all on oval bread. And so they're like the space sandwiches in 2001. A little bit. They're uniform. And so we have the sandwiches represented. And there's like four for each region, which is for totaling 16 international sandwiches, which I think is pretty good.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is incredible.

• 17:09Sarah Marshall?

  Northern Europe, the Pacific,

• 17:13Sarah Marshall?

  the Mediterranean and the Americas. She was one of these four trays, four delicious sandwiches on each. All the seven up you want. 150 per tray plus tax. We should compete with the Russians again. It brought out the best in us, at least in terms of, you know, sandwiches.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least in terms of sandwich culture.

• 17:31Sarah Marshall?

  Well, what do you think of also about like the kind of advances? Cause just with you talking about the Jedi gym, like right between like 1949 and 1969, we first like made these huge leaps in like commercial passenger airlines. And then we went to space and then we went to the moon. And so you can really forgive science fiction writers for being like, the year is 1991. Robots have taken over the planet and only 14 humans remain. This is their story.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it's good. It's good that you brought up space because here is, okay, so I have, this is kind of like, I'm working toward like a grand theory of sandwich logic. So you know how in, are you a Star Trek person? Have we talked about this?

• 18:15Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I haven't watched a ton of Star Trek, but like, I like Star Trek ambulantly and I like being surrounded by Star Trek people. I feel very safe amidst them.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  We're very cozy. And I think one of the things that I have always found really funny and really entertaining about like the original series. And I guess to some extent, like the 90s reboots, less so nowadays, because I feel like they're kind of getting more, they're more far out in terms of the science in a way that's really cool, but it's kind of past the golden age that I would consider to be like, basically you go, you know, you're on a spaceship centuries from now. You go to a distant galaxy and the alien life that you meet are basically like people with like a very severe haircut or like shoulder pads. Do you know what I mean?

• 19:00Sarah Marshall?

  Like, and it's kind of like Humans from the Ren Faire.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:03Sarah Marshall?

  They're like, well, you got your Vulcans and then you got your Romulans who basically look like Vulcans, but

• 19:09Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, well, they have different eyebrows. So they're, you know, they have like a slightly different nose.

• 19:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but we ran out of latex and so they're Romulan.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  So what I love about this, and that if you think about this, let's like, put this together and have it hold hands with the sandwich garden.

• 19:25Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  You are in New York City, you're American, you can point to sort of any point on the globe, and every other place will turn to you and say, yes, we have a version of exactly the kind of sandwich that you're used to, that is made with like, you know, Russian ingredients, or Vietnamese ingredients, or, you know, whatever. And I think it is fair to say that most cultures on earth have a version of like, a hand pie of some kind, like a sort of portable.

• 19:54Sarah Marshall?

  I too have have pies to talk about, yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Right. So we're gonna, we're gonna link this to pies. But, you know, you could, there are pasties, patties, you know, tacos, there are versions of this all over the world. But they are almost certainly not versions of this where everybody on planet earth gets like, bread from an American supermarket that's oval shaped and puts like, the exact same amount of stuff on it.

• 20:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  So in the same way that there's this idea that you can kind of go anywhere in the world, and every alien you meet will sort of speak East Coast English and kind of be more or less humanoid, this idea that you can almost, in air quotes, travel, sort of.

• 20:32Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  And experience of a taste or a version of someplace exotic. But what you're actually experiencing is basically like a creative director who works for 7up, or Better Homes and Gardens, kind of conjuring an idea of something that's Japanese, or, you know, exotic in some other way. And I think that that idea of foreignness, you can sort of, as a commodity, I think that that American access, partially because we've had, thank God, so much immigration in, I'm gonna be on my soapbox just for a second, we have wonderful food from around the world, made by people who are from the world, right? So we're not kind of stuck in, you know, making kind of like, esoteric sandwiches

• 21:14Speaker 01

  that are based on a thought experiment. But so I feel like the travel boom, the sort of version of the travel boom that most Americans could not partake in, because it was still expensive, it's like now, it's still expensive to travel. This was a sort of, instead of being on TikTok or Instagram and kind of looking at people posting from their vacation on the Adriatic, you had this version of it. You could kind of bring, quote unquote, foreign food into your kitchen if you bought a cookbook, like Meals with Foreign Flair.

• 21:42Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and then there's something interesting too about the fact that like, that food like is both like a colonizing agent, right? Where it's like very painful and often profitable how food traditions are like destroyed and consumed.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:58Sarah Marshall?

  And imitated by people who don't understand them. And yet, at the same time, I think there's like this inevitable thing that happens, you know, it happens across all different kinds of cultural lines, but I think it's just a thing that happens with food where it gets adapted by whoever is interested in it based on what they're familiar with and feel comfortable with and what they have at the store and what's available. And so this, this thing where you can say, oh, that's, this is wiping out culture and it's oppressive. And it's like, yeah, but also like, we also just kind of like run home with ideas and don't understand it, but I want to try something out. And that's cute that we do that, too. It depends, I think it depends on, it depends on the motives, I think,

• 22:42Sarah Marshall?

  really. But yeah, these sandwiches are all like, I think anyone from any of these cultures would be like, like, what?

• 22:52Sarah Marshall?

  Because for example, another example, Scotland is sliced clam with minted dressing on Scotch barley bread. And you're like,

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Well, what about a Scotch egg? What about, you know, there's limitless.

• 23:03Sarah Marshall?

  Canada, baked ham with the pickled dressing on cheddar cheese bread. It's like, sure, that's as Canadian as Canada pie.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 23:12Sarah Marshall?

  And then what's on the USA, sliced turkey with cranberry dressing on whole wheat bread, something that no American eats on a daily basis, but that makes me think of Thanksgiving. So yeah, it's fun. It's all over the place.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And it also does, does this kind of visually, it sort of standardizes, um, instead of like an idiosyncratic kind of things around the world sort of appear in different shapes and Forms and might be one, you know, something might be a stew and the next thing might be a hand pie. Everything is a sandwich. So it kind of uses the sandwich as like an organizing principle to give to sort of snap the entire world into a grid where like everything, do you know what I mean? Like you can kind of find, um, yeah.

• 23:54Sarah Marshall?

  To put the whole world between two slices of bread, if you will.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. If you will, if you will.

• 24:00Sarah Marshall?

  And then put an incomprehensible dressing on it. I have a question for you.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:05Sarah Marshall?

  That I feel like I hear this referenced a lot and it sounds like it could be a myth to me. I might've even asked this before. So if I have, I'm sorry. But the idea is that cake mixes were invented. American housewives didn't want to buy them because they didn't feel like they were doing enough. And so they didn't need an egg, but the cake mix people were like, okay, add an egg, then you'll feel like you're baking.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So I have heard this too.

• 24:30Sarah Marshall?

  And I feel like I've heard people repeat that. Is that true?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  I have heard that this is a myth.

• 24:34Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  But that the myth itself is instructive because it kind of shows that there's an attachment to the idea that people need to do this, that like the egg kind of like.

• 24:45Sarah Marshall?

  And that women want to bake.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Ultimately, it's like their biological destiny to bake in like a labor intensive way. So I think that's like, you're talking about the kind of like Betty Crocker.

• 24:56Sarah Marshall?

  Some people were meant to bake. Some people were meant to cook everything in a rice cooker.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  And they.

• 25:02Sarah Marshall?

  See what, what the fuck happens.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:05Sarah Marshall?

  It's usually, I mean, it cooks it, you know, one way or the other.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. Yeah. So I think that's a super instructive example and that it's kind of something that's taken on a life of its own in the culture and that there's like this, what is it that we want to be true? And like, why, why do we want that to be true?

• 25:22Sarah Marshall?

  And what do you think we do want to be true?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Well, I have to say, I think the, the whole sort of like egg mythos and the idea that people want to.

• 25:30Sarah Marshall?

  The egg psychodrama.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  The egg psychodrama, that people want to do things from scratch is people have spent many years making, doing things by hand, making things by hand, cleaning, cooking, et cetera. All that is time that our ancestors would never get back. Right? It's all, you know, we had. Generations of women, particularly before us, who did nothing but that and didn't have a choice. And I think the idea that there's an attachment to it and that people like it, which is not to say that everybody hates it, because I think people actually do.

• 26:00Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I mean, as with everything, some people like it.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Some people do, exactly. The idea that it's kind of a widespread desire is almost a way of making the lives of women of the past seem less sad, because it means that maybe they were, do you know what I mean? Like, maybe they wanted to.

• 26:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, no, I do know what you mean.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Maybe they wanted to forego education and travel.

• 26:22Sarah Marshall?

  No, you're right. God, that's really interesting.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Just a theory. This is just, this is just a hypothesis, if you will.

• 26:29Sarah Marshall?

  No, I believe it, though. I mean, it makes, I mean, and multiple things can be true, you know, or true to different degrees, but that feels accurate to me. And I mean, that, well, okay, so this connects to, can I tell you about one of my cakes?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:43Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so, well, this is really the cake of the hour. And so this begins with Peg Bracken, of course, who we've talked about many times.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Of course, Peg.

• 26:57Sarah Marshall?

  And with 1960s, the I Hate to Cook book.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Oh, so good.

• 27:01Sarah Marshall?

  Which is a book of recipes for women who hate to cook. And it has a very short dessert section, which regrettably is subtitled, Because You're Fat Enough Anyway.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Jesus Christ.

• 27:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Oh, Peg. Oh, no.

• 27:19Sarah Marshall?

  And, you know, I choose to let that one go by, but you don't have to.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. It's, that's a tough one, but it's a different time.

• 27:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but it has a recipe for what Peg Bracken calls cockeyed cake. And so this is this chocolate cake that is deceptively simple. I made it. I was amazed at how it turned out.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Like, so when you, you made it, you, you liked how it tasted and all that?

• 27:46Sarah Marshall?

  No, I loved it, because it, it doesn't have any dairy or any eggs.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 27:52Sarah Marshall?

  And it's this sort of novelty recipe where you mix together dry ingredients and then you poke three holes, you know, in your, like, flour mixture. And then I think into one, you put five tablespoons of oil, some recipes say six. Into one, you put a little bit of vanilla, and into the third, you put some vinegar. And it has baking soda. And so the vinegar and the soda combine and leaven it while it's cooking. And also you can make it right in the pan that you bake it in.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  That's genius. Wow.

• 28:23Sarah Marshall?

  And it is just this like very light, fluffy, moist, delicious chocolate cake that apparently many, many people who've talked about it in newspapers, starting in 1944, which is when recipes for this started turning up in, in newspapers around the country and in Canada. We're like, that sounds wacky. And then they make it and they're like, oh my God, this is so good. And they're like, and they're amazed. And it's like a trick. And so it's more commonly known as wacky cake.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  I'm gonna try it. Now I'm inspired to try it. That's like, it's, it's, it sounds like a miracle.

• 28:59Sarah Marshall?

  It's fantastic. And I think there's an interesting psychological difference between wacky cake and cake mix, because if you make something with a cake mix, which is operating on about the same principle, although it does have an egg, then you're like, oh, whatever. It's just cake mix. But if you make a wacky cake, you're just throwing together a few dry ingredients and then adding a few liquids, mixing it together and baking it. But you've performed a miracle because you put the dry ingredients together.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  It's like you've performed science, like you've done science in your, and it's kind of like the, this incredible kind of chemical reaction that is just with stuff in your pantry. It's kind of cool to be able to do that.

• 29:41Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And so I feel like there's like the need to do that if you want to impress people. Cause like, one of the things that it seems like people have kind of always been reluctant to admit about cake mix is that a good cake mix tastes about the same as like a good homemade cake.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, a cake mix is fine. It's, it's absolutely fine. Yeah.

• 30:03Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, there's like different kinds of cake and many that you can't get with a mix. But if you just, I mean, like, cake is cake.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's also one of those things that I think in a strange way, I mean, I personally. I am not a fan generally of kind of very fancy like flowerless cakes. Like that kind of doesn't really do it for me. Like, I really want like birthday cake. Like, that's what that would be. You know what I mean?

• 30:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I want like the Duncan Hines slash Wacky Cake kind of a cake.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Duncan Hines, like frosting from a tub is like, which, and because I think that's kind of like, as an adult, you don't have that a ton. Like, there's not a ton of scenarios when that, and if you don't have kids, there's not like cupcakes happening all the time. But if I do ever make something like that, it is really good. I'll take that over like a fancy pants, you know, New York Times recipe section cake.

• 30:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. I also wanted to mention, I do really enjoy the New York Times Cooking Section's email subject lines. I've never cooked a single recipe they send me, but it's always like, you open your email, you know, and it's like, nuclear Armageddon. Urgent. Your identity has been compromised. And then the New York Times is like, turkey cutlet razzmatazz. And you're like, oh.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Well, that sounds good. It is very, the New York Times food juxtaposed with-

• 31:27Sarah Marshall?

  Kerry stone clams, or the clam of the hour.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. That like, on the one hand, we're living a life where we have time to contemplate like clam typologies and like leisure. And on the other hand, like, we might be going to World War III. Like, that, both of the, but that, I mean, honestly, that's what the 60s were like, too.

• 31:46Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's a good point. And, and then as now, we were fucking obsessed with our food and our houses.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 31:52Sarah Marshall?

  And that's kind of nice that we're holding hands across time with-

• 31:56Speaker 01

  With people from-

• 31:56Sarah Marshall?

  People who are like-

• 31:57Speaker 01

  In bomb shelters.

• 31:58Sarah Marshall?

  La, la, la. I'm gonna get really into design. If all of this is gonna get blown up, I gotta get it looking perfect.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Gotta get it looking absolutely perfect. And then, or recreating it underground to, for the, for the, you know.

• 32:10Sarah Marshall?

  And to be clear, I'm laughing because I'm doing exactly that. I'm not not doing that. That's not a laugh of duration. That's a laugh of, oh, my God, I'm doing that same thing with my life. And so, well, okay, so the Wacky Cake starts showing up in 1944.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Oh, so it's wartime. It's, it's wartime, it's like rationing. Okay.

• 32:28Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly. And, well, tell us a little bit about that.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, my understanding is that wartime food was designed to, basically, it was a lot of workarounds. It was kind of make do, not unlike the Civil War, too. There were sort of like innovations and, you know, ways to kind of like use a cut of meat that you wouldn't ordinarily and you could save up your ration coupons to buy, you know, a piece of steak. And but it was sort of not the kind of thing that you could have all the time. My dad was old enough to remember, he was a little kid during World War II, so he actually remembered the food.

• 33:03Sarah Marshall?

  What does he remember about that?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  So he remembered having something called salmon loaf, which, I mean, it was, he described as being kind of like spam, but it was made out of salmon. And I don't know whether that's something that you could buy off the shelf or something that my grandmother made. But the idea was that you're kind of using like every little bit and kind of gelatinizing it and making it into a sliceable entity.

• 33:24Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it does seem that like, I mean, because you have this kind of, you know, you have depression recipes and then also wartime recipes where meat and sugar and fats were being rationed and you can have like a limited amount, you know, per household. And so there's a lot of meat stretching recipes and a lot of like, you know, using breadcrumbs or using oatmeal.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Using a starch of some kind.

• 33:45Sarah Marshall?

  Or potato. I mean, and also like, you know, you kind of like, you need breadcrumbs for meatballs. So it makes sense because kind of like, you know, upping the starch quantity or the ratio.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  You're kind of changing the ratio. And that basically, and I think, I don't believe they had a victory garden. I could be wrong about this because I do remember actually my grandmother, who grew up on a farm, saying that she didn't really understand why anyone would grow something that you couldn't eat. Like she didn't really understand flower, flower gardens. Like she like, just didn't, it wasn't anti, just didn't understand it. You know, it was a lot of like shelf stable stuff and macaroni and cheese figured, beefaroni, like a lot of the sort of stuff that we now associate with like, like young kid food is my understanding is that it was kind of perfected as a genre during the war.

• 34:35Sarah Marshall?

  And also I imagine in part due to advancements in, you know, food preservation technology due to the need. Needs of the troops in World War II. Yeah. And I think like, I think I learned in a car in San Diego that canned food was innovated due to wartime needs.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Interesting. Well, that's also, there's a great book Combat Ready Kitchen, which we can link to in the notes, that is a whole history of like food innovations in wartime, kind of throughout history.

• 35:02Sarah Marshall?

  That sounds great.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Anastasia Marx de Salcedo. I wanted to double check this to make sure I was getting it right. So Combat Ready Kitchen is great. It's like super fascinating, kind of a lot of the innovations in preservation, packaging, you know, kind of understanding what people needed in terms of nutrition, all of that stuff. And so that eventually filters into, I mean, a lot of the technology that we have even now for keeping things shelf stable originates in that time.

• 35:29Sarah Marshall?

  That's fascinating. Well, I have a couple of things to show you.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 35:35Sarah Marshall?

  Based on our adventures in Wacky Cake, because one of the things about it that you might remember is that it calls for only about five tablespoons of oil. And so something that, you know, people who aren't scholars of World War II because they read the Molly books might not know is that during World War II, people were also instructed to collect fat.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:00Sarah Marshall?

  And donate it to wartime needs because it was.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It was useful.

• 36:05Sarah Marshall?

  I have a short produced by Disney that's going to explain it.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 36:10Sarah Marshall?

  Wait, okay. First, I'm showing you a poster.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 36:14Sarah Marshall?

  So tell me what you see there.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Okay, I am seeing save waste fats for explosives. Take them to your meat dealer. There's a hand, like a manicured hand, holding a sort of cast iron skillet, pouring what looks like rendered fat into an inferno from which it looks like bombs are exploding.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Basically, so from the kitchen to the battlefield, like in two easy steps. Take them to your meat dealer. That is, that is an interesting command.

• 36:49Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly, exactly. Okay. And then I sent you a link to this short and we're going to watch this together.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  So out of the frying pan and into the firing line.

• 37:03Sarah Marshall?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 37:05Sarah Marshall?

  A Walt Disney production in Technicolor. Distributed and exhibited under auspices of the war activities. All right, it cut to some really beautiful looking bacon and eggs, which Minnie is making.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  And Pluto, who is smelling the beautiful bacon smell.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Pluto, how would you like some delicious hot bacon grease?

• 37:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't it weird to realize that Minnie is an immortal being?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And who has a pet?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Don't throw away that bacon grease.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Housewives of America, one of the most important things you can do is to save your waste kitchen fats: bacon grease, meat drippings, frying fats. We and our allies need millions of pounds of fats to help win the war.

• 37:51Sarah Marshall?

  Pluto is not pleased.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  For fats make glycerin, and glycerin makes explosives.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Every year, two billion pounds of waste kitchen fats are thrown away.

• 38:02Sarah Marshall?

  Those idiots.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  And what's cool is it kind of looks like a Norman Bel Geddes Patriot radio. The radio that's in the cartoon.

• 38:11Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah, I see, yes. I mean, the visuals are really good.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  A skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Meat dripping, sink axes, warships.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  I love how literal it is.

• 38:29Sarah Marshall?

  Fat dripping off meat and turning into an actual bomb.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  And just exploding a German ship.

• 38:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Your pound of waste fat will give some boy at the front an extra clip of cartridges.

• 38:54Sarah Marshall?

  And then we see a picture of Mickey Mouse, who is...

• 38:56Speaker 01

  At war.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Do you care what the bacon grease, Pluto?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Pour your waste kitchen fats in a clean, wide-mouthed can. That's right, not a glass jar or paper bag. Please strain the fats through a kitchen sieve.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  So this thing of like, collecting fat in a coffee can feels very familiar. Like this is something people did for ages.

• 39:22Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, then it's also just something you would do to have, you know.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Have fat around.

• 39:26Sarah Marshall?

  Fat. Except for cooking needs and such.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And also not put it down the drain because it's not good for plumbing.

• 39:32Sarah Marshall?

  Not even for household bomb making, right? Or even just to throw away, just, you know, eventually all in one unit.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Oh, coins. Can be paid in sausage.

• 39:44Sarah Marshall?

  Pluto is now happy about the whole war effort and he's flying a little American flag off of his tail.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Save waste fats to make explosives. Look for the official insignia in your meat dealer's window.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Oh, this is incredible. Technicolor.

• 40:05Sarah Marshall?

  We gotta go to the official fat collecting station.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 40:09Sarah Marshall?

  The end. So anyway, these are the circumstances under which the wacky cake was born.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  So this is fascinating. So that this explains exactly why you needed to kind of find, like, let's find some ingredients that they don't need to sink Axis boats.

• 40:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Specifically. And I guess vinegar and baking soda were.

• 40:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and in this case, you can use vegetable oil, which is also what you, what you use generally when you're baking with a cake mix.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. What a beautiful thing. It's really, and I love the colors. It's very like, what is technicolor?

• 40:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I mean, you gotta have your war propaganda and technicolor, or else what's the point of all the innovation? But it's, I mean, it is, it's interesting to think about American food trends as something shaped by scarcity, because I think if you look at American history, it does seem like... There are these almost unceasing waves of boom and bust.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:03Sarah Marshall?

  And it seems like maybe some of the most enduring inventions and the ones that we end up liking the most are the ones that people come up with when they don't have access to the things that they're used to, or when we have to innovate, or when we have to figure out how to make something out of, out of almost nothing.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it kind of, it spurs a kind of inventiveness and kind of out of the box thinking that is unusual.

• 41:24Sarah Marshall?

  Would you like to talk about TV dinners?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I can.

• 41:27Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm thinking of like the international frozen meals thing that you sent me.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Oh, do you mean Foreign Flair?

• 41:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I mean Foreign Flair.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Okay, because that's not frozen. Actually, could you want to look at the cover of that?

• 41:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  So here's the cover, and I chose an interior spread. And this is published in 1963, which is the same year that The French Chef premieres on WGPH Boston, interestingly. And Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks are, like, they're in every secondhand store you've ever been in. Like, there's the kind of red and white check-covered binder cookbook that's the standard. And then they, they published a ton of the, like, dozens and dozens of these kind of more slim volumes that were, you know, like hors d'oeuvres, or desserts, or Christmas cookies, or meals for two. And it was, interestingly, they're not individually authored. So I did a little digging into this, and the Better Homes and Gardens sort

• 42:26Speaker 01

  of creative office in Des Moines, Iowa, and part of Meredith Publishing, were just cranking these out. And I think there's a case to be made that they're almost more like decorating magazines than they are cookbooks.

• 42:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which certainly happens today as well.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  It happens absolutely today. Because like, describe what we're seeing on the cover with Meals with a Foreign Flair.

• 42:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And, okay, so Meals with a Foreign Flair, it has the title in big letters and like this big, I would say, like, not probably technically technicolor, but technicolor feeling, like very vivid hues.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, photo on the front of this kind of buffet laid out of the foods that you're going to be able to make in here presumably, most of which do look pretty bland and like broad interpretations on. And also, it's like, Foreign, foreign flair. What flair? Oh, you know.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:19Sarah Marshall?

  Just foreign. 100 recipes from 18 countries, main dishes, desserts, breads, salads, prized souvenirs from around the world. And then you open it, you've sent me a couple of pages. It says around the world, a la carte, Italy, Sweden, India. And it's again, like lovely pictures of these like fairly ambitious spreads that make sense as something that's being sort of written in haste recipe wise.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:45Sarah Marshall?

  And it feels like you would, it makes sense to me that you might have it kind of out as a way of showing the kind of person who you were in that you were, you know, interested in a new type of cooking.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Also, do you remember the Mad Men episode where Betty Draper does like an international buffet?

• 44:03Sarah Marshall?

  I have not seen Mad Men.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  You haven't seen Mad Men?

• 44:06Sarah Marshall?

  No, I know.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  It's so good. So there's a season, okay, so the episode is called A Night to Remember. This is if you want to get into it. It's season two, episode eight. And Betty Draper, for context, is a very glamorous, like Bryn Mawr educated, pretty former model who's married to our protagonist, Don Draper, the ad man. And they have a house in Osning, I think. And so there's a cocktail party or a dinner party in which she decides to basically cook as though from this cookbook. It's there's, I think there's sort of Dutch beer, Heineken, there's, you know, different kind of, I think she makes rumaki. So there's a kind of like around the world sort of set of hors d'oeuvres and foods.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And it turns out that this, she has unknowingly shopped at the local supermarket where Don's ad agency was doing an experiment, sort of putting different kind of like international foods in key areas like end caps to see if like educated consumers would do. And so she was the exact kind of like client that they were imagining and it worked. And so then she gets, she's furious at him because she feels humiliated because everybody at the party is like, oh, ha, ha, ha, you're experimenting on your wife. And in fact, I mean, essentially they don't mention this cookbook, but this cookbook basically is like this episode, the book. And it's more about signaling to your guests that you have gone, you know, maybe 1962

• 45:31Speaker 01

  or three, you have leapt beyond fancy dishwasher and nice vacuum cleaner to exotic, imported, foreign. And she's somebody who graduated from a Seven Sisters College. So there's this kind of aspirational idea that this, you know, it's a housewife who's really more like an educated hostess.

• 45:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And also that you may no longer be in the workforce, but you're like still of the world.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. You are so you're in your house, but you are of the world. And so the cookbook allows you to, and again, the cookbook is very similar in content and kind of graphic design and tone to like the Sandwich Garden. Like it's, it's more sophisticated than the Sandwich Garden, but it's kind of similar to, let's say, like the World's Fair food pavilions where you can sample, you know, tapas and Thai food. And, and it's kind of sanitized in some way for an American audience. And also it's as much the around the world as a la carte spread that we looked at. It's using very attractive serving pieces, like the one from Sweden. There's this kind of cool mid-century ceramic bird on a stick and

• 46:38Speaker 01

  a, like a plate full of very nice looking apples and then meatballs and beans in black and white striped casseroles, which are very chic, on teak trivets and little trays.

• 46:49Sarah Marshall?

  Right. They're beautiful place settings and it's like a stage managed kind of a thing.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. So this is very much like you're in the department store and it's, you know, new chic fondue pots from France, like being sold on a version of foreignness that's more about kind of stage managing than actual, you know, exploring.

• 47:11Sarah Marshall?

  Pardon me, I'm having a Ritz cracker.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  That sounds so good. Is there, does the box have recipes on it for like mock apple pie or like rumaki or anything?

• 47:23Sarah Marshall?

  Not anymore, but it should.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  It should. Yeah. And is mock apple pie just basically like solid Ritz crackers?

• 47:29Sarah Marshall?

  And sugar? No, you make like a mixture. Here, let's find a recipe, but you gotta make it.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  So Depression era mock apple pie uses Ritz crackers, lemon juice, cream of charred to perfectly mimic the taste of apples. Sugary syrup poured over whole crackers creates a soft fruit-like filling. So that those, so the Depression version has no fruit. It is purely sugar lemon. And juice, cream of charter cinnamon and Ritz crackers to kind of mimic the look and feel and taste of pieces of apple. So that's, that's rough. Like that, that sounds like it might be kind of rough, but a Ritz cracker crust. I mean, I mean, maybe it's good. I don't know.

• 48:07Sarah Marshall?

  It's, it's supposed to be very good. And I mean, the thing with these recipes too, is I think that they wouldn't have caught on in the way that they did if, if they weren't good.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  That's a good point because people do still make it.

• 48:18Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe not to everyone's standards, but I mean, I want to make it.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  It's kind of like when, if you, when you were a kid, did you ever have those like Stouffer's spaghetti and meatballs frozen, like the, the frozen dinners?

• 48:29Sarah Marshall?

  No, but like we all have some version of that, you know?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  And it's those would just, there would be just, I would sort of say like your Stouffer's spaghetti and meatballs. It is not what you would expect or, or recognize as spaghetti and meatballs in a restaurant, or if somebody made it for you. Like it's its own strange entity, but it's not bad.

• 48:49Sarah Marshall?

  Let me read to you a little bit from MFK Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, which was published in 1942 originally and is about kind of this question of how do you, how do you feed yourself and others when things are scarce, basically?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:05Sarah Marshall?

  And she writes, this is an introduction when it was reissued in the 50s. There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the 20s. They will feel until their final days on earth, the kind of culinary caution. Butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance, not lightly to be wasted. Meats too, and eggs and all the far brought spices of the world take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. And I feel like that also brings up one of the merits of box cake mix, which is that it's shelf stable and it's often extremely cheap. And if it's not cheap, it goes on sale.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:50Sarah Marshall?

  You know, because you can still buy a box cake mix for a dollar and you don't have to add in the egg.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. And it won't go bad.

• 49:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  So I think for people who, this is something I remember noticing a lot about like spending time with my grandmother, who was an adult during the depression, is that this is my dad's mom, that She would do things like rinse and reuse paper towels and she didn't have to. Like she was, she was not like paper towel deprived.

• 50:17Sarah Marshall?

  But what if all the paper towels go away tomorrow again?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. What if they all go away and we're collecting fat for bombs? And there's, you know, it just, I think it was so ingrained from like, living through two world wars and the depression. It was just kind of like, this is how things are. And she just sort of was, she was mindful of materials in a way that I would say my mom and I are less so, only because we grew up in the post-war world. And so there's a kind of disposability that like, if, you know, if you're sort of not including the environmental movement and the idea of kind of like reduce, reuse, recycle, but kind of the era before that. There is a kind of cavalier-ness about, you know, tinfoil. It's like, like there's, you know, there's always going to be more tinfoil. You don't have to worry about it.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  But there's, I think for people in like MFK Fisher world, if you have been deprived of things like that, you, it, it changes you in some way.

• 51:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And also, you know, to, to get back to desperation pies, like I think the general definition is that they don't have fruit in them. They're made with shelf staple items, usually without dairy or eggs either. Or you might have like, you know, one of those things to make up for like a lack of fruit or ingredients generally. So you also have like the sugar cream pie.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Like something tart?

• 51:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Or the vinegar pie, which is like using vinegar as a substitute for the kind of tart fruit flavoring in fruit pies. Or like, for example, maybe a rhubarb pie. And I think it's like humbling how well these things work and how easy it is to like, not fully trick our taste buds, but like a lot of these really like dirt cheap foods often hit the spot in a, in a profoundly great way.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Mac and cheese. My God. I, I kind of, what I often perceive on social media is that there's a kind of like authenticity arms race a little bit. And that there's a kind of desire to find like the most obscure, the newest, the most authentic, the most highly specific, you know, restaurant that sort of serves. Food from a particular region of Cambodia and it's very accurate and they only seat 16 people.

• 52:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, because food is always going to be a status symbol in like as many ways as there is it can be. Because you know what's interesting about food too is that like innovation will unceasingly happen because everyone has to keep eating something multiple times per day. And also it's it's going to take on more symbolic freight than it can possibly carry because again, everyone has to relate to it every day of their lives and whether you they have it or not, you know? If you have it, you're thinking about it. And if you don't have it, you're thinking about it more.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Right. You're thinking about it more. Exactly.

• 52:57Sarah Marshall?

  Let me read to you a little bit about pie.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I love hearing about pie.

• 53:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so this is from a book called Midwest Pie. This is from the introduction, which is by Phoebe Magri. In these early colonial days, pies were practical foods. They created their own gravy and could be a complete meal on their own. They also gave bakers an easy way to use odds and ends, leftovers and dried produce. It was the perfect culinary standby for Yankees who liked to think of themselves as thrifty, pragmatic and full of common sense. By the mid 19th century, pie had become much more than a practicality. It was a favorite breakfast of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and some people ate it three times a day. One British journalist visiting the East Coast wrote that, quote, "An unholy appetite for pie

• 53:44Sarah Marshall?

  works untold woes in the American public, thus cementing the new country's love for pie as a nationalist snub of the stuffy Brits." Rudyard Kipling, who lived outside Brattleboro, Vermont between 1892 and 1896, somewhat derisively called New England "the great pie belt" due to the dish's prominent position in the region. As more Europeans settled in the Midwest, they found that local ingredients like chok cherries, pomegranates and black walnuts could all be incorporated into pie at will to make something delicious. In 1851, a Norwegian immigrant living in Beloit, Wisconsin penned a letter home that read, "Strawberries, raspberries and blackberries thrive here. From these, they make a wonderful dish combined with syrup and sugar, which is called pie."

• 54:28Sarah Marshall?

  I can tell you, that is something that glides easily down your throat. They also make the same sort of pie out of apples or finely grown meat with syrup added, and that is really the most superb. By the early 20th century, the dessert suffered some from the emergence of the nutritional science field. It turns out that eating pie three times a day might not be the surest path toward long-term health. But Americans weren't able to kick their addiction so easily. According to food writer Matt Siegel, a writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel weighed in on the debate over the national flower by arguing that Americans shouldn't be wasting time discussing plants when pie could easily serve as a national emblem.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Wow. That is fascinating. And it also kind of underscores the idea that pie as we know it is very much an American dessert, which I forget.

• 55:15Sarah Marshall?

  And also a very utilitarian food and something that historically you could eat at any time of day, which I think is empowering.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:21Sarah Marshall?

  I think if your pie window is only after dinner, that really decreases the amount of pie that you can eat and thereby the amount of pies that you can make.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Whereas if it's a three times a day food and a snack.

• 55:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I think the basic mechanics of a pie, we're in kind of sandwich territory here. There's something really universal about it. But yeah, the idea of it being, I think, based on this argument too, or this presentation of history, maybe a typically American food, because it's so versatile, it can be adapted. You can put any ingredient in there, or you can put nothing in there. You have the famous water pie where you pour in water and then add in your ingredients, which is like flour and some sugar and mix it together. And you bake it and it makes a custard. And yet it seems like you just baked water in a crust.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:10Sarah Marshall?

  You know, these like magic trick desserts that seem to have nothing in them. That seems to define American food more than abundance. And yet I think like, as you're talking about the 60s, it feels like we also have these phases of reaction against past desperation. We're like, what? No, no one here has ever been hungry. We're eating food from every country that has ever been.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  And part of that also, don't forget, is Cold War propaganda. Like there were the two. Do you know about the American and Soviet exhibitions that happened in New York and Moscow in 1959? That one, the one in Moscow was the site of the kitchen debate and the one in New York had like a Soviet fashion show and kind of a typical Soviet kitchen.

• 56:47Sarah Marshall?

  I bet you told me a little bit about this before, but tell us. Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  And so essentially, like, a big piece of this was Like sports, you know, each side trying to position their way of life as a kind of triumph of their system. And both countries where God knows, the Soviet Union certainly, was, you know, very well acquainted with famine. So there's a kind of an emphasis on the American side of sort of what all this technology can do for you as an individual housewife. And the Soviet design, the Soviet exhibition was much more geared toward sort of what our system can do for society. Like it was kind of, so it was sort of competing visions of abundance that had different political ends.

• 57:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think it's revealing kind of what we see food as being for. And certainly as American individualists, we will use it as a marker of class identity a lot of the time as well. I mean, what do you think of my conclusions here? I guess that my argument maybe is that American food is fundamentally defined by inventiveness and desperation. And also that we keep sort of like going through the same cycles and not really being aware because of course now everyone's trying to stretch meat again. And we're sort of, I don't know, falling into these historical cycles where nothing is really that new, but that also is what makes it fun and what makes it able to connect

• 58:14Sarah Marshall?

  us with people throughout history who have also been trying to feed themselves and their families.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I would add to that, that food is politically charged at every turn.

• 58:26Sarah Marshall?

  Oh God, yeah. Especially lately.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Lately. So we've got all the like cuckoo, all this like Maha ridiculousness. So we've got the beef tallow people. We've got, you know, that's, that's now. And before that, it was, you know, fat is terrible, but carbs are great. And now I guess fat is great, but carbs are terrible. Or I don't know what, what cycle we're in. And, you know, or it's the Civil War, or World War One, or it's the invention of breakfast cereal, and the idea that like exercise and pressed grains are good for you. And, you know, all sorts of different theories about what people should be eating and the food pyramid. So there's, it's kind of like the government and society at large will sort of not leave anybody alone when it comes to food. But it's also food famously and understandably is not something that you can do alone. Like it's, to feed this many people.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  It, you know, eight billion in the world and I don't know, it's like 340 million in the US, I think. It must be a group effort on some level. And, you know, this kind of, I think it gets all sort of balled up with like ideas of gender and strength and sort of beauty and, you know, all that stuff, interpreted differently in different eras. And so nowadays, I think there's, there's a way in which, like, I'm old enough to remember in the 90s, when everybody was focused on fat, that something like, you know, pasta primavera, you know, pasta and vegetables would be considered like the perfect thing for a woman to eat. And now that would be considered, you know, in kind of like trendy food world would be considered decadent because pasta is carbs and it's, you know.

• 1:00:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, we just kind of keep going back in these loops.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  We keep going into kind of, there's different versions of what it means.

• 1:00:07Sarah Marshall?

  And not to get too far into like the more extreme ends of what's going on today, but like, I do find the carnivore diet thing so fascinating and disturbing. And one of the things I always come back to is this idea that like, well, ancient man was eating all this butter. And it's like, we wouldn't have butter if we hadn't had agriculture and like domesticated and created like the cow as we know it. And like, where was all this butter coming from that ancient man was supposed to be eating? And I realize that that's not really the point. It's just like creating a frame story so people can eat butter because they always wished that they could. I don't know. You can just, you can eat butter, you can just eat butter and it doesn't have to be a philosophy. It's not, you can just like, you can just eat it.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  And that's also kind of like, like protein creep. Like there's kind of a scope creep happening with like protein is now.

• 1:00:56Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that really is like one of the huge food trends of today. And I haven't researched this, so I'm not gonna like, yeah, opine too much, but it, but it is like, it's something that, you know, things become trends for many reasons, but I think partly this seems like very convenient for like the dairy and meat industries.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  It sure does.

• 1:01:14Sarah Marshall?

  Which are becoming, you know, too expensive and who can maybe hold hands with some people who are active in conservative politics who can say, right? And meanwhile, just, you know, you could also try and get enough fiber. And it's interesting how also in this like push for protein, where we're putting protein in water now.

• 1:01:35Sarah Marshall?

  I'm seeing very little advertising for lentils. Where is Big Lentil? Lentils have, I think, an equal amount of protein and fiber.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Oh, ton. No, they're like, like incredible. Yeah.

• 1:01:45Sarah Marshall?

  Show me Big Lentil. They're so small that Big Lentil would only be medium.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it kind of, there is a strange way in which this, it reminds me a little bit of, there's a display, I think you can see, you can see images of it, if not actual film footage, of Norman Bel Geddes' design for, it was actually the original Futurama that was at the 1939 World's Fair. And this was basically a kind of future occupied by this huge system of highways. And it was sponsored by General Motors. So it's kind of like, it's this idea that kind of like, we're imagining, they could have imagined a sponsor-free, you know, all buses and trains future, or all sort of public transportation, but no. And so it's kind of, and I think there's

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  a way in which sometimes if we're, like, if we're not looking critically at who's paying for something, it can feel like, oh, this is a cool idea. Like, the future is going to be this particular kind of convenience, and everybody's going to love it.

• 1:02:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And we're going to take away these forms of labor.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Nobody needs the bus. Exactly.

• 1:02:54Sarah Marshall?

  And then, of course, now we're in the, like, trad wife era of you, and as you and I have talked about in the past, and something that I think we see, like, throughout the history of homemaking technology is that it then becomes a flex to, like, take on more, raise your standards. Like, cakes, as we know them today, with, like, refined flour and a very kind of, like, smooth and fluffy texture have only been with us since the 19th century, when flour technology improved enough. And there's always going to be an arms race of the American housewife, or of the American woman, and this idea that you need to keep perfecting yourself as the technology gets more advanced, in a way. And I will just say, for anyone who needs to hear it, do less.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Do less. Always do less.

• 1:03:36Sarah Marshall?

  You know, it's like, if you don't enjoy doing it, then see if you can get out of doing it.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  That is a great rule of thumb for so many things.

• 1:03:48Sarah Marshall?

  And of course, there are some things that we need to do, but there's like a lot else that gets drilled into us as something we need to do. And then you think about it, you're like, I don't need to be doing this. And possibly no one does. It used to be normal to iron your sheets, or at least not unheard of.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Can you imagine? I used to do that. I used to iron my pillowcases. This is something I used to do.

• 1:04:08Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, look, if I were really avoiding a work thing or an email, I might iron pillowcases. But I don't even own an iron, so I would have to go buy one. Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Speaking of which, have you seen any episodes of The Testaments?

• 1:04:21Sarah Marshall?

  No, I haven't.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Do you know about this? So I did not realize this was coming. And then I just, I stumbled upon an ad for it. And it is the TV show adaptation of The Testaments, which is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. So it's based on a novel, and it's about like, the prep school for future wives. And it captured something. So this is something really interesting. I kind of like lost patience with The Handmaid's Tale. Eventually, I kind of felt like I just went on for too many seasons, and I was tired of like, sort of looking at-

• 1:04:51Sarah Marshall?

  As most TV does, unless it goes on for only two seasons, because it's on Netflix. Yeah.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. But there is something that I'm now realizing Margaret Atwood was very prescient in capturing, which is that the Gilead worldview is, on the one hand, sort of evangelical authoritarian and kind of, you know, extremely normative in terms of gender hierarchy. And it's also like beef tallow, people. Like, there's no plastic, like, because Gilead is green, right? So because there's this obsession with fertility. And I remember kind of first encountering that novel at some point, you know, maybe 20 years ago, and thinking, oh, that's weird. Because those two things never go together. And here we are. In 2026, and they go together, you know?

• 1:05:37Sarah Marshall?

  And we made it.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Like, she predicted Ballerina Farm like 40 years before it happened.

• 1:05:41Sarah Marshall?

  I always knew Margaret Atwood had it in her.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  She really did. Yeah, no, she's really impressive.

• 1:05:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and it does feel like this sort of, I don't know, maybe the conclusion that I'm coming to talking about food with you, and this is just, I mean, these are just sort of, you know, some things that we find interesting. It's by no means attempting to be at all comprehensive, but give us enough time, we'll get there. But I think that what I'm seeing in this is that we try to use food to define ourselves, and yet it defines us more and in more ways than we're not aware of at the time than than we can ever write over, you know, with the things that we're trying to do intentionally. And I think that that's kind of great, because it's this this form of history that is there waiting to be understood, and you also get to eat it.

• 1:06:28Sarah Marshall?

  And what do you think about, I mean, of course, everything is political, but just in like, I don't know, the smaller food trends of today, have you, are there any that you're like, oh, I'm doing a trend?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  So there are times when I've been kind of leaning more into plant-based stuff, like I've kind of gotten, as I have matured, I have

• 1:06:49Sarah Marshall?

  Because of the depression?

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  It's because, it's because we're living through the Great Depression. Well, it's because, it's partially because I'm sort of reevaluating my relationship with dairy, and I am a, I'm like a yogurt freak. Like, if I had one food to eat the rest of my life, like, I'm like a yogurt, like fanatic. And so I've discovered lactose-free yogurt. If you are a person of forty-something experience, this may also be for you. But and I kind of, I've kind of gotten into like, like yogurt fruit smoothies and stuff. So I think I don't like thinking of them as meal substitutes. This is more something that I kind of, when I want like a frozen treat, I have like a frozen fruit and lactose-free yogurt smoothie, which sounds like desperation food, but it's actually great.

• 1:07:32Sarah Marshall?

  But that's the thing, a lot of us have desperation foods that are just like amazing.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  They're incredibly, and you can put like frozen bananas in, it's like, almost tropical, you know, there's endless, infinite variations on it. So if you think of like, the blender as an organizing principle, the same way that you do a sandwich, then like, the possibilities are truly endless. So it's fruit, it's, you know, you can do like, like a different substrate. And so I don't know if I would say that's a trend. I'm not really like quite cool enough to be on trend. I wouldn't. I don't know if I would make videos about these, but maybe I should.

• 1:08:02Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I find whenever I find fail myself on a trend, I feel a little bit embarrassed because I feel like I'm trying to emulate the cool kids, you know? But, okay, so speaking of yogurt, I have this figure, this is from an old NPR piece. So the average American in the 70s consumed about five pounds of cottage cheese and about two pounds of yogurt.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:22Sarah Marshall?

  And then those numbers flipped in the 80s.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  That's so interesting.

• 1:08:26Sarah Marshall?

  And in 2010, the average American was eating like two pounds of cottage cheese. And do you want to guess how many pounds of yogurt per year?

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Like 10?

• 1:08:35Sarah Marshall?

  14 pounds of yogurt per year.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Wow, I believe it. That's a lot of that is me. That's a lot of that's that data is me.

• 1:08:41Sarah Marshall?

  And so the, and this article is from 2013.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Sarah Marshall?

  I think a lot of that is you.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Sarah Marshall?

  You're, and you're canceling out some other people.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Eating cottage cheese.

• 1:08:50Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't have, have figures for the cottage cheese versus yogurt numbers at present. But cottage cheese has made a huge comeback because it has protein in it and

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so good. Oh, my God.

• 1:09:01Sarah Marshall?

  And it's very good. And it's also cheaper than meat. But it's also, it's just funny to me, too, that any, that a food can be a trend in a way. Because it's like, it's cottage cheese. It's just kind of there. It's waiting for its moment. And then the moment comes and passes and it just waits for it to come back.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:16Sarah Marshall?

  Share.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Like, it's such a kind of basic thing. It's like saying that, like, getting up in the morning and doing stuff is a trend. Like, it's just like, like, reality. It's like, have you heard this new thing about, like, living life?

• 1:09:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Cottage cheese is just this glowing monolith, you know, just like

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were just waiting to discover it.

• 1:09:33Sarah Marshall?

  Doesn't matter whether I acknowledge it or not.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I also kind of think like, you know, when, when you get to a certain age, like, you like what you like.

• 1:09:40Sarah Marshall?

  It is. And also just, we get to, we don't have to justify our taste to anybody, you know? And that's a really nice thing, too.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  You know who is super into food trends?

• 1:09:51Sarah Marshall?

  Who?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Our cats.

• 1:09:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Or this, I don't think they think of it as trends, but my experience of cats is, so we have like three different kinds of dry food and two different kinds of wet food because there are different, like, health concerns in the, in the household. And every time you think like, oh, they like the one who needs like kidney diet really likes this particular kind. So we're going to order like a multi pack and save money and time. The minute you're like, you know, month's supply arrives, they don't like it anymore.

• 1:10:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yep.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  The minute that it's like, it's excessive, it's like, oh, I had that. I had that's, that's, that's nobody's doing that anymore. Which, to be fair, you know, it is the same food every day. But that's like you, I think they are more trend aware than I am. I would argue.

• 1:10:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's who should be driving our trends is the cats.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  The cats. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:10:41Sarah Marshall?

  Well, in conclusion, just, you know, keep, keep your body going and find some joy and whatever tastes good is probably gonna work out. That's what I think.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  You gotta feel good because like, life is hard enough. So you got, you gotta like, feel good and have, you know, and take care of yourself and rest and eat good things. And just do like, do what you think somebody who cares about you would want you to do.

• 1:11:08Sarah Marshall?

  Ah.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:11:09Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And they would want you to have cake.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, you have to have cake sometimes. Do I, what are you cooking next? Do you have anything on your agenda that you're gonna cook?

• 1:11:19Sarah Marshall?

  I gotta make that mock apple pie.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  You're gonna do it? You're gonna do it?

• 1:11:22Sarah Marshall?

  Do you want to both make it and compare?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  We should both do it.

• 1:11:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Do you feel enticed?

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:11:36Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. We also have a new bonus episode for you with the wonderful Princess Weeks about the case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, a sensational trial of 1925. And you can listen to it right now on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions, plus a lot of other bonuses. We've also got a nice show about orcas, if you like that kind of thing. Thank you to the people who make this show. Miranda Zickler is our producer and editor. Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. Thank you to Sarah Archer for being our guest. You can find her website and links to her books in the show. Notes plus links to the videos we watched while we made this episode.

• 1:12:20Sarah Marshall?

  If you want to make the wacky cake, or cockeyed cake, as Peg Bracken calls it, here is the recipe from the I Hate to Cookbook. 1 1/2 cup sifted flour, 3 tablespoons cocoa, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 cup sugar, 1 half teaspoon salt, 5 tablespoons cooking oil, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 cup cold water, and good old confectioner sugar frosting. The frosting is 2 cups of confectioner sugar with a dash of salt, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and enough cream beaten in to make it spreadable. And here's the cake recipe. Put your sifted flour back in the sifter, add to it cocoa, baking soda, sugar, and salt, and sift this right into a greased cake pan about 9 by 9 by 2 inches.

• 1:13:05Sarah Marshall?

  Now you make 3 grooves or holes in this dry mixture. Into one groove, pour the oil, into the next, the vinegar, into the next, the vanilla. Now pour the cold water over it all. You'll feel like you're making med pies now, but beat it with a spoon until it's nearly smooth and you can't see the flour. Bake it at 350 degrees for half an hour. If you make it, or any of the treats we mentioned in this episode, let us know how it turns out. You can email us at [email protected]. And we are also taking submissions still for our listener special for June. We're asking you to tell us in about a 3 minute voice memo what you love and why you love it. We're listening to them through April.

• 1:13:50Sarah Marshall?

  We are having the best time listening to everyone that we get, and we can't wait to hear yours. That's all. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. We'll see you in 2 weeks.