The Vintage Site

“9 out of 10 screen stars guard their skin this way…”

This ad for Lux Toilet Soap comes from the June 1929 issue of Woman’s Home Companion magazine. Several bold claims are made in this ad – the first is the big headline in the center of the page:

“9 out of 10 screen stars guard their skin this way…”

And then, a bit further down, we have this:

“Directors and screen stars know so well that lovely skin is the most magnetic of all charms. And in Hollywood, among the 451 important actresses, including all stars, 442 (98%) use Lux Toilet Soap to keep their skin lovely.”

The 1920′s seem to be an era that never loses its appeal – the glamour and elegance of that time is still reflected in much of our art today. I’ve found a selection of beautiful invitations that clearly show the influence of the 1920′s – some of them even feature actual vintage 20′s illustrations. Some are wedding invitations and others will work for any occasion. Take a look and see if you find something that would be perfect for your next party!

1920′s Gatsby Invite

1920′s Party Invitation

1920′s Great Gatsby Wedding Invitations

Chic Art Deco 1920′s Bride & Groom Wedding Custom Invitations

Peacock and Lady Custom Invites

Roaring 20s Twenties Art Deco Wedding Invitation

1929 Party Invitations

Lou Wears a Tutu Invites

1920′s Themed Wedding R.S.V.P. Cards Invite

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“Nothing could be more charming and restful than the soft moonlight glow of frosted paper. The diffusion of light is almost perfect; one can look directly at an electric light bulb behind this paper with no feeling of glare.”

This article, and wonderful illustrations that accompany it, are from the December 1928 issue of Woman’s Home Companion magazine. All of the lamps were designed and painted by L.V. Carroll. I love the art deco look of these lamps; they all scream 1920′s to me. I am including here a transcription of most of it. It seems that the lamps were made of frosted paper as well as ivorine (imitation ivory).

“Frosted paper, a practically non-inflammable material imported from France, is so lovely in its light effect and texture that no further decoration is required. It can be used with lamps and fixtures of any period, yet is so new that it will fit into the most modern of modernistic interiors with the advantage of being distinctly  “different.” In delightful combination of the shades illustrated ivorene has been used, which has a soft warm amber glow when it is illuminated.”

“Both frosted paper and ivorene are easy materials to work with and can be bent or folded into almost any shape and form of lampshade. The fixtures that the artist has experimented with are of the simplest construction. With a little ingenuity and ability with carpenters’ tools anyone can make them by following the patterns and directions which are offered below. The electric fittings can be bought at any electrical store.”

“Cook has an afternoon out each week, and certainly every homemaker should be able to join a club or participate in some pleasure that takes her away as often as this. Surely the preparation of the evening meal need not prevent your having an ‘afternoon off,’ if you will do a little intelligent planning and prepare as much as possible in the morning.”

Yes, in the early 1920′s, it was not uncommon for a family to have a cook, and/or a maid, as an employee to help around the house.

The menu from this February 1923 issue of the Women’s Home Companion magazine features a menu with your choice of three “30 minute meals”. Where today these fast meals are usually needed in order to put a quick dinner on the table after either a day full of work and commuting, or taking care of the children and house on one’s own, (or even simply preferring not to spend too much time in the kitchen), 90-odd years ago the recipes were being offered as a way for the housewife to deal with having no household help to assist with the cooking on one day a week.

You may notice that there is a lot of pork on the menu (shown in the image to the left). That was intentional:

“The three menus on this page are based on a ‘first cousin’ to cold ham. A fresh shoulder of pork does not cost as much as a ham and it may be utilized in many different ways. Unless the family is very large, one shoulder, weighing from five to seven pounds, will provide steaks for one meal, the meat for the bean and cabbage soup for one meal, and the creamed pork for the third meal. There may even be a little more meat left, which can be used for a mock chicken salad, if combined with chopped celery or cabbage and salad dressing.”

However, the pork recipes supplied here are fairly common and similar to recipes that can be found easily today. To me, the dessert recipes stand out as particularly interesting and unlike what you may see in the present time.

I’ll be presenting here the recipes for “Coffee Cabinet Pudding,” and “Fluffy Coffee Sauce.” Although coffee is possibly more popular now than ever, it’s rare to see it in the incarnations here. For one thing, the gelatin found in so many vintage recipes but often neglected today is found here, in the pudding, and creates a molded dessert. For another, I’ve never seen a dessert sauce that combines coffee with egg whites (although of course various types of egg coffee do exist as a drink). These two recipes are ones I will most likely never try, but I must admit a certain curiosity.

The recipes are a little hard to read so I’ve transcribed them here:

Coffee Cabinet Pudding

“Most girls between fourteen and eighteen years old have trouble choosing just the right patterns in order to have becoming clothes.”

This is how the article, titled “Clothes for the Girl at the Difficult Age”, begins. It is from the September 1913 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, so just in time for back to school that year! The article is credited to “the Fashion Editors,” and drawings are by A.M. Cooper. “The designs illustrated on this page have been carefully selected to help the tall, slender girl, as well as her shorter sister, who is probably stout also.”

For the illustration at the top of this entry, this is how the magazine describes the outfits:

“A Double Skirt effect is permissible if the upper portion comes well below the hips, like No. 7894, which is made with a two-piece skirt and a drop-shoulder, tunic blouse.
The short double-skirt effects, especially the plainted ones, like No. 7892, are attractive for the tall girl.”

Now onto the rest of the fashions:

“A box coat made by pattern No. 7896 will prove becoming to any young girl… The broad belt of No. 7896 adds a new touch, and the large patch pockets are both decorative and practical. Greater comfort in walking is obtained in these coats than in the full-length ones. The hat (No. 7217) – patterns for which come in one size – may be of the same material as the coat.”

“Those who are not tall will do well to choose the longer lines, like those shown in No. 7888.”

“The flounced skirts are also a good choice for her dressy flocks. An attractive example of this style is shown in No. 7886, made of shadow lace flouncing.”

“A box coat made by pattern No. 7896 will prove becoming to any young girl, as will also the blouse coat No. 7907.“

“How Old Are You?
“You may turn out to be an old fogy of eighteen or a jitterbug of eighty.”

So begins the short article that I found in the April 1942 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. The main point of the article is this curious quiz entitled “Have You Grown Up Yet? ” The quiz is below, so get your pencils ready; but first, here are the instructions:

Answer every question either “Yes” or “No”.  On your paper,  make one “Yes” column  and give yourself 5 points for every “Yes”. In a separate “No” column, give yourself 5 points for every “No.” Then see what your total is for each answer.

Now get ready, there are some strange questions here:

Ok, now, the instructions go on to say that

The “No” score represents emotional maturity and the “Yes” score emotional immaturity. A high “No” score should send you a bouquet, but a high “Yes” score should make you take a careful personal inventory.

At this point, I feel I have to re-read some of the questions.

1. Do you tint or dye your hair? Covering your gray apparently shows that you are actually not as mature as you think.
14. Do you have an emotional reaction to any of these words: Communist; strike; adultery; divorce; false teeth? This confuses me. You can’t hear about divorce or adultery, for instance, and feel any type of emotion, and still be a mature adult?
And the best of all:
4. Do you disapprove of Mrs. Roosevelt? I still don’t understand how that made it into the quiz, other than to assume that the author supports Mrs. Roosevelt!

But just for fun, now that you do have your final score, there is one further step to take:

Compare your score with your actual age to find out how far you are lagging behind or how far ahead of yourself you are.

So, if you are thirty years old, but ended up with an 80 in the “Yes” column, you have 50 years of maturity to catch up on!

Okay, so maybe the quiz does not make a lot of sense, but it’s still fun to step back into the concerns of another time and to see how differently we viewed things. After all, there are tons of online quizzes around when you’re ready to come back!

“One of the favorite viands of John Philip Sousa, the eminent bandmaster and composer, is a dish that is not unfamiliar to lovers of the Italian cuisine. This is a most refined kind of meat-balls called “polentas”, and it is safe to say that those who once partake of them will always recall the experience with delight.”

Today we will have the pleasure of enjoying a recipe said to be one of Sousa’s own. It’s a basic spaghetti and meatball recipe, and I found it in the February 1907 issue of the Delineator magazine. I was confused, however, by the fact that the meatballs here are called “polentas” – so naturally I assumed that some type of cornmeal would be one of the ingredients. It turns out though to be a fairly straightforward, old-fashioned beef meatball recipe, with not a drop of polenta in sight.

I set out to see if there was any precedence for calling Italian meatballs “polentas”, and unfortunately I couldn’t find anything else other than this recipe. But my research did lead me to something else interesting – several other websites also containing Sousa’s version of spaghetti and meatballs. The interesting thing was, though, that it seems his recipe was published in “The Stag Cook Book: Written for Men By Men”, but there the meatballs were called “Pelotas A La Portuguese” (Sousa’s father was of Portuguese ancestry). So I don’t know if it was merely a simple error on the part of Delineator magazine, or an attempt to make the recipe name sound more Italian – “polenta” rather than “pelotas” – especially since the Delineator version claims this as an Italian dish.

Another thing is that so far the 1907 Delineator is the earliest mention of Sousa’s recipe being published that I have been able to find. According to another very helpful website, the recipe was published in the Chicago Herald on July 23, 1916, and then again in the Stag Cook Book in 1922. Of interest is that the quantities of ingredients in the meatballs seemed to have changed a little in each version – just 2 tablespoons of grated stale bread in 1907, and either one or two cups of bread crumbs in other versions. The sauce also varies; the 1907 version adds lard to the spaghetti sauce which is missing elsewhere. I’m curious if this was the result of Sousa “tinkering” with his recipe through the years, or if the recipe was changed on the part of the publishers.

I am going to transcribe Sousa’s “Polentas” recipe here, along with his instructions for the sauce and the spaghetti, exactly as published in the Delineator in 1907.

POLENTAS, recipe by John Philip Sousa 1907

To prepare these, the cook must take a pound of prime round steak, and, having removed any bits of bone and all stringy pieces, the meat must be put through the chopping machine – not to be cut into ordinarily small pieces, but to be chopped until it has assumed the consistency of a perfect mince. One egg is then added, with two tablespoonfuls of stale bread grated, one small onion grated, four sprigs of parsley finely chopped, and the necessary seasoning of salt and pepper. This mixture is then rolled into balls, each containing about a teaspoonful and a half of the paste.

In the meantime a sauce must have been prepared after the following recipe: Take a quarter of a peck of ripe tomatoes (or one can of tomatoes), one sweet green pepper from which the seeds have already been extracted, one onion, two bayleaves and one pint of water. These ingredients must boil together for one hour, after which they are pressed through a colander until all substance has percolated through and this is then boiled up one more. One tablespoonful of lard is then added, with pepper and salt as seasoning. Into this sauce the “polentas” are placed, and in it they are permitted to boil gently over a slow fire for fully forty minutes. By this time they have absorbed all the delicious flavors of the sauce, and by having boiled gently they have lost none of their own firmness, being still as smooth and round as they were when they were first put into this savory stew.

They are then served with spaghetti that has been prepared after the following fashion: Boil one pound of spaghetti in two quarts of water, to which one tablespoonful of salt has been added, for twenty minutes. After it has been thoroughly drained, pour over it the tomato sauce in which the “polentas” were boiled, and serve the combination very hot, with a liberal supply of grated Roman cheese on the side.

“I’m a redhead and what I wanted for my birthday even more than a new fur coat was a bedroom that would flatter me… Luckily, I had gone first to look at Alexander Smith Carpets and the salesman introduced me to the Alexander Smith Colorama Selector. That’s how I found out that I could wear a pink room… and to think I’d always been afraid of my favorite color!”

This ad, which I found in my copy of the April 1942 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, introduced me to the fun vintage invention called the “Alexander Smith Colorama Selector”. This was a way that women in the 1940′s could create the perfect room for themselves, based on the color of their hair! From what information I have been able to find on the Selector, I’m guessing it was not much more than a simple color guide letting the decorator know which colors best flattered blondes, brunettes, etc., but the thought that women were actually matching their homes to their hair amused me. I suppose drastic changes in hair dye were just not happening in these homes!

I found a few of the colorama selection guide brochures on ebay, so if you are curious just search that site for “Alexander Smith Colorama Selector” and you should be able to locate some.

As far as the changes made to the newly-colored pink bedroom above, a small picture of the dull old room is also provided in the ad:

“Here’s how drab our bedroom looked before. We pushed our beds together under one headboard, painted the walls, treated the two windows as one, dressed up my dressing table, put down new carpet – and presto, look at it now!”

So for any “Blondes – Brunettes – Brown Hair – Redheads – Silver-Gray”, there was a carpet made to flatter you.

“Up to now, you’ve dressed with more haste than care for eight-o’clock classes, and with considerably more care for eight-o’clock dates. Now you’re looking for a job, or you have a job. Your clothes will help you, or let you down.”

The August 1950 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine contained an article full of stylish fashions for a young woman’s first job (or her job search). I am so impressed by the elegance of the clothing here; everything seems quite timeless and beautiful. The items suggested in the article were based not only on looks, however, but on price – after all, for a young girl just starting out, she most likely did not have a huge budget for clothing. That is why the author makes suggestions such as:

“Use your wits and save your well-earned dollars by having a plan that includes: a suit and a jersey dress in gray to wear with any known color; two or three velvet hats – they cost so little; cotton shirts in white or autumn colors; cotton gloves; a big gold-and-crystal stickpin that goes on beret, bag or collar.”

It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, but I really like the outfit in the top photo, the gray suit with yellow blouse and gloves and a smart red purse; the black two-piece dinner dress in the photo below is also stunning.

The article goes on to say:

“You’ll indicate your fashion knowledge by the cut of your suit – perhaps a box jacket, slim skirt, though walking ease in skirts is always permissible. You’ll remember, or learn, that a jersey dress is the easiest keeper, and a natural for old or new belts and scarves. August weather calls for a silk or rayon-crepe dress, summer weight, fallish color. A black dinner dress is forever the necessary jewel. Your coat for everything can be a bright color – red or bittersweet this year.”

It’s rare that I find a vintage fashion spread without one or two really bad outfits hidden among the others, but this is one of the cases where I actually do like every single choice. Good job, Ladies’ Home Journal!