A brief commentary on words follows the recipe. We’ve made this and it was good.

Recipe: Authentic 1949 Chow Mein

Originally published on April 9, 2019

(Proctor & Gamble, Cincinnati, 1949)

The Home Economists of the Crisco Kitchen at Proctor & Gamble recommended serving Seafood Neptune, Creamed Chicken, or Chow Mein over Fried Noodle Rings. Unfortunately, the pages for the first two recipes are missing from this crappy old paperback cookbook, so we’ll have to settle for authentic 1949 style Chow Mein.

Chow Mein

Makes 4 servings

• 1 1/4 lbs. pork shoulder (cut into 1″ pieces)
• 1/4 cup flour
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup Crisco
• 1 1/2 cups celery (cut in 1″ pieces)
• 1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
• 2 cups water
• 2 bouillon cubes
• 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

1. Dredge pork in seasoned flour. Brown in Crisco in heavy skillet; add onion, celery and mushrooms to pork. Brown lightly. Dissolve cubes in water and add to meat and vegetable mixture. Cover and cook on low heat about 30 minutes. Add Worcestershire sauce and blend well.

Serve on Fried Noodle Rings.

See the recipe for Fried Noodle Rings for some brief comments on the cookbook, and cooking when women wore dresses!

With respect to recipes of the time, notice how there’s no instruction to combine flour and salt. None to use boiling water to dissolve the bouillon cubes. It’s a given that wives and mothers knew these things.

Here are the instructions for a recipe for Pork Chow Mein from Allrecipes. Except for the addition of sprouts and almonds, and a few substitutions, the ingredients list is basically the same.

The 1949 recipe used 46 words of instruction. Allrecipe, 90. I scrolled down the first page of search results for ‘pork chow mein’ and could not find a recipe with similar ingredients that didn’t use twice as many words.

Too much verbage.