OP: Blondie’s Cook Book: Soups, Salads, Sandwiches

$70 · Offered by Kitchen Arts & Letters

Bell Publishing Company, Drexel Hill, PA, 1947. Hardcover. Very Good. Second printing. For those of certain generations beginning in the early 1930s, the front-page eye catcher of the Sunday funnies section was Blondie —a zany everyman sitcom of the Bumstead family. Solidly middle class, living somewhere nice in the suburbs, this madcap household consisted of Blondie; Dagwood, her husband whose two most favored activities are eating and sleeping; their children Alexander and Cookie; their dog Daisy and her five identical puppies. Although it is Blondie who lends her name to this chronicle, Dagwood is clearly the featured character—sweet, tender, vulnerable, a bit dim, and excitable, this last trait set to go off on a very short fuse. His near universal fame, however, is for his devotion to cooking and eating. With a bottomless appetite he is constantly cooking up soups, throwing together salads and, mostly, devising unimaginable sandwiches, whose highly improvised recipes consist of everything that at any particular moment happens to be in the refrigerator. The famous “Dagwood Sandwich” provided in this cookbook happens to contain buttered bread, lettuce, a variety of cold leftover meats, American cheese (or Swiss or cottage cheese), sliced tomatoes, sardines (or anchovies or smoked salmon), sliced onions, cold baked beans, a bit more lettuce, and another slice of bread and butter. Other suggestions include pineapple slices, chopped pickles, pickled beets, olives, cucumbers,

• Printing: later
• Binding: Hardcover

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