2020 Update! I’ve added a few more ads that have turned up. They’re at the bottom. Competition for 2020’s winning recipe came down, to me, between those on the last two ads: Pancake Sizzlers: “Glamorous dessert or main dish for Lent” – pancakes folded in quarters, then flambéed in a sauce of margarine, orange marmalade and Karo corn syrup or Cantonese (??) Tuna: Chow mein noodles (the crispy kind from a can) topped with a mixture of cream sauce, tuna, pickles and…Miracle Whip. I believe you see my point – no competition. At all.

What to cook for those Lenten meals? Such a dilemma!

Me, I always have dreams of various interesting vegetable-based stews and soups, but you know what it always ends up being?

Cheese pizza. Lots and lots of cheese pizza. With maybe some pancakes and eggs tossed in there for variety.

For some reason, I went on a bit of a rabbit trail last night..I have no idea how I happened to think that there might be a treasure trove of Lenten-themed vintage food advertisements out there…but there is. It’s at an advertising design archive website, and, yes, there is a “Lent” keyword, although several of the ads in that category are Valentine-themed since, of course “lent” is a part of the word.

(I’ve since found many other ads from other sources)

But then I thought, Wait. The Era of Regrettable Food was also pre-Vatican II…when Catholics abstained from meat every Friday anyway…what were the Lenten regulations right before the Council? Why would Lent-themed advertising even be a thing if Catholics were going meatless on Fridays all year?

Turns out that it was: fasting every day of Lent except Sunday, of course, fasting and abstaining from meat on all Fridays and Ash Wednesday, and on the other days, meat allowed in one of those “one regular and two small meals” of the fasting days. So that explains the advertising directed at helping the cook be creative within those constraints since less meat would be consumed for several weeks…hence Lima Loaf.

(Too bad they changed that. Really. It lends a sense of greater body/soul continuity to the season, in my mind. It’s also kind of insulting that they thought we couldn’t handle that mild of a regime any longer, but what else is new. )

Of course, not all of this is regrettable. Some is just quite normal – vegetable soups, hot cross buns and pancakes and such. Some is surprising – using Lent to even advertise peanuts! – and a reminder of a time in which religious practice was just considered…normal and as amenable to commercial exploitation as any other part of life!

So enjoy, and may these be an inspiration…

of what not to cook during Lent, that is….

(You should be able to right click on each ad for a larger version)

Bring on the Cranberry-Fish Souffle Salad, the Velveeta Jelly Omelet and the Individual Tuna Dreamboats!

Even peanuts get in the Lent game!

Because everyone want prawns, pineapples and egg scramble.

Or a tuna-olive-cream of mushroom soup biscuit ring.

Penance!

2019 Update. Here are a few more. None quite match the Tuna Dreamboats, in my mind, but they’re fun nonetheless. And interesting – again, from a time when the family needing to eat Lent-centric food was a worthy market to pursue.

I was also looking over all of these again and was a little puzzled by the Birds-Eye ad above – why is it a big deal to eat CORN during LENT? And then I realized – well, that’s because people ate far more seasonally then, and so the sales pitch here is that frozen corn during Lent would be a treat because it would give you the fresh taste you wouldn’t expect until summer. Supposedly.

And notice the contrasting appeals between the Banquet and the Knox Gelatin ad – Banquet echoing St. Basil the Great and encouraging us to “give up cooking for Lent” and rely on their frozen meals – and Knox suggesting “While you’re keeping Lent…make unusual dishes!”

It’s not obvious, but the Lent angle on the Quaker corn meal ad is over on the right – it’s a “Young Idea for Lent.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Click on images for full screen version.)

2020 Update

A few more:

And this year’s winner, no competition:

On a less gruesome note, there were, in that era (as there are in ours) many cookbooks and handbooks to help a Catholic homemaker make her home…Catholic. Some are still in print and are very good. One that I have was published by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. I have a post on it here, with a reader evaluation of a modern reprint. But in case you don’t want to head over to that old post, here’s the first page of the Lent section, so you can see how substantive it is:

If a healthy penitential attitude is to grow with our children, it should be fed with their daily Lenten bread.

…or tuna-olive-cream of mushroom soup biscuit ring.