More Vintage Gourmet: August 1951

I love these old Rheingold ads.  With their perennially blond women doing their best to make a working class quaff classy, they say so much about the culture of the time,

But you don't need to stick to the ads to for that information. The recipes also tell us a lot about the times.  Here, for instance, are a couple of dishes from Gastronomie sans Argent, the column the editors created for people with more taste than money.

Because we're at the height of the peach season, here's a recipe you might actually be inclined to make. A friend just dropped a load of windfall peaches on my porch, and some of them are destined to become peach leather.  What I love best about this recipe?  You do the drying in the sun.

And given our newly coffee-conscious culture, this ad leapt out at me.  I couldn't find out anything about Senor Pinto, but I did discover that in the fifties coffee was San Francisco's second most important industry.