Relic on the Lethe

While I missed Canada's Thanksgiving this year, this next pack of 20 PNGs should give the US friends plenty of time to design invitations, place settings, or greeting cards. A turkey bears an invitation to Thanksgiving, suggested as a place card for the Thanksgiving table, circa 1919. This batch is a mixed bag from different artists and time periods, and even publications. The oldest images are circa 1869, sourced from newspaper "specimen books" to show off typefaces and ornaments. About half of the images are from homemaking magazines like Good Housekeeping, either as illustrations to stories or as divider bars or section titles. The three hand-lettered versions of the word "Thanksgiving" were all part of a school workbook, showing examples of classroom activities around 1920. A few images in this batch were even sourced from a sales book for pottery! I selected this batch to focus more on the people, food and cooking aspects of Thanksgiving; if this doesn'...

How many ways can you think of to eat shredded wheat biscuits? Apparently there were "two dozen ways of preparing them" in 1896, according to an ad in the Daily Item . Just four years later, public demonstrations using shredded wheat mentioned a r ecipe book with 262 recipes . Newspapers ran snarky ads decrying the manufactured necessity for shredded wheat and other breakfast cereals. Despite the push back, shredded wheat was here to stay - at least as a breakfast cereal. But how did it arrive? Shredded Wheat Biscuit with Apricots and Cream, from More Light . Shredded wheat was the invention of Henry Perky . The story goes that he met another person over shared digestion woes around 1890, and learned this person's trick of eating boiled wheat with cream. After connecting with machinist William H. Ford, they developed a machine to process wheat into "little whole wheat mattresses" to facilitate the ease of eating the wheat.  After exhibiting his biscuits at the ...

It's the 1870s. Travel is getting faster, but it's still not instantaneous. Imagine you're on a long boat trip, and you want to have a little snack, but you find your butter has gone rancid. You can't exactly go around to the corner store and pick up a fresh batch. What do you do? If you're the French navy, the answer was apparently to create artificial butter for your sailors, and incidentally spark a century-long debate on the healthiness and purity of food. Articles that repeated this breakthrough word for word started circulating in Virginia newspapers in the early 1870s, generally reading, as this version in Tri-Weekly News, Volume 7, Number 141, 6 December 1872 : Artificial Butter.— At the request of the [victual] department of the French navy for some wholesome substitute for butter that would keep well, Mege Mouriez [Mège-Mouriès] , after a long course of experiments, has succeeded in producing an excellent substitute for genuine butter, that does not b...