The Wine and Food Society booklets
Potatoes, to Know Potatoes, and to Serve Potatoes, by Ernest Oldmeadow
Two wartime booklets issued by the Wine and Food Society in London that try to make the humble spud a bit more up-market, potentially for members of the Society who may well have been used to more up-market fare! There is also a hint that it was may also have been aimed at people who were used to having food prepared for them rather than in wartime conditions when they may have had to fend for themselves and indeed a few of the Ministry of Food’s publications of this time were aimed at people who may have lost servants and cooks!
The opening to Soups Salads Souses includes the phrase “wartime fare for the fastidious” and it was written by the doyenne of the Society, André Simon, along with forewords by Eugéne Herbodeau and postscript by Jessop Hulton.
The cover design is quite stylish and well-constructed and I wondered who designed the wee vignette. And thanks to Alan Brignull’s detective work (on the Soup’s cover) it can be confirmed as being by Berthold Wolpe. The printer was the famous Curwen Press.
The open and shaded caps are from Orplid, a typeface design by Hans Bohn who had studied at the Technische Lehranstalten Offenbach, just like Wolpe.
Soups Salads Souses by André L. Simon
