Kitchen Chatter with Aunt Sammy began in 1926

One of America’s first “celebrity chefs” was Aunt Sammy. She made her radio debut on Oct. 4, 1926. 

The wife of a fellow known far and wide – Uncle Sam – Aunt Sammy was created by Morse Salisbury of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Home Economics and Farm Radio Service.

 

Aunt Sammy’s 15-minute radio show, “Housekeeper Chat,” aired five days a week. The target audience was rural homemakers. Participating radio stations brought in local talent to read the scripts prepared by a staff of three women working at the Bureau of Home Economics, under the leadership of Dr. Louis Stanley, a chemist. 

Aunt Sammy offered recipes, advice and offered commentary on current events. 

Just weeks after the show premiered in the fall of 1926, Queen Marie of Romania arrived in the United States for an extended visit, traveling across the country by train, visiting many communities along the way. Scripts were altered accordingly, and Aunt Sammy would say: 

“Queen Marie of Romania is visiting my town this week. She didn’t come to America especially to see me, but I thought she might drop in to discuss household problems. I have a new recipe, called “Peach Dainty,” that I’ve been saving for her. I am sure the king would like it, and the prince and princess, too.”

 

It wasn’t long until the recipes were collected in a cookbook, “Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes.” More than 100,000 copies were distributed by December 1927. 

Aunt Sammy’s “Beef Loaf,” uses ground beef, flour, milk, celery, parsley, onion, breadcrumbs, salt, pepper and tabasco sauce. 

Use an open roasting pan. “Much better results are obtained by making the meat loaf in this way than by packing it into a deep pan and baking it like a loaf of bread. Remove the meat loaf and serve hot, or chill it and serve in thin slices with watercress garnish.” 

For the 1928-29 radio season, the recipe book was supplemented by “Aunt Sammy’s Radio Record,” a 48-page binder that offered information on how to provide balanced meals and how to set a table. It also contained blank, loose-leaf pages so listeners could write down menus and recipes that were given out during the radio shows. 

Soon thereafter, Aunt Sammy was telling her listeners that Uncle Sam saw how neat the new product was that “he waxed enthusiastic. His only regret was that he didn’t originate the idea himself. Isn’t that just like a man?”

 

Aunt Sammy began to fade away during the Great Depression, and eventually the show was cancelled in 1946, but the torch had already been taken up by newspaper columnists known as Marian Manners and Prudence Penny. 

Jenn Garbee, a Los Angeles-based food writer, said Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, invented Marian Manners in 1931 to address “the thousand and one intermediary problems and snags that confront the housewife daily.” The writer was a local food instructor, Ethel Vance Morse. 

Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst created Prudence Penny to fill a similar role at his newspapers, but each Hearst newspaper employed a local writer and a culinary instructor to play the role, Garbee said. 

Prudence Penny helped Americans get through the hard times of the Depression and the wartime rationing of the 1940s with money-stretching recipes like “Vitality Loaf,” a form of meatloaf. 

The dish was packed with beef, pork, pork liver, oatmeal, wheat germ, onion, evaporated milk, egg and chili sauce. The oatmeal was a good filler that would bulk-up the meatloaf as well as provide the moisture it needed. 

For a time, in the 1960s, the Prudence Penny at the New York Daily Mirror was Hyman Goldberg, a former police beat reporter. 

He once advised readers while making a glazed rum pie: “Break up zwieback. Keep rum bottle handy; if smashing up zwieback exhausts you, take a swig of rum and resume zwieback breaking when strength returns.”