CAKE SECRETS from Swans Down Cake Flour

I did a post on February 20, 2011 entitled "Swans Down Vintage Recipes" which was about an old cookbook that contained lovely illustrations of cakes. The book was put out by the company that made Swans Down Cake Flour. Today I feature another book.

The illustrations are not as delicate as the previous book, but they still have me wishing I was making these recipes and not just looking at them.

No information is given about the illustrator. The publishing date is 1926.















Swans Down Cake Flour was made by the Igleheart Brothers in Evansville, Indiana. The company was established in 1856. They were purchased by the Postum Cereal Company in 1926. Today Swans Down Cake Flour is sold by Reily Food Products.

Here is a newspaper ad from the Rome, Georgia Rome Tribune-Herald dated November 15, 1916.



I think it's interesting that this newspaper ad is on the same page with an ad for the Reily-Taylor Company, the company that would eventually own and market Swans Down.

You can see various photos of the original Igleheart Mill here.

(SOURCE: Williard Library - Knecht 2394)

I wonder if any of these Bob Hope Angel Food cake store displays exist anymore. That would be a real find!
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New book available on Amazon.
Tattered and Lost: Forgotten Dolls

This one is for those who love dolls!

Snapshots from the last 100+ years of children and adults with dolls. Okay, there are a couple of dogs too.

Perfect stocking stuffer!

Ridin' the rails to DOWNERS GROVE, ILLINOIS

My friend Bert, who I've mentioned at my other blog, is a collector of ephemera and most especially photographs. Last week when I visited him he mentioned a story about his father at the Downers Grove train station. I remembered I had a post card of the station and emailed this to him last night.

Click on image to see it larger.

The card brought back the following memories for Bert:

"As a child in the late 1920"s and 1930"s. Bert used to stand on this station's platform and watch the freight trains go by. He would look at the many railroad signs on the freight cars and dream of those places that seemed so remote to his childhood visions of being there. Little did Bert know that his eventual home would be in the city of Oakland, CA where the Southern Pacific trains terminated its runs, then people took ferries across the bay to San Francisco and connected to Peninsula trains at the Townsend Street terminal, on journeys to all points south. But today, like dreams, that vast railroad junction in Oakland has vanished and changed into large ports-of-call for container ships to unload their cargoes. Has the Downers Grove railroad station survived, he wonders?"--Bert

Bert, the station is still there. Click here to see a recent photo. And here's a fun video of a steam engine going lickity split through the station.

Video by http://www.youtube.com/user/ryanrules281

From Wikipedia I find the following about Downers Grove:

Downers Grove was founded in 1832 by Pierce Downer, a religious evangelist from New York. Its other early settlers included the Blodgett, Curtiss, and Carpenter families. The original settlers were mostly migrants from the Northeastern United States and Northern Europe. The first schoolhouse was built in 1844.

During the American Civil War, 119 soldiers from Downers Grove served in the Union Army; at least one of these was interred in the cemetery downtown. There was an abolitionist presence in the village, and some of the older homes are thought to have been stops on the Underground Railroad. However, there is no evidence to substantiate this claim.

The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad was extended from Aurora to Chicago through Downers Grove in 1862, boosting its population. The town was incorporated in March 1873. Its somewhat unusual spelling ("Apostrophe-free since 1873") remains a minor historical mystery.

In April 1947 the wreck of a Burlington Railroad Twin Cities Zephyr passenger train killed three people, including the engineer. The streamliner struck a large tractor which had fallen from a freight train and two passenger cars crashed through a wall of the Main Street Station.

The construction of two major toll roads along the village's northern and western boundaries, I-355 in 1989 and what is now referred to as I-88 in 1958, facilitated its access to the rest of Chicago metropolitan area. Downers Grove has developed into a bustling Chicago suburb with many diverse businesses, including the headquarters for Rossi Furniture, FTD, Sara Lee, Arrow Gear Magnetrol, Dover, TMK IPSCO and Luxury tour operator, Abercrombie & Kent. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

It's funny where ephemera leads. I've had this post card for many years and never thought about posting it. Now it's linked forever with Bert. Thanks Bert!

More of Bert's railroad nostalgia:

At one point in my youthful years in Downers Grove we lived in a house alongside the railroad tracks. Next to the house was a railroad "Roundhouse" for locomotives to be turned around and face the opposite direction. As trains sped by locomotive "firemen" would sometimes shovel off coal along the railroad tracks for us "poor people" to pick up and burn in our stoves. People really helped each other then. When the Burlington Railroad Twin Cities Zephyr passenger trains were first put into service, a pair of them slowly rode "side-by-side" through Downers Grove. We watched them pass in awe of such beautiful art deco design and technical advances. Eat your hearts out Charles Lindbergh & Amelia Earhart for pioneering the demise of flights that put passenger trains to rest.