“To the child mind,” Percy Collins wrote in American Homes and Gardens in 1911, “two bananas served upon a plate are just what they appear to be and nothing more.” Hardly a birthday dish. But add broken matches for legs, paper tails and ears, and eyes painted in Chinese white on the yellow rind, and the fruit becomes “an object of desire” — in this case a mysterious pair of porkers. The Public Domain Review’s collection reproduces eight of Collins’ creations, with Mathilde Montpetit’s essay on the world they came out of.

The recipes are exercises in making do with what a 1911 kitchen had:

  • Banana pigs, legs from matches, eyes in icing sugar
  • An “old Irishman taking his pig to market” and an “old Welsh woman” whose head is a hazelnut
  • An elephant built from a big pear and a small apple skewered together, mounted on two pieces of banana
  • A “Red Indian” assembled from banana, fig, filbert nut, and jelly on a plate
  • A “booby bird” of fruit, skewers, and tissue paper plumes
  • A cat made of two nuts and some matches — “a very weird creature”
  • A cottage of sponge cake, icing sugar, and whipped cream

Food here isn’t food. It’s dessert, entertainment, and a chance to rearrange the natural world into a menagerie of people, animals, and buildings. Collins promises his eight suggestions “by no means exhaust the list of possible dishes.”

The occasion is what dates the piece. Birthday parties were imported from Germany and only became common in the United States in the 1830s, remaining formal, parent-controlled affairs until the 1870s. By the turn of the century they had taken their recognisably modern, child-led shape: “Happy Birthday to You” was composed in 1894, and the Boston Cooking School Magazine began printing birthday cake recipes — for use with candles — in 1906. Collins’ confections are dessert and parlour entertainment for the birthday party at the moment it became a children’s event.

Collins was not a chef. He was a magazine writer who mostly did biology for Scientific American, the parent publication of American Homes and Gardens, and a man preoccupied with the inner lives of the non-human: “The Nuptials of the Flowers” (June 1907), “Ants and Bees as Pets” (May 1909), and, most provocatively, “Do Plants Think?” (September 1909).

American Homes and Gardens, independent from 1905, belonged to the era’s shelter-magazine boom alongside House Beautiful (1896), House & Garden and Country Life in America (1901), and Suburban Life (1903) — titles serving a suburbanising, city-fleeing middle class that was fitting out new houses on moderate budgets. The February 1911 issue opens with a lavishly illustrated profile of Romulus R. Colgate’s palatial 1906 Connecticut estate; the rest of the issue keeps to modest scale, and every issue works through the possibilities of concrete, in building and in decoration.

Worth noting: although the piece addresses a female reader, the magazine’s writers and readers were mostly male. The historian Margaret Marsh has documented a turn-of-the-century boom in male suburban home-making; the Progressive economists Martha and Robert Bruère proclaimed that “When God made homemakers, male and female created He them!” Editor Charles Allen Munn argued in December 1905 that “the responsibility for the home is not [the woman’s] alone, but is equally the husband’s.”

The delight didn’t last. By the 1940s parents were sick of the birthday party rigmarole — in May 1946 Life declared that “to most parents the prospect of giving a child’s party is about as appetizing as giving a lynching.” The banana sculptures, at least, remain available.

Text by Mathilde Montpetit. Images from the Biodiversity Heritage Library / Smithsonian Libraries and Archives; underlying work public domain worldwide.