Vintage 1941 A-1 Sauce Recipe Pamphlet 🍽️ Hartford CT Advertising Booklet, Wholesome Relish Kitchen & Table Ephemera

What Was A-1 Sauce in 1941? 🍽️ Printed September 15, 1941: When A·1 Was "The Wholesome Relish," Not a Steak Sauce

Size: 6" x 3 1/2"

Turn this little pamphlet over and the printer's date is right there in the corner: 9-15-41. Less than three months later came Pearl Harbor. What you are holding is one of the last peacetime pitches for A·1 Sauce, from the Hartford, Connecticut company that A·1 had just carried through thirteen dry years of Prohibition — and not once does it call A·1 a steak sauce. It is "The Wholesome Relish," meant for the rarebit, the beans, the tuna salad and yesterday's pot roast.

What You Are Getting

• Original A·1 Sauce advertising recipe pamphlet, G. F. Heublein & Bro., Hartford, Conn.
• Printed date code 9-15-41 and "Printed in U.S.A. — No. A102" on the back panel
• Measures 6 x 3.5 inches
• Folded paper pamphlet: photographic cover, a two-page recipe spread inside, and a back panel of uses and sales copy
• Printed in orange-red and black with tinted photographic cover art and small red chef cartoons beside each recipe
• Condition: new old stock

The Cover

Bold cream letters on an orange-red band spell out A·1 SAUCE, with THE WHOLESOME RELISH on a black band beneath. Through a kitchen doorway a smiling mother stands at the stove, tipping a bottle of A·1 over her pot. In the foreground a little girl in a checked dress, a bow in her hair, sits at a set table and hoists her own bottle like a prize. Across the bottom runs the whole marketing plan in one line: USE in the KITCHEN and on the TABLE too.

Inside: "With A·1 Sauce These Recipes Are at Their Best"

The spread holds nine recipes, each with a little chef stirring, tasting or hauling a bean pot: Lamb (or Chicken) and Rice en Casserole, Hamburg or Meat Loaf, Sea Food Cocktail Sauce, Welsh Rarebit, A·1 Spaghetti Chop Suey, Creamed Dried Beef or Codfish, Sea Food Salads, Baked Beans, and a section titled simply Leftovers.

They are a snapshot of how a 1941 kitchen actually cooked. The Welsh Rarebit melts 1½ tablespoons of butter and 3 cups of grated cheese in a double boiler with dry mustard, cayenne and a tablespoon of A·1. The Spaghetti Chop Suey browns bacon, onions and green pepper with ¾ pound of chopped bottom round, stirs in a can of tomato soup, and bakes half an hour to serve six. The seafood salad takes "flaked tuna fish (or salmon, shrimp, lobster, crab meat or any sea food)." Hamburg was still the everyday word for ground beef, and the casserole is built to stretch leftover gravy, carrots and onions into another supper. That creamed dried beef in thin white sauce and the layered casserole are straight Depression-kitchen cooking, the kind of filling cream dishes and casseroles the home economists of the thirties were promoting to families with little money to spend. Food historians remember them as pretty bland, which is exactly the problem a tablespoon of A·1 was being sold to fix.

The Back Panel: "The Universal Seasoning"

The back is pure period sales copy. A drawing of the tall A·1 bottle sits beside the company's boast that A·1 is "the largest selling thick sauce in the world," made from fruits, vegetables and spices "from all corners of the world" and concentrated, so it was inexpensive. A WIDESPREAD USES chart suggests it for sandwiches, hors d'oeuvres, canapé spreads, salad dressings, tomato juice, macaroni, game, canned fish and more. A LEFTOVERS paragraph speaks straight to "every efficient housewife." It closes on A HEUBLEIN PRODUCT, the tagline "Brings out the hidden flavor in all good foods," and the firm's Hartford address. Look close at that little bottle drawn up top, too: its label still reads BRAND'S across the top, the old London firm's name, even though by 1941 the sauce in that bottle was being made right there in Hartford.

The Legend of "A Number One"

The story goes that in 1824 Henderson William Brand, a chef in the royal kitchens of King George IV, served the king a new brown sauce, and the king declared it "A1" — first-rate. Food historians still argue over whether a king ever said it, but the legend has ridden on the bottle for two centuries. Brand's firm, Brand & Co. of London, was advertising in 1835; the sauce was shown at London's International Exhibition of 1862 (the "Est. 1862" on later labels), and the name A.1. was formalized in 1873 after a trademark dispute. By 1895 advertisements named G. F. Heublein & Bro. "sole agents for the United States." A.1. was registered as a trademark in the United States in 1895. For the next twenty years or so it was an import, crossing the Atlantic from England, and American ads in 1905 and 1912 still named Heublein the "sole importer." From the start the London firm pitched it as a condiment for "fish, meat and fowl," so the do-everything idea on the back of this 1941 pamphlet was already an old one.

Heublein of Hartford: A Café, a Rained-Out Picnic, and the First Bottled Cocktail

Andrew Heublein, a Prussian immigrant, arrived in Hartford around 1859 and opened a café and small hotel at the corner of Mulberry and Wells Streets. His sons Gilbert F. and Louis Heublein took over in 1875 as G. F. Heublein & Bro.

That same year, as Hartford tells it, the brothers mixed a big batch of martinis and Manhattans for the annual picnic of the First Company Governor's Foot Guard, the Hartford militia company organized in 1771 and still the oldest military organization in continuous existence in the United States. Rain cancelled the picnic. An employee sent to dump the unused cocktails tasted them first and declared them still good, and the brothers began selling pre-mixed drinks. In 1892 Heublein bottled its Club Cocktails — credited as the first bottled cocktails sold in America.

The brothers built the five-story Hotel Heublein at Gold and Wells Streets in 1890–91, with gentlemen's and ladies' cafés, basement rathskellers and, by 1906, a rooftop garden with an orchestra of young ladies. After a 1957 renovation its Heublein Lounge was known for jazz players including Dizzy Gillespie, and the building came down in 1965 for Bushnell Plaza.

The Sauce That Saved the Company

Heublein took a license for A.1. from Brand & Co. in 1906, and when the First World War choked off shipments from England, it began making the sauce in Hartford. In 1918, with wartime shipments from England growing sporadic, Heublein reached an agreement with the Brand firm and began making A.1. in Hartford. That decision turned out to be the company's lifeline. Prohibition shut down its liquor business from 1920 to 1933, and A.1. kept Heublein alive for the whole thirteen years. In October 1931 an advertisement in the National Grocers Bulletin told grocers that millions of housewives knew A.1. Sauce and that national advertising was reminding them of it every month.

By the time this pamphlet was printed, Heublein was building again. It bought Grey Poupon mustard in 1936, and in 1939 Heublein executive John G. Martin paid $14,000 for the American rights to a struggling vodka called Smirnoff. His Moscow Mule promotions changed what Americans drank and helped make vodka an American staple. Heublein later bought Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1971, and R. J. Reynolds acquired the whole company in 1982 for $1.4 billion. The A.1. line passed to RJR Nabisco and then to Kraft in 1999.

The Castle Gilbert Promised: Heublein Tower

Hartford's favorite Heublein love story is still standing. Legend has it that on a hike up Talcott Mountain, young Gilbert Heublein promised his fiancée, Louise M. Gundlach, that one day he would build her a castle up there. In 1914 he did: a 165-foot tower designed by Smith and Bassette, anchored into the ridge with steel girders and built to survive 100 mph winds, about 1,000 feet above the Farmington Valley. The Hartford Times bought it in 1943 for its radio station, Dwight D. Eisenhower was a guest there in 1952, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places on July 30, 1983. It stands today in Talcott Mountain State Park in Simsbury, Connecticut.

Welsh Rarebit: The Rabbit That Never Was

One recipe inside carries its own old joke. The dish was first recorded in 1725 as "Welsh rabbit" — melted cheese on toast, with no rabbit anywhere near it, a jab that it was the only rabbit a poor Welshman would see. "Rarebit" is a later, politer spelling, recorded from 1781, and Hannah Glasse printed Scotch, Welsh and English "rabbits" in her 1747 cookbook. The English usage writer H. W. Fowler grumbled in 1926: "Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong." Heublein, like most American food companies, went with rarebit.

Why a 1941 Recipe Pamphlet Matters

Within weeks of this printing the country was at war, and by 1943 Americans were counting ration points for meat, butter and cheese. A pamphlet built around stretching leftovers, canned fish and a bottle of seasoning was about to become the way everyone cooked. Two decades later the marketing turned: beginning in the early sixties A·1 was sold in the United States as "A.1. Steak Sauce," and the everyday relish of this pamphlet was forgotten. In May 2014 Kraft dropped "Steak" from the name, calling it A.1. Sauce again — the same all-purpose pitch printed on this back panel in 1941.

Questions People Ask

How old is this A-1 Sauce pamphlet?
It carries its own printed date code, 9-15-41, on the back panel: September 15, 1941.

Why is A-1 called a "relish" instead of a steak sauce?
In 1941 Heublein sold A·1 as an all-purpose seasoning for the kitchen and table. The "Steak Sauce" name came with a marketing shift in the early sixties, and Kraft dropped it again in 2014.

Was A-1 Sauce really made in Hartford, Connecticut?
Yes. Heublein began manufacturing the sauce in Hartford when the First World War disrupted imports from England, and the back of this pamphlet signs off with the Heublein name and its Hartford address.

What recipes are inside?
Nine of them, from a lamb-and-rice casserole and a cheese rarebit to a tomato-soup spaghetti bake, tuna or lobster salad, doctored baked beans and a closing note on dressing up leftovers.

How big is it, and has it been used?
It is 6 x 3.5 inches, and it is new old stock.

Who would want it?
Collectors of food advertising and vintage cookbooks, Hartford and Connecticut history buffs, Heublein, Smirnoff and Prohibition-history collectors, and anyone who cooks from old recipes.