Mrs. Wilson's Mother's "Hand-Me-Down" Chocolate Cake (Hershey's advertisement)

The recipe on the sheet

"Hand-Me-Down" Chocolate Cake

¾ cup butter or margarine · 1¾ cups sugar · 2 eggs · 1 teaspoon vanilla · 2 cups all-purpose flour · ¾ cup Hershey's Cocoa · 1¼ teaspoons baking soda · ½ teaspoon salt · 1⅓ cups water.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla; beat 1 minute at medium speed. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt; add alternately with water to the creamed mixture. Pour batter into 2 greased and floured 8-inch cake pans. Bake at 350° for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool; frost with chocolate frosting and decorate.

What the sheet actually is

The bulk of the page is a first-person story, not a recipe: a woman remembers her four-year-old brother Tommy sliding on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and landing his hand flat in their mother's just-frosted chocolate layer cake. Rather than lose the cake before a dinner guest, the mother outlined the handprint in white icing, added a candied violet on the ring finger and an icing ruffle at the wrist, and served it as "Hand-Me-Down" Chocolate Cake — from a recipe that had been in the family for generations. The narrator dates the evening by the radio news: the invasion of Poland, i.e. September 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, they begged for the handprint every time.

The headline panel reads "Mrs. Wilson's 'Hand-Me-Down' Chocolate Cake tastes as good as her Mother's did 33 years ago." A coupon offers the Hershey's 1934 Cookbook, 123 recipes, 96 pages, for $1.50 from Box 5348, Clinton, Iowa 52732.

Notes — dating the sheet

It is not a 1930s clipping, despite reading like one. The coupon carries a five-digit ZIP code (52732), and ZIP codes were not introduced until 1963. The "33 years ago" line against the 1939 setting points at an early-1970s printing. So: a story set in 1939, printed no earlier than 1963, advertising a reprint of a 1934 cookbook.

This is a good example of why the Printed\ folder exists as a folder rather than a front-matter flag. Nothing on the page is handwritten and nothing marks it as the family's — only its condition says it was used, and condition is not provenance.