Incidentally, here's an interesting little run down of some thirties-era cookbooks.

This timeline of how people cooked and what they ate in the 20th century is really, really interesting.

Ritz Mock Apple Pie? Period-appropriate. I'll also toss whoopie pies into the mix, despite their vexed origins (I'm with Pennsylvania on this one--Wikipedia does note, however, that "[t]he now-defunct Berwick Cake Company of Roxbury, Massachusetts had been making the "Whoopee Pie" since 1931").

Here's a history of cookies. Hey, the chocolate chip cookie was invented in the thirties!

Depression-Era Cooking with 95-year-old Clara.

Great timeline, Orange Swan!

Fannie Farmer sugar cookies are identical to the "tea cakes" my great-grandmother used to make for my mother in the 1940s and 1950s, and the recipe has been in our family for much longer than that.

They are also unbelievably delicious. I have been accused of putting crack in them because people can't stop eating them. They were the most-requested cookie at last year's cookie exchange, beating out all kinds of fancy competitors.

However, do not overcook them. Pull them out of the oven the moment the edges start to brown. Then they are chewy and wonderful. A few more minutes and they turn into beige hockey pucks.

A classic is the cake that's variously called Poor Man's Cake, Depression Cake, War Cake, etc, the idea being that you could make the cake with cheap ingredients because it doesn't generally contain any butter or eggs and uses only small amounts of sugar and sometimes milk. My grandmother made this all the time - it's excellent because you can pretty much always make it out of what you have in the pantry - and I've heard that it is one of the most frequently submitted recipes to magazine contests and the like, because everybody's family had a version.

It's really pretty tasty - basically a cocoa/spice cake, as our version had it.

I've got an older Betty Crocker cookbook at home - I'll see what I can come up with this evening.

I was going to suggest the depression cake, myself.

Yeah, we called the Depression Cake "Wacky Cake". This is our recipe.

Well, I ended up deciding that just about anything I could bake that would be suitable didn't seem all that definitively thirties. I mean, chocolate chip cookies were invented in the thirties, but chocolate chip cookies don't exactly scream "historically specific recipe" to me.

So I just baked some mashed potato/molasses cookies and some orange ginger chocolate chip cookies, and took two dozen of each to the party. My friend whose party it was put them on the table in front of everyone with much fanfare and the cookies were enthusiastically received by even the most foodie of the attendees. At any rate the cookies steadily disappeared and no one seemed disappointed that the recipes weren't of the proper pedigree.