Worse than headcheese

Here's a recipe I emphatically don't recommend, despite its simplicity (the only listed ingredients are cauliflower and mayonnaise). From the September 1954 Good Housekeeping, a pathetic attempt by Hellman's to increase America's gratuitous mayonnaise consumption.

Did anyone see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring Attack of the (the) Eye Creatures? The special effects budget of that film could have been reduced even further (like, under ten bucks) with a jar of Hellman's and some olives.

Separated at birth?

Doesn't "King Zippy" look a lot like Kevin C. Cucumber, head of the Jellyspotters' Club?


I tried to find an image of Kevin being carried on the shoulders of his adoring anchovy followers, but no luck. This image doesn't do him justice--you can't see his arms or his minions.

Zippy doesn't seem to have any legs at all though, so at least he's got an excuse to be carried everywhere.

Sheesh

That has to be some kind of record--I had to post the previous in four separate chunks, and then combine them. That followed I think eight attempts to post it in its entirety, each and every one of which caused Blogger to lock up my browser. Curse you Blogger, and your intermittently-crappy free service!

Stepford teens

I picked this little charmer up on eBay a while back--published in 1959, it was a collaboration between the editors of Co-Ed magazine and Gay Head, a social expert, I guess you'd call her, who must have developed her howitzer-like breeziness in a desperate attempt to drown out the endless jokes about her name.

I also happen to have an issue of Co-Ed, from December '58, and a dreary specimen it is, too.

Both are prime examples of the real harm home economics did to this country (if you haven't read Laura Shapiro's books, I recommend them--see the links to the right). But we'll get to that in a minute.

Don't you just love this "party"? Wouldn't you feel smart and clever and gosh-all with-it if you were there? Wouldn't you be begging someone to just shoot you in the head?

If I had Photoshop I would be able to tell you the titles of all the records they have on the floor, but alas, no. All I can make out is the last part of one name, "--lanetz." Must be Andre Kostelanetz. Spaceagepop (http://www.spaceagepop.com/kostelan.htm ) says "Percy Faith, Ray Conniff--even Liberace--are names one naturally associates with easy listening, but they were entertainers, creators, who liked to spice things up, to toss in a surprise now and again. But Kostelanetz's goal was a pristinely perfect and consistent product, with no rough edges, no striking sounds, nothing to deter from a seamlessly smooth musical experience."

That sounds perfect for this gang. Party perfect!


Here the young lady in blue has a slightly more natural expression. Sadly, now that she's smiling in a remotely human manner, she reveals an unfortunately long nose. Pompador-head over there is just staring at it. The two of them are trying heroically to gloss over the awkwardness with food.

Good luck with that, kids.


This is what passed for party food in 1959: Peanut Butter Dipsies. If you're too stunned to click on the recipe, I'll give you the main ingredients: Peanut butter, mayonnaise, hard-cooked eggs, pickle relish, salt, and bacon. Oh, and "30 small round-shaped pieces bread." Get it? It's egg salad with peanut butter.

And only in the 50's would a recipe based on peanut butter, mayonnaise, pickle relish, and bacon call for additional salt. You can tell these kids are going to drop dead of thromboses before they hit 45. Which is probably a blessing, given the kinds of marriages they are likely to end up in.

Still testing

Testing

Trying to pry an image loose from blogger photo. Stand by for jolliness.

Apologies

Blogger has been holding photo posts hostage for some reason--please stay tuned.

Gross meat on other blogs

James Lileks has some great (read: horrible) BBQ recipes up at his site; my favorite.

Oddities of 50's advertising, Part One: Disembodied heads

A farewell to meat porn

And so, Happy Fathers Day, Dad. You are the faceless arm and torso that frame our World of Meat. Your half-comotose wife and square-headed progeny salute you with their adoring, perhaps medically -prescribed, gazes. Even though you seem to have forgotten the grill this evening, and demanded we throw the meat directly onto the lighter-fluid-soaked charcoal briquettes.

Incidentally, I don't know what kind of animal that cut of meat came off of, but I fail to see how the creature could have walked.

If you still don't believe me about 50's meat, check out the chart below. These things eerily resemble the hibernating grubs I dig up in my garden every spring. Mmmm-mmm. Bet those would go great on a shish-kabob.

Do I even need to comment on this?

OK, I almost, almost, withstood temptation and resisted posting this one. Untill I noticed the utterly gratuitous bowl of bananas and apples. I mean, come on.

You really need to look at the large version for full effect (click the image).

The "portable grills" pictured here are classic 50's safety hazards: metal cans which you can use to carry all your picnic stuff, and within which you are supposed to build a charcoal fire. Great--until it's time to take them home (insulation as a concept being still in its infancy in the 50's). How many purchasers ended up with that plaid pattern permanently branded onto their hands, I wonder?

Eew

There's an ad for farm-raised elk meat showing up periodically at the top of the page. Please remember, no endorsement is expressed or implied.

Fork into fluffy piping-hot metaphors

This page is a poignent reminder of the lot of the working woman in the 1950's. Imagine a career as a copywriter for Better Homes and Gardens--a gal's dream job, by all popular standards. And yet--how many snappy verbs can you come up with for heads and sub-heads in a cookbook? There's cook, sure, and eat. Maybe serve. After that . . . the list tails off, your mind wanders, your polished fingernails tap the freshly-sharpened pencil absently on the steno pad . . . you wonder, was the degree in Literature really necessary for this job? Maybe you should have followed Sue's lead, and done the Home Ec course instead. Sure, there were more lab hours, and you had to pass the test in appliances and electricity, but look at Sue's career now. She invented a rosin potato cooker . . . Don probably thinks that's swell, he always hated mushy baked potatoes . . . that's how Sue stole him away in the first place . . . wonder if they're really happy. Ah, fork this job anyway.

Would you cook your potatoes in rosin? Webster's Seventh tells me rosin is "a translucent amber-colored to almost black brittle friable resin that is obtained by chemical means from the oleoresin or dead wood of pine trees or from tall oil and used in making varnish, paper size, soap, and soldering flux and on violin bows."

Yum!

Review: Meat + pointy sticks = manly

Granted, this page is forward-thinking enough to acknowledge that women might enjoy eating shish-kebabs (or "kabobs" as they are called here). But the "Dad's Delight for man-sized appetites" gives the game away. Women are expected to put smaller pieces of meat on their skewers. The Company Cookout recipe on the left page helpfully suggests two sizes: "ladylike tidbits" or "he-man" size. Remember, there are ONLY TWO options.

As if the "Tall-teen Wienies" weren't bad enough on their own (why "tall"? What is tall about them? If anything they are notably more horizontal than the other kebabs, assuming you aren't running the skewer through all that cheese. Are they intended to be eaten by tall teenagers? Teens with big feet? Do we really want to make this connection?), note that of the seven recipes on this double page, two feature hot dogs, one features balogna, and the other is based on canned ham. In addition to being cheap and repulsive, all of these so-called foods are pre-cooked, making their slicing and stringing and marinading and grilling doubly pointless.

By the way, most browsers will give you a larger image if you just click any image in this blog. I added a note to this effect at the top of the blog. Most of my entries, you really need to see the details up close.

Sometimes a pepper grinder is just a pepper grinder

But not this time. Continuing yesterday's theme of meat monarchy, today we see the only relationship 50's men were allowed to have with salad: total dominance.

Frankly, his "equipment" doesn't look exactly "king-size" to me. I've seen bigger pepper grinders (there's another 50's cookbook, I think a BHG, with a similar picture, featuring an enormous, but enormous, black pepper grinder--but for the life of me I can't locate it at this time). Still, you'd have to be pretty dim not to get the point. Come on, why else would there be eggs in that bowl?

This is the kind of photo that leaves me conflicted--most 50's advertising makes me laugh and say, oh, they were so naive! But stuff like this makes me think they had to know what they were doing. Presumably it was just the readers who were that niave.

Notice the striped apron--that's 50's code for "I'm not gay!" Also, due to the lack of meat or even hamburger buns, the photographer appears to have greased this man's head instead.

You and your meat

Remember:
1) Meat makes you manly. It is the natural domain of men. Women admire men who handle their meat well. In fact, they find meat-smart men downright fascinating.

2) Skewers are almost as manly as meat.

3) In the Meat Kingdom, men can wear aprons, but they must be striped.

Tell me, why are his eyes closed? Is jamming an iron rod through three raw chickens really that pleasurable? I think he's overcompensating.

Fathers, start your engines

Cross your fingers--Blogger is starting out the week with some ominous hiccups.

Here is the cover of this week's focus: Better Homes and Gardens 1956 (and 58 and 59) BARBECUE BOOK. It's got all the glistening meat and gender stereotyping a man could ask for.

A few explanations as our journey gets underway:
Barbecue wasn't just a way to cook in the 50's. It was a symbolic escape from civilization itself. To barbecue properly, you had to do more than just buy the meat and light the fire. You had to practically revert to Neanderthal status. In the 50's, that meant using paper napkins and not garnishing the salad with radish roses. Still, it's amusing to see how earnestly and explicitely this manual instructs the suburbanite in how to have fun at a barbecue. And the book is very precise in breaking down tasks for men and women, as we'll see.

Barbecue was also an exciting new way to get people to buy exciting new products, or, in some cases, completely stupid new products. You'll see a few of these this week. It's all about consumption. What if the Russians had invented the rosin potato cooker before us, for God's sake?

Something about the spirit of barbecue (at least as they envisioned it) provoked the writers of this tome to drop final -g's and add apostrophes with wild abandon. See the repulsive modifier "smackin' best" above. And the word "them" hardly appears in this text except in the folksey, colloquial, and intensely annoying form "'em" (again, see above). The captions and framing text throughout this book acheive a fever pitch unequalled in any other BHG cookbook that I've seen.

Perhaps all those missing letters are due to the astonishing quantity of grease slathered across everything. All those g's and th's just went skidding off into the margins on a sheet of lard. So far, I haven't found a recipe in this book that's worth sharing, mainly for health reasons. Most of the salads call for bacon or mayonnaise, or both. The amount of fat pictured on the meat is mind-boggling. I used to think Commie-hunting alcoholic Joseph McCarthy was weird for eating a stick of butter everyday. This book led me to re-think that assumption. In the 50's, downing a stick of butter was probably equivalent to us eating a granola bar.

Stop that sport coat before it kills again

Sorry about the big blurry gutter on this image; I was afraid I'd crack the glass on my scanner if I mashed the book down any harder.

But:

If you ever, in a fit of misinformed nostalgia, wished you were a teenager in the 50's, look at this picture, and repent. That poor, poor young man. I wonder if he ever recovered from this photo shoot. "Wider!" says the photographer. "Wider! No, keep the hamburger in front of the jacket. It cuts the glare."

The little electric grill makes me laugh, too--have you ever cooked something greasy on one of those old electric grills with the exposed element? Remember the horrible metallic pinging and evil hiss every time a drop of grease hit the hot wire? Remember the smell? Now imagine trying that with 1950's ground beef, which must have been close to 40% fat. If that grill were actually plugged in, every one of these kids would be hidden in an enormous cloud of smoke.

Also, those hamburger buns. Sometimes you read in recipes to "butter the hamburger buns," but I never assumed that meant to butter them on the outside. Yet that appears to be what they've done here. Honestly, those things positively glow.

As you can tell, I've been rummaging amongst the Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks series in preparation for our Father's Day extravaganze next week. This is from 1963's Birthdays and Family Celebrations--yes, I know, 1963 isn't the 50's, but I suspect many of the recipes and pictures are recycled from earlier BHG texts--they reused stuff frequently from book to book, to stretch out the product line.

Horrifying coporate mascots, Part 1 of a 990,000 part series

Check out the spats on this freak.

Doesn't he remind you, just the tiniest little bit, of Michael Jackson?

Bloggeritis

Blogger seems to have gotten over its latest bout of pissiness, and restored all my photos. Hooray, Blogger! You are a free service.

Gaaah!

This bulbous tyke was featured in a series of ads for Van Camp's products around '53--sometimes he'd leer at you from behind a can of beans on the left-hand page, then from behind a can of corn on the facing right page. The layout is reminiscent of the Arthur Godfrey bleach/laundry rinse ad duo posted below--and doesn't this kid look a bit like a young Godfrey?

Shudder.

Anyway, I'm struck by the outsize markers of what passed for good health in the '50's: plump cheeks, ruddy complexion (to the point of floridity), a general greasy sheen, and goo oozing down the chin. Overindulgence was a patriotic duty in those days, sure, but if I've ever seen a four-year-old candidate for a heart attack, it's this kid.

I'm cooking up (that's a pun, did you catch that?) a little something special for next week, in honor of the approach of Father's Day. Keep your fingers crossed that Blogger doesn't pitch a snit-fit.

So, that image below

left me with many unanswered questions, perhaps the most perplexing of which is, what is the kid yelling?

It does that

Blogger's not letting me post photos at the moment--testing to see what can get through . . .



OK, all the photos are down. There's a photo above, trust me, even if you can't see it at the moment.

I promised recipes

Here's a good one. From the inside front cover of Women's Day magazine, October 1951. Betty Crocker's Brownies!

The basic recipe:

4 sq. unsweetened chocolate (4 oz.)
2/3 c. oil
--melt the above together; I use the microwave

2 cups sugar
4 eggs
--beat into the chocolate mixture

1-1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
--mix together and stir in. You don't have to sift it.

1 cup nuts (optional)
--add 'em if you want 'em

Bake in a greased 13x9 inch pan at 350 degrees F for 30-35 minutes.

The variations:
Brownies a la Mode
Bake in 9-inch round pans and top with ice cream. Duh.

Tea Brownies--I haven't tried this one. Looks good for a crowd.
Make half the recipe and spread it in two 13x9 inch pans--very thin. Sprinkle with 3/4 cup blanched slivered almonds or pistachios. Bake 7-8 minutes and cut into squares immediately.

Chocolate-Frosted Brownies--I've tried this, and prefer it over the Hershey's frosting I used to use.
Use half the regular recipe and bake in an 8x8 inch pan (I think this takes 20-25 minutes). Spread with Marie's Chocolate Icing (they don't say who Marie is, presumably a friend of Betty): Melt 1 Tbs. butter with 1 sq. chocolate, blend in 1-1/2 Tbsp. warm water and then beat in 1 cup powedered sugar.

Golden Brownies--haven't tried this yet, but you can't go wrong with a brown sugar meringue.
Make half of regular recipe, but reserve an egg white from one of the eggs. Spread in a 9-inch square pan and spread with meringe topping: Beat egg white until frothy; gradually beat in 1 cup brown sugar and 1/2 tsp. vanilla. Continue beating until very stiff. Fold in 1/2 cup nuts, if you like. Bake at 350; they don't say how long but I'd start with 20 minutes and go from there.

p.s. It took me a while to figure out the weird space-alien things that are waving the wands with numbers. They're brownies. Get it?

Plastic: spawn of the devil

That's what we know now, at any rate. In 1955, it was a miracle substance. To everyone except the glass manufacturers, that is.

This is one of a great many peculiar ads run over a considerable time (details? me?) by the Glass Container Manufacturers Institute. They must have cost a bundle--they are all full-page, full-color. Most of them feature rather pretty photographs of things like sparkling wrapped candy in glass jars, or fifteen different colors of soda pop in glass bottles.

This one is just weird. You can't tell me that glass actually looks better with dregs of old ketchup stuck to it. The freshly-stabbed hamburger in the background doesn't help either, with its halo of grease and stigmata of sacrificial tomato-blood. And that knife, for heaven's sake--it's pointing right at us!

Who uses a steak knife to eat a hamburger?

Could this be a crude early attempt at subconscious advertising? The blood, the knife, the reference to blessings? Are they going for the Pentacostal market segment, or the repressed slasher market? I thought it might have something to do with Easter, but this is an October issue.

And did the Glass Container Manufacturers Institute win their holy crusade against plastic? They sure fought the good fight--this site lists 126 of their ads for glass bottles that ran between 1955-1969 ("The D'Arcy Collection of the Communications Library of the University of Illinois is a collection of almost two million original advertisements published between 1890 and 1970." There. Details). They don't seem to be in business anymore, but glass bottles can still be had with relative ease. This particular ad's mission appears hopeless though--would you ask your grocer to stock "foods like powdered milk, brown sugar, and cornstarch" in glass bottles?

Me neither.