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.