Six ways to ruin perfectly good cereal

Cereal and fruit: a combination we can all get behind.

Or so you'd think. Unlike the bunny salad in the previous post, which horrifies by its soon-to-be-eaten cuteness, these creations (would they be composed cereals?) are, for the most part, just plain creepy.
The Little Man Who Wasn't There (oddly, subject of a song from a play about a psychotic co-ed) looks like a mushroom (on a good morning I guess he'd look like a banana in a sombrero). The Man in the Moon isn't going to work, forget it, you're not going to get that level of definition on top of Cheerios. Winken, Blinken, and Nod is just confusing, and Fatso is patently offensive. Nothing compared to Old Black Joe, though. Wow.



Sadly, they actually look a little better in the drawings than they do in real life. I note the significant absence of Old Black Joe in the photo. Also notice how much less artificial color they put in cereal in those days.It's kind of hard to tell the Trix from the Kix.

The pear/Pig in a Poke is resting on Sugar Jets, in case you are wondering. I couldn't tell what they were at first. And the dish in the middle is Wheaties with strawberries mixed with softened ice cream. For breakfast.

Composed salads: The horror

Candle salad.

Those two words ought to strike fear into your heart, and if they don't, you've been lucky and lived a good life and never been served one of these, especially at a dinner party.

The version here is bad enough, with the cherry. When this monstrosity first appeared in either the 20s or 30s (I've lost track), the "flame" was a piece of pimiento. And, I swear to God, even though I can't find it at the moment, one recipe I've seen calls for the cook (I use the term loosely) to "dribble mayonnaise down the side of the banana to simulate melting wax."

Well. How would you keep a straight face in front of the other guests?

The Bunny Salad, on the other hand, is heartless in a different way. You simulate a tiny, cute, obviously terrified baby rabbit crouching in fear, and then you slice him up with your salad fork and devour him. Why not just run him over with the lawn mower, for God's sake?

Cooking by and for encephalitic children

Betty Crocker recently republished her "Cook Book for Boys and Girls" from 1957. Interesting in lots of ways, but perhaps most so because of the hideously distorted portraits of the child testers referenced within.

Sure, the hairstyles don't help, but come on.

I'll cover more out of this one as the week progresses.

In the meantime, here's the recipe for butter pie crust I mentioned earlier:

1 1/4 c. flour
10 T high-fat butter (often called "European")
Add 1/4 t. salt if you use unsalted butter
2-5 T. ice water

Cut the butter into the flour (and salt, if used). Add the water until it starts to gather. Roll into a ball, wrap, and chill at least 1 hour before rolling. Make one 9-inch pie crust.

The good, the bad, and the perplexing

Three recipes in this Wesson ad from August 1950, and three verdicts.

Stir-n-roll pie crust: Good. I've struggles a lot with pie crust over the years. Crisco produces a somewhat flaky but flavorless and often tough crust. Butter and shortening combos (I got one from Julia Child's baking book) are better, but messy and produce so much crust they can overwhelm the pie. Right now I'm enamored of an all-butter recipe that calls for high-fat, European butter. I've also had some luck with tart shell recipes requiring an egg or egg yolk and no rolling (but I don't currently own a food processor, so I haven't made those lately.

But for me the failsafe is always oiled pastry. It is easy to make, you don't need special equipment, and it never turns out horribly. You roll it between sheets of waxed paper so you don't get flour everywhere. It isn't flaky, but it is always tender. However, I've tried using milk, as this ad directs, and not liked the results so much. Oil and water are better.

The filling here, on the other hand . . . no. Frozen or canned fruit, melted marshmallows, whipping cream . . . I just don't think so. Not even in August.

The salad mystifies me. What makes it a "Man" catcher? The capers? Are capers a guy thing?

More fatigue-fighting cereals to the rescue!

We've seen the basic information here before; Cream of Rice is your go-to cereal because it hits the bloodstream in mere seconds. Outside of a concentration camp, I'm not sure why this matters, but in the 40s, people thought it did. This version is jazzed up compared to the one I posted earlier, they've added the cartoon presence of the vaunted Child Specialist and a couple of ADHD-looking kids. What I like best about it is the comparison at the very bottom (I'm not sure you can see it; maybe if you click and enlarge the image) in the text bubble next to the box. There, they claim that Cream of Rice is better than the following cereals:

1) wheat
2) oat
3) baby

Is it just me, or does that creep you out too? Granted, I'm not a Child Specialist; I've only given birth to two of 'em.





Now here, we've got bigger problems.
Would you trust your child's protection to an elderly man in tights and a wig? Even her "energy protection"? (I still can't imagine who Americans thought was trying to steal all their energy in the late 40s--Nazi spies? Working women? Lex Luthor?) This is exactly the kind of guy I want my kids to stay away from.

And the "famous" "plan" they are touting turns out to be this: Eat some oatmeal every day.

The other white meat

Remember the heyday of cheap Argentine beef imports? Me neither. Like Prem, Treet, and Mor, Anglo appears to have sunk without a ripple into Davy Jones' meat locker.

It never reached the same level of market penetration; Mor, Prem and Treet all run full-page color ads regularly in the 50's (and don't even ask about Spam ads--you can't escape them). Anglo just has these marginal, back of the book two-colors.

It seems that Britain got a lot more Argentine beef than we did. Bonus fact: The Anglo company was named after a town, named after a Jesuit priest.

Bonus quote: "Prince Charles said: 'I remember eating Fray Bentos beef until it came out of my ears.'" Wow, so that's what happened to his ears.

Cake, squared

I haven't tried this recipe yet, because really it isn't a checkerboard cake, just two different cakes stacked up, with squares of coconut on the top. But I still love the photo. The way they cut the cake is inspired, I think. Some home economist or food stylist earned her salary on this ad.

My sense is that "digestible" is always used to describe vegetable shortenings in order to to distinguish them from lard, which often isn't very digestible. But maybe there were some hellishly bad vegetable shortenings on the market in the early days. People were still working the kinks out. "Nutritious" I can't defend, except to point out that high calorie counts made a food "nutritious" in the 50s.

This ad also represents a Great Leap Forward for the Swift company from its lard ads. James Lileks has one of these on his site, and it's one of the most peculiar things you could ever hope to see in terms of lard ads.

Christmas in August

I just noticed how many black and white images I've been posting lately. I guess we've been stuck in 1947 for a while. Let's back cautiously away from this grim monotoned decade and return to the bright Oz of the fifties, shall we?

Baker's Coconut can be counted on to reliably produce mesmerizingly hideous food images, time and again. Look, here's "ambrosia" sprinkled with gritty threads of coconut. Here's a cake covered in green seven-minute icing, camouflaged with coconut. What did they think they were going to hide? But my favorite is Frosty the Snowblob down at the bottom, a cupcake slathered in 7-minute frosting, coconut, and shame. Plus his head is a marshmallow. Would someone please eat him and put him out of his misery?

If you've never cooked or eaten 7-minute frosting, you really don't know what the fifties were about. You can't understand the Cold War, McCarthyism, Milton Berle, Korea, desegregation, or the heyday of American automobiles. You just have no idea.

So, here's a recipe, adapted from Betty Crocker's 1950 Picture Cookbook:

Combine 2 egg whites, 1-1/2 cups sugar, 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar, and 1/3 cup water in top of double boiler. beat until firm peaks form. Add 1 tsp. vanilla.

Put this on a cake, and try to eat more than three bites. It sort of glues your mouth together. In the 50's, this was the most basic cake frosting imaginable. Buttercream was a cop-out; it wasn't luxurious enough. You couldn't pile it on two inches thick, so why bother? 7-minute frosting was light, abundant, hyper-sweet, and pure in color; it was as shiny and exciting as a new Chevy. Everyone used 7-minute, and no one questioned it.

Now do you understand?

Won't someone please think of the children?

Like you, for example--do you want your kids growing up to be shifty-eyed, caffeine-swilling meth addicts? No? Then you'd better start pouring Postum down their throats right this very minute!

It should be easy if you, like the woman in the ad, are a fabulously manicured giantess. Conversely, if you're normal, and your kid's that small, something has stunted her, and you'd better make some changes fast. Either you've been putting caffeine (sorry, caffein) in her formula from Day 1, or she's already smoking. But simply having her read books about giraffes isn't enough.

James Lileks has some of the even creepier Mr. Coffee Nerves Postum ads on his Web site.

According to Wikipedia, "The ingredients in Postum are wheat bran, wheat, molasses, and corn dextrin." They'd probably have to terrify me into drinking that.

Ironically, C. W. Post's Postum is now sold by Kraft.