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?