Ending September: Month of the gayest salads since gay moved to Gaytown

Plenty stands out from this September 1959 Family Circle feature on HEARTY SALADS (apply kooky font of your choice). There's the Cthulhu-like "Chedderoni," yet another exhibit in our continuing freak show of foods inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. There's the reassuring statement in the first line that there is NOTHING sissy about these salads! Even though we named one Tray Gay! Because this is 1959 and homosexuality doesn't exist! Just sissies! And everyone hates them and no one wants to feed them! So it's OK!
But what I like best is the mystifying attempt to make "Tray Gay" into an actual recipe, when it fact it calls for putting vegetables on a tray. I mean, come on, "Pick up a red-ripe tomato or two to eat just plain"? That's not a recipe; it's a stage direction. If Yoko Ono wrote a cookbook, I expect that's what all the recipes would look like: "Recipe for Joy Salad: Eat a tomato."

If Yoko Ono did it, it would be cool.

Adding, and another thing, I do like how in 1959, before we all lived in refrigerated splendor, magazines acknowledged that September 1st did not in fact herald the beginning of the long holiday calendar death spiral. Here in Texas, it's still 90 degrees every day, and projected to remain that way until at least a week into October. But is anyone suggesting I make salad? No, Martha Stewart and Southern Living insist I must now begin nourishing my family with savory stews and pork roasts with winter root vegetables and a million things with pumpkin in them and I don't even like pumpkin all that much. But we have to eat it in October because IT'S AUTUMN! And buy plaid flannel jumpers at the mall and shop for winter shoes and ogle the Old Navy store full of woolen sweaters that no one will ever wear because WE LIVE IN TEXAS AND IT IS 90 DEGREES YEAR-ROUND! In 1959, they didn't deny reality like this. In 1959, if the polar ice caps had started to melt, they would have said, holy crap, that means the Russians will have a warm-water port. We'd better do something, fast. They wouldn't have walked around with Bluetooth headsets jammed in their ears, slurping iced pumpkin frappuccinos from Starbucks and shopping for Christmas decorations in October. If they had, we'd all be speaking Russian right now. And there IS no Russian word for frappuccino.

As always, click on the image to make it bigger, if you think you've got the guts.