I apologize in advance

. . . if the following puts anyone off their feed for the near future. It's a badly scanned picture of bad food. "Plan your lenten meals around eggs, canned fish, cheese," advises Julia Lee Wright. Curious whether Ms. Wright had suffered some sort of childhood accident that rendered her tastebuds useless, I have conducted a thorough search of the Internets only to find that no one, evidently, knows anything about her. She appears to have been more active in the 30s and 40s, writing for Homemakers' Bureaus and for Safeway. Some food historian should do a write-up on her, even if her life was less interesting and tragic than Poppy Cannon's. Who knows, maybe she didn't even exist, like Betty Crocker. Perhaps, by 1954, she was just phoning it in. Your guess is as good as mine.


What we have here, from top left to lower right, are: Pennywise Salmon Bake, Eggplant Parmigiana, Double-Decker Spanish Omelet (mercifully truncated by my scanner), Tuna Timbales with French Cream Sauce, and Tuna Souffle Sandwiches.

The omelette isn't as bad as it looks (how could it be?). It's basically six elaborately separated, scrambled and whipped eggs with cream, baked, with tomato sauce on top. If you ever had a slightly odd friend who liked ketchup on her scrambled eggs, she would have liked this. The timbales are more egregious--really, they are a smaller version of the 3-layer tuna-noodle-what-the-hell we saw earlier this week: Tuna and noodles, crammed into muffin tins. Instead of putting he processed American cheese into the noodles, you turn it into "French" cheese sauce and pour it on top.

The Tuna Souffle Sandwiches call for tuna salad, with the addition of horseradish (wow), to be spread on toast and covered with what seems to be a meringue topping that has had mayonnaise and pickle relish folded in. This is the kind of thing that gives me nightmares.

The Pennywise Salmon Bake and Eggplant Parmigiana actually don't have much wrong with them as recipes go, so why do they look so repellent? What was it about food photography in the 50s that makes everything look like a doughy, greasy Chicago politician? Why did it have to be that way?