Just because you cancan doesn't mean you shouldshould

I know it's hard to read the fine print on these scans, but this time I'm doing you a favor.

Family Circle thought this "cancan Cassarole" (because you make it with canned foods--get it? Get it????) would be an ideal dish to "tote" (man they loved that word) along to a picnic. I'll just hit the highlights:

- a can of tomato soup
- a "can or jar" of tamales. I think you can still get canned tamales, but I shudder to think what a jar of them would look like.
- a can of tuna
- a can of creamed corn
- rice

This recipe makes an interesting brain teaser: which of the canned items most deserves to be excluded? I keep thinking, well, of you just took out the tuna . . . but then, no, creamed corn and tomato soup don't work either. Take out the creamed corn, and you're still left with tamales and tuna, which is also clearly not right. If you took out the corn and the tuna, and added a can of beans, maybe? Perhaps that was the original recipe they started with, and then they "fancied it up" with the tuna and corn?

A lot of 50's recipes feature wildly inappropriate food combinations--especially as packaged "convenience" foods start to take over--see Laura Shapiro's excellent Something from the Oven for the gory details. But this one has to be near the top of the list in terms of its glop factor.