Party Meatloaf

Just because you cancan doesn't mean you shouldshould

2008-06-01T08:22:00.000-05:00

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.

I'll have what the poodles are smoking

2008-05-21T08:27:00.004-05:00

Old Gold cigarette ads regularly puzzle me. They resort to some of the most surreal associative images of all the 50s ads (LOOK! WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT NOT CANCER!). This has to be the strangest so far though:
The attempted sleight of hand is just so bad. The cigarettes come in two sizes; fine--put some cute dogs in there to illustrate the sizes!

And show the dogs smoking, because everyone loves dogs and they wouldn't do anything bad!

And make them French poodles because . . . well, because we know they come in different sizes!

And juxtapose the terms "treat" and "treatment" to make people mad at those other cigarettes that remind you smoking is bad for you!

And tell people they can "take comfort" in the fact that Old Gold has been selling tobacco for a long time. Clearly, since no one has ever died of cancer, this proves the product is safe.

Whatever the creators of this ad were smoking at the development meeting, it wasn't tobacco.

DIY

2008-05-14T18:48:00.002-05:00

Apologies for the hiatus--if you could see my sunburn you would understand.

My daughter and I made this Checkerboard Cake from the Betty Crocker Cake & Frosting Mix Cook [sic] Book a couple of weeks ago:

My suggestions:
1) Use 8-inch round pans. We used 9" rounds as recommended, and the sections didn't come out square, but rectangular. You'd have to do three rings of batter to get squares, I think. I'm not sure why this is. Do cake mixes rise less today than they did in the 60s?

2) When you put the batter into the inner ring, hold the ring in place with one hand (or one of your helper's hands). Otherwise it will slide around in the pan and your circle will be off-center. I filled the inside circles first, as the recipe directs.

3) Hold back a little white batter in case you can't get the batter levels to match inside and outside of the circles. You can add a little more food coloring to your reserve batter if you need to, and even things out.

4) We used pink gel food coloring because I had some (who doesn't? Don't you?). But other colors would look just as cool (or strange, take your pick). I didn't use almond extract because I forgot it, and I'm not sure a two-flavored cake would really be the kind of surprise my family would appreciate. Checkerboard colors, OK. Almond flavoring, I might be trying to kill them.

5) I used butter frosting because I always do, because it was good enough for my mother and who really likes that marshmallowy stuff anyway?

Frosting Nog!

2008-05-05T07:51:00.003-05:00

I don't suppose there's anything wrong with making milkshakes out of frosting mix, really . . . it's mostly packaged sugar, after all. Still, there something not quite right about frosting mix plus corn syrup plus butter plus milk plus a raw egg.

Don't you think so?

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Products and flavors no longer available from Betty Crocker

2008-05-05T07:35:00.003-05:00

As found in the 1966 Cake and Frosting Mix Cookbook.

Cake mixes:
Tropical Mist
Honey Spice (you can still get plain Spice)
Butter Brickle (now Butter Pecan)
Lemon Velvet (now just Lemon)
Lemon Chiffon (I think Chiffon cake went out with Nixon)
Cherry Fudge
Chocolate Malt

Frosting mixes:
Golden Caramel
Coconut Pecan
Chocolate Fudge
Butter Brickle
Lemon Velvet
Cherry Fudge
Chocolate Malt

In fact, the only frosting mix you can still buy is Fluffy White. There are 21 flavors of canned frosting to choose from though.

Cakefight!

2008-05-01T07:35:00.003-05:00

Can you even imagine, in this day and age, having an election returns party with both Democrats and Republicans attending? This is what Karl Rove and his ilk have done to our country--we can't even eat cake together anymore. Which I guess is a minor point compared to our lost moral standing, economic implosion, and decaying infrastructure and health. But it's still sad. If cake can't bring us together, we're screwed.

I didn't realize until I posted this that I cropped off the title; it's for an "Election Returns Party Cake." There are lots of recipes like this in the cake mix cookbook; you make a shaped cake by baking a square or round cake and then carving it elaborately into the shape you want. Simpler times.

What I like best about the instructions for this recipe is that they stipulate you should construct the marshmallow-and-gumdrop eyes so that the elephant and donkey are looking at each other.

If you want to try this on your own, you can click on the image for the larger version.

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When the back of the box isn't enough

2008-04-30T14:11:00.003-05:00

From 1966, I give you Betty Crocker's Cake and Frosting Mix Book:

Notice that's cake AND frosting mix. They tell you all kindsa stuff you can do with frosting mixes too, like making meringues or fudge or fondant out of frosting mix, or "Children's Surprises" such as Cheerios-Peanut Butter Fudge Balls, Cheerios-Fudge Confections, or Frozen Cheerios Squares. (Yes, Betty Crocker is the official imaginary spokeslady of General Mills, which makes Cheerios. But GM makes other cereals too, don't they?
Not as far as this book is concerned.)

Anyway. I'm fascinated by cookbooks which purport to tell one how to cook when really they aren't telling you to do anything of the sort. These days, we have the Cake Mix Doctor, a presumably very nice lady who advises readers to do unspeakable things with cake mixes, often to the point of adding enough extra ingredients to them that you could have made a perfectly good dessert without using the cake mix in the first place. And then there is the More is Better school of cake-mix doctoring, where inconceivable amounts of sugar and artificial flavor are combined into a sinkhole of cloying sweetness, like this "Strawberry Creme Cake" which I actually saw some crazy lady making on TV--strawberry cake mix (ever tried that? If you're not diabetic, probably not), a can of strawberry nectar instead of water (that's another 200 calories), strawberry jam between the layers, and a can of that glycerin-rich, gluey strawberry frosting to top it off.

And speaking of TV cooking shows, can I just say that I saw a lady making cinnamon toast on one a few months ago, and she actually told people you didn't have to use cinnamon if you didn't want to. That some people liked the way it spices up the toast, but that plain sugar was good too. I submit to you that when cinnamon toast without cinnamon is the topic of a TV cooking show, we have too many cooking shows on TV.

Anyway. None of that here. This book has some dumb ideas, sure, but it also spends a lot of time suggesting harmless ways to decorate cakes (dig the Tootsie Rolls on the chocolate cowboy cake!), and has extensive sections on frosting techniques. It also contains what strikes me as a completely superfluous section on "basics." If you can't follow the three steps on the box, I fail to see how two chapters of additional reading are going to help you. Still, we are treated to the Q&A "Why Isn't My Cake Perfect?" (NINE different categories of failure are possible--and you used a CAKE MIX!!! Who's the real failure here?). We also get the 911 call "I Have a Frosting Problem!" Two potential problems for "creamy-type" frostings (too thick and too thin), four for "fluffy-type" (not "beating up," stickiness (?), rubberiness, and "disintegration," an alarming concept to say the least).

More as the week progresses and my meds kick in.

Apropos of nothing

2008-04-24T07:54:00.002-05:00

Half a year away from Halloween, yet I still feel compelled to post this image. I just love the bag. Also, you have to admit the tagline is ominously funny. It wouldn't have had such a sinister ring in 1954, of course.

I suppose this post does at least continue the theme of my craptacular image scanning. I think I've apologized enough for that over the years, so I won't do it here. You can get your lovingly-photographed, Photoshopped and touched-up images just about anywhere on the Web these days. And that's great. It's just not what I do.

A How-To

2008-04-23T07:08:00.002-05:00

A very cool thing about 50's magazines is they assumed women knew how to knit--I mean knit, like, whole sweaters out of fingering weight yarn on size 2 needles knitting. So they often have patterns and in fact when they have patterns they tend to have half a dozen or so.

I'm putting this one up because it looks kind of cool and trendy and in line with what the young people like these days (those who knit, anyway). It's a remarkably simple pattern which, in the interest of accuracy, I'm not going to try to re-type here, but if you are interested in it, just click on the image of the instructions and you will get a larger version that should be readable.

I'm not starting this at the moment because I swore not to start anything new until I finish my daughter's latest cardigan; it has already been rendered superfluous by spring temperatures but I want to complete it before she outgrows it. Maybe in September, the cap?

From the October 1954 Family Circle.

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New blog!

2008-04-21T13:46:00.003-05:00

And it's not one of mine, even!

Kitchen Retro has fun stuff and covers some of the same quote-unquote recipes featured here, which gives a nice sense of perspective, I think. She also has a great series of how-to's for those of you into making your own marshmallow animals (all of you, I hope). Plus, Party Meatloaf is already in her blogroll, so naturally I am returning the favor.

More photos soon--my scanner was buried under DVDs of Blue's Clues all weekend; sorry.

Flickr Pool

2008-04-18T10:20:00.003-05:00

No, I don't have anything there--how do people find time to blog *and* take pictures *and* post them on Flickr?

But anyway: vintage cookbooks.

Somthing greasy this way comes

2008-04-07T07:09:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's Halloween in April. Almost as scary as breaded, fried pork chops, we have Crisco-Fried Croquettes:

You make them by combining tuna fish and white sauce into a sufficiently viscous lump, then frying it. Serve with fried potatoes. The "salad" appears to be a bell pepper stuffed with macaroni-mayonnaise salad.

The doctors Crisco talked to said it was OK to eat this way "seven days a week!" Presumably they were all cardiologists who needed to make a boat payment in a hurry.

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They're good because they're bad for you!

2008-03-27T21:49:00.005-05:00

Old Gold cigarettes employed many innovative advertising techniques, but by 1954 they were clearly ready to throw in the towel on health claims such as "Not a cough in a carload!"(which they employed in the 20's, along with, somewhat scandalously according to TIME, the endorsement of banker J.P. Morgan's sister).
This is the first, and least puzzling, of a series of ads Old Gold ran in the 50's that encourages customers to throw caution to the winds, double down, and smoke because you like to, damn it! Trust me, they get a hell of a lot weirder. As we shall see.

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These make me think of Easter

2008-03-21T09:20:00.004-05:00

Py-O-My ads are all over the place in the 50's, and yet now you never see the brand. Yet it still exists, barely: Py-O-My/Kitchen Arts Foods was bought in 1968 by private label food manufacturer (i.e., generic/store label) Gilster-Mary Lee. The only Py-O-My product still available is the coffee cake mix, which G-ML sells online as a "Hard to Find" food item. I'm tempted to order it, just to see what the box looks like now, but you have to buy a case. The Internets offer no clues as to the meaning of "Py-O-My." They didn't sell pie crust mix, from what I can tell, so I'm stumped.

In addition to coffee cake and muffin mixes, Py-O-My also sold, in the 50's, brownie mix that came in its own disposable foil pan, and a "Puddin' Cake" mix (mix it, pour extra water over the top, and voila! It doesn't bake completely and you have goo at the bottom of the pan. Or, "pudding.").

What I find most striking about this image is the size of the muffins. Tiny by today's standards, this is what food looked like before America supersized itself. That's a normal muffin, folks; everything you see and eat today is too damn big.

On the other hand, candy bars have gotten a lot smaller over the years, so you can eat all of those you want. Happy Easter!

Good Friday thoughts

2008-03-17T08:46:00.008-05:00

"Pall," in addition to being a verb that means "to become insipid or distasteful," is also a noun meaning "a heavy cloth draped over a coffin." It's a tenuous link to Good Friday, admittedly, but cigarettes and death are so inextricably linked that I think we can run with it. Why you'd use "pall" in the name of any product that produces smoke is beyond me, but these cigarettes have been around since 1899, so what do I know.

You really need to click this image and see it full size to appreciate what it's doing. Pall Malls were for a time the most popular cigarette in America, in part because they were longer than other brands. As niggling doubts about the health effects of smoking began to surface in the 50's, cigarette companies came up with increasingly ludicrous and implausible claims about the health benefits of their brand. Here, Pall Mall is telling us that its longer cigarettes are milder than others because the smoke is filtered through more tobacco before it hits your throat. They also claim that the way they pack the tobacco in their cigarettes filters the smoke better.

Wikipedia tells us that "Pall Mall" was pronounced "pell mell" in its earlier days, but when television ads were pronounced off-limits to tobacco products, people started pronouncing the name "pal mal," because that's what it looks like in print. This Family Circle ad ran in March of 1954; YouTube has a 1955 television ad that features the "pell mell" pronunciation. It also uses the bizarre phrasing "travels the smoke further" to explain how the length of the cigarettes is a benefit. And there's a bonus shot of a woman going slightly nuts after her gentleman friend lights up her Pall Mall for her. I recommend it. It's only 60 seconds out of your life and I doubt you were planning to go to Mass today anyway.

Swing dancing = bad; bicycle stunt riding = good

2008-03-17T08:45:00.009-05:00

These little cartoons were featured in feminine hygiene pamphlets back in my day, and they really stuck with me. Partly because of the huge heads (I have a thing about oversized or disembodied heads), partly because of the contradictory messages. "Yes, it's OK to do normal girl things during your period! BUT NOT THAT!!!!"

So, it's a good idea to shower, but don't use hot water. Why not, I wonder? Too stimulating? Are we more likely to scald during that time of the month?

Dancing is fine, as long as no one appears to be enjoying it. Dancing that includes judo moves is out.

The bike riding cartoon really amuses me; can you imagine an image like that in any approved children's literature today? No hands, no helmet, feet off the pedals . . . don't even get me started on the difficulty of balancing that enormous head on such a tiny body.

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The mysterious connection between brain and naughty bits

2008-03-12T11:41:00.004-05:00

If there's one single image from all of the old "Now you are a woman! Smile, damn it!" pamphlets, it's this one. Purporting to somehow explain the link between pituitary activity and sexual development, all it really does is confuse the issue. Yes, the pituitary gland affects the development of sexual organs, but that's not really depicted here, is it? All they really show you is that the pituitary gland and your ovaries are waaaaay far apart, and that no girl with any decency would allow her face to be shown in an image containing ovaries. We surmise that there must be a connection, because they are both highlighted in the image, and nothing else is. But what is it? How do they communicate? How do my ovaries know what I'm thinking? It must be magic!

And would it be too much trouble to depict a girl's equipment without making it look like the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

The good old days of socially acceptable misogyny

2008-03-07T09:29:00.003-06:00

They're still here!

I don't usually (OK, I never) post current events stuff on this blog, but if Charlotte Allen's dipshit essay in the Washington Post had you rolling your eyes this week, be sure to read Katha Pollitt's response today:

Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead.

Girls to the Home Ec. classroom, boys to the gym

2008-03-06T08:19:00.003-06:00

Who remembers that movie? You know, the Walt Disney one called "The Story of Menstruation"? It was just part of the prolonged siege that girls underwent (and I suppose still do) when they got within shouting distance of puberty. The besiegers were a powerful alliance of social interests whose one goal was to convince all girls that they needed to 1) be happy about becoming fertile; 2) express their happiness through a determined display of female-coded behavioral markers, usually expressed with words like "dainty," "fresh," "cheerful," "sweet," "pretty," "radiant," "delightful," and "gay," (that last one only up until 1960), and 3) buy the feminine hygiene products produced by whichever company was sponsoring the movie (Modess, Scott, or Kimberley-Clark).

After you watched the movie (in pained silence heightened by the constant threat of hysterical giggles), you usually got a pep talk from either the girls' gym teacher or a middle-aged saleslady. You also got a booklet. Remember the booklet?

Oh yeah. My friend Karen recently sent me four of these gems dating from 1946-1961. One of them seems to be the same one my older sister brought home in the 70s--at least, the cartoons inside are the same. It's the one on the right in the image, titled "Very Personally Yours."

Now undoubtedly these presentations and booklets were a big improvement on the prior method of informing girls about menstruation, which as far as I can tell consisted of not telling them anything about it. But they still leave much to be desired. I'll have more in the next few days.

Bring me the head of Arthur Godfrey

2008-03-03T07:45:00.005-06:00

There was just no way to make Arthur Godfrey look good, the poor schmo, but this caricature really pushes the envelope:

I mean, the artist really didn't care, did he? He didn't care that taking a pen-and-ink rendering of Godfrey's ubiquitous photograph head shot and pasting it on top of a clip art ukulele-playing body produced this freakish anomaly. He didn't care that the innocent consumer of Star Kist tuna might look at this ad and think, Holy cats, Arthur Godfrey wants me to win a trip to Hawaii, but what if I go there and sit under a coconut palm just like him, and a coconut falls on my head and my head swells up that big? Arthur Godfrey may have sufficient neck muscles to hold a 180-pound head upright, but I sure don't.

Folks, he just didn't care.

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Cookbooks, getcher cookbooks

2008-02-29T13:35:00.003-06:00

Download 'em while they're hot from the Internet Archive. For starters, why not try

Lady Young's Cookery Book, produced in Hong Kong, year unknown (but prior to 1954), "in aid of St. John's Cathedral Michaelmas Fair." Featuring full-page rum ads and opening with five pages of cocktail recipes, it's as colonial as all get-out: Yorkshire pudding, a bunch of cod recipes (can you even get cod in Hong Kong?), the odd curry. Nothing vaguely Chinese, at least upon my first cursory inspection. Maybe Chinese food is forbidden during Michaelmas; I'll confess I don't know much about the Church of England's dietary restrictions.

I apologize in advance

2008-02-28T06:35:00.003-06:00

. . . 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?

All this, and Lima beans too

2008-02-26T07:40:00.004-06:00

Continuing yesterday's theme of Lenten self-mortification through packaged foods, I offer you Chicken of the Sea's Tuna Macaroni Cheese Loaf:

The ingredients list would lead you to think this is just another tuna casserole: macaroni, cheese, onion, bread crumbs, parsley, tuna, eggs, lemon juice.

But.

Four eggs--two for the tuna, two for the pasta--mean that this isn't going to work like a casserole. Instead, this is more of a baked custard, so it's going to come out in discrete chunks. Slices, if you will, but I don't want my pasta to slice, usually. And segregating the tuna in the middle--it just doesn't seem like tuna and eggs is something you want to show off or call attention to. Maybe it's just me.

But surrounding the whole thing with Lima beans? I'm sorry, that's inexcusable.

Fasting and prayer, made simple

2008-02-25T06:50:00.004-06:00

The Lenten season comprises forty days of prayer, penitence, almsgiving and self-denial, in preparation for Easter. In the 1950's, the packaged food industry jumped on board that bandwagon with both feet.

In the Catholic church, the rule was (and still technically is) no meat or poultry on Fridays during Lent. Not so many people practice this now, though during Lent is when you still see the fish specials at fast food places--Wendy's has a "new" fish sandwich out right now, for instance. And McDonald's introduced the Filet-O-Fish during Lent (it's still popular with observant Jews and Muslims who have to eat kosher or Halal meat).

But the world had to wait until the 60's for the Filet-O-Fish. In 1954, you got tuna, mostly, though you couldn't necessarily tell.

This is tuna with a can of Veg-All and some Bisquick, and I think there's some white sauce thrown in there for good measure. The result looks like one of those stepping-stones you put out to make path between the back door and the tool shed.

The wages of sin is diet pears

2008-02-22T09:15:00.006-06:00

Well, what do you expect when your pound cakes are bigger than you are, your lemon chiffon pies float ominously in mid-air, compelling you to eat them, and you supercharge your kids' non-fat powdered milk with soda? You're gonna get fat.

The answer? Pistachio ice cream! And diet pears, of course.

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An idea whose time never really came

2008-02-21T17:38:00.002-06:00

Seven years before the Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, the makers of PET instant milk had a GREAT idea.

Reconstitute their product with soda pop instead of water!

After all, who can resist a cold glass full of viscous foam that appears to be trying to climb out of its containment unit and smother you? Wasn't this thing in a Star Trek episode?

To make it even more fun, they've given names to the different "fizzes." Use a different color soda, get a different animal for your "pet": a brown cow from Coke, and "orang-a-tang" from orange, a purple poodle from grape, etc. It's just too fun!

It certainly provides some grounds for the "new rage" of the soda pop set. I'd be pissed too, if my mom expected me to drink this.

As always, click on any picture to see it frighteningly enlarged.

Blowback

2008-02-18T07:25:00.000-06:00

In 1959, packaged mixes were so popular that good old Knox Gelatine felt compelled to push back with their own ad campaign. Ironically, plain powdered gelatin was one of the earliest "convenience" foods--how often would you make gelatin if you had to boil your own pig's feet? Here, Knox calls into question the essential reality of chiffon pie mixes.

And I'm sure they have a point--flavored Jello is notoriously over-sweetened, and real lemons probably make a world of difference. I haven't tried this recipe though, because I can just imagine how long the rest of the box of Knox gelatin (Spell check doesn't like the "e" on the end, sorry Knox!) would sit on my shelf. Forever, basically.

The deeper irony is that no one ever even eats chiffon pie any more, so far as I can tell. Or chiffon cakes either, which is a mercy. I have made one of those.

Run for your lives!

2008-02-16T16:17:00.003-06:00

The giant pound cake mix will destroy us all!

You have to admit, that is a really big pound cake; the ad copy says it's "almost twice" the size of the regular, so I assume it weighs around two pounds. It sure looks bigger though. The box alone dwarfs the poor housewife who somehow dragged it home from the supermarket. It's so big, it apparently takes a week to eat it, with a different high-calorie topping each day. Does anyone really want to eat pound cake six days a week?

Another fine product from Dromedary, no longer available, thanks be to God.

I'm not dead!

2007-11-27T15:19:00.002-06:00

I'm lazy though. Especially with the holiday and all. I didn't have any splashy Thanksgiving-related recipes to post, so I just ate quietly offline.

But I have this ad left over from summer (June 1954, to be exact), and it may actually be a Jello salad I'm willing to try, perhaps for Christmas dinner. I am just a little nervous about the carrots. Shredded carrots embedded in Jello do not strike me as a pleasant textural experience. What else goes with pineapple and orange rind? And lemon-flavored pigs' hooves?

Wouldn't you kill to have been an ad copy writer in 1954? One phrase, repeated five times. Ka-ching!

Anyone know where I can get one of these molds? All the new ones these days are shaped like brains or hearts.

Technology!

2007-11-13T12:05:00.001-06:00

From 1954's American Home, painfully detailed instructions on how to use your stapler around the house to . . . you know, staple things.

Just think, someone actually got paid to write and photograph this feature.

Click on the image to make it big enough to read. Because I'm sure you need to know how you can use your stapler more effectively.

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Spooky!

2007-10-16T14:54:00.001-05:00

Wooooo-ooooooooo!

These are some terrifying fried pork chops, aren't they?

I love this ad, which I've seen before (I think in Life) and rediscovered in a June 1954 American Home given to me by my friend Denise who knows me too well. The ad goes on to reassure those who fear fried foods that, with Crisco, you can eat fried foods seven days a week and not worry about your digestion!

Your weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and renal function, however, would still scare the shit out of you.

Wazzup, Blogger?

2007-10-16T08:24:00.001-05:00

Blogger can't seem to upload images today.

They say they are "aware of the problem" though, which is an inexpressible comfort.

Masonite and you

2007-10-11T07:05:00.000-05:00

This May 1952 edition of American Home is chock-full of ideas to make a house into your dream home.

Here, the manufacturers of Masonite invite you to customize your kitchen by adding your very own petting zoo.

And if you don't have any goats, you can just shove the kids in there on a rainy afternoon.

Blogger must be pro-rubber-scraper

2007-10-10T13:22:00.000-05:00

Or I just posted too many images in one entry. Blogger is breaking up the preceding post, apparently in an attempt to make me post fewer images next time. Blogger is free.

Cooking by and for encephalitic, spastic children

2007-09-30T11:27:00.001-05:00

In addition to perpetrating horrific illustrations of perfectly innocent child test cooks, Betty Crocker has a rubber fetish. That's the inescapable conclusion if you read the entirety of her COOK BOOK for Boys and Girls (1957 reissue). How else to explain her shrill insistence on using rubber scrapers for every possible cooking operation?

Either
1) Betty owns a rubber plantation in Indonesia;
2) The purchase of rubber scrapers was keeping the Cold War economy afloat; or
3) Someone was afraid that kids would poke their eyes out if they used too many rigid kitchen utensils.

Disclaimer: I actually grew up in a house that didn't have any rubber scrapers. Mom didn't have anything against them, to my knowledge. I suspect it was just that her last set got chewed up before I was born, and she never bothered to get more. Because, honestly, while there are some things rubber scrapers do very well, there's not much they can do that another tool can't.

Also, if you scrape a bowl with a rubber scraper, there is precious little batter left in the bowl to lick, which to my way of thinking is one of the most important parts of any baking project.

I do now have rubber scrapers in my house, and handy things they are, too, but I don't make a religion out of them, for heaven's sake.

.

The more things change

2007-09-29T21:42:00.001-05:00

So, what did the fall 1959 television season herald?

Next to nothing, as it turns out. Well, Dennis the Menace premiered; I guess that counts for something. Also "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

But check out Dick Clark! Looking like he's just come from his First Communion, he's all set to emcee a wild, innovative, wacky new show that sounds a hell of a lot like every damn thing you see on TV these days. Worse still, the article text points out: "older viewers will recognize [it] as an updated version of 'This Is Show Business,' that old TV package distinguished largely for the smoothly dispensed advice of Clifton Fadiman and the acid commentary of George S. Kaufman." Hmm. Sound like anyone you've seen on TV lately?

Incidentally, "Bonanza" debuted on September 12 1959. Family Circle's Philip Minoff sniffed that "The autumn schedule calls for a rash of new horse operas that include not only the common half-hour variety . . . but several hour-long cactus epics like NBC's pardners 'Laramie' and 'Bonanza.' For each of these entries its sponsor promises, of course, a Western utterly different from anything now being seen on the channels, but don't bet the rent money on it."

"Bonanza" aired for fourteen seasons. So, don't take any betting advice from Philip Minoff, I guess is the lesson here.

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

2007-09-17T08:04:00.001-05:00

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.

Six ways to ruin perfectly good cereal

2007-08-25T09:33:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-21T07:28:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-19T08:43:00.001-05:00

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

2007-08-16T09:06:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-08-11T12:30:00.001-05:00

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

2007-08-08T07:50:00.001-05:00

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

2007-08-07T07:13:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-05T07:58:00.001-05:00

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?

2007-08-04T07:29:00.001-05:00

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.

Cereal: the caffeine of the 1940s

2007-07-21T07:44:00.001-05:00

The women and children of the 1940s were pathetic, weren't they? So tired and listless that even a bowl of Cream of Rice would pep them up. When did cooked cereal stop being a jump-start, kick-in-the-pants energy giver, and start being a stick-to-the-ribs, gut-loading comfort food? After 1949, at least--that's when the Cream of Rice ad came out (the oatmeal ad is from 1947; I thought the fatigued lady was holding her head, but maybe she's saluting the Quaker Oats man).

What I love in these ads is the insistence on how quickly processed cereals digest. Because God knows if you have to wait half an hour for your cereal to kick in, you're going to end up face down in the street with tire tracks across your back. "New life begins to pour into the system in a few minutes! Gives more energy!" Were women and children in a constant state of collapse in the 40s, or what?

I also love the footnote in the Cream of Rice ad saying that you can get data supporting their claims "upon professional request." We can't let just anyone in on the secrets of Cream of Rice, now can we?

As always, click 'em to biggen 'em.

I guess alcohol comes from vegetables

2007-07-16T22:15:00.001-05:00

Wow. Let me just quote some of the text of this ad for Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound:

"Nature may endow you with breathtaking beauty, a lovely curvaceous figure. She may bestow gifts on you that make you a brilliant actress, a leader in your class at college, sought after at dances, or a charming wife and mother.

"Yes, Nature may do all this. But even so--you may find your face mockingly slapped if you suffer these distressing symptoms which so many unfortunate girls and women do."

The "distressing symptoms," if you care to know, are pain, nervous distress, feeling weak, restless, "so cranky and irritable that you almost turn into a 'she-devil'" on some days, nervous tension, irritability, and "those tired-out, mean, 'pick-on-everyone' feelings."

Well.

In the good old days, the compound was compounded with 18% alcohol, which if, as the ad suggests, was "taken regularly throughout the month" undoubtedly did help "build up resistance against such distress."

Nowadays, the formula's a bit more new-agey. The current incarnation of her business empire is eager to assure us that Lydia was a feminist and female emancipator, but boy, it's hard to imagine this ad in the pages of Ms.

Noted without comment

2007-07-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

Except to add, "educator"?

More spokesfreaks

2007-07-03T14:29:00.001-05:00

The Salty Salt sailor with horrific goiter reminds me how long it's been since I focused on irritating/frightening corporate mascots. How about this cranberry guy, from a December 1949 Family Circle?

Or maybe it's two guys; you know, they all look alike.

This little sentient being is directing you how to cook and eat him. Perhaps that explains the panicked expression and the clock in his hand.

Some lucky ad man was patting himself on the back for keeping those sketches from the first year of art school, when they teach you how to draw the human figure in proportion by stacking up heads.

Up close:

Very nice brushwork on those highlights though. It's hard to tell, but I'm pretty sure most of the ad art in 40s and 50s food ads is watercolor, which is pretty astonishing to me, having worked in the medium. It's really hard to control. I doubt these illustrators could have gotten the glow they got from oils or acrylics though. Hats off to you, you old food painters.

It figures

2007-07-03T14:28:00.000-05:00

Put up a post musing about how you never see salt ads anymore, and Google Ads plasters one on top of your blog.

What kind of salt?

2007-06-26T15:11:00.001-05:00

The "salty" salt. You should put it on things! Like French fries. Because if we didn't tell you to, you'd never think to do it on your own.

Also, I'm guessing, this salt is un-iodized, given the size of the goiter on their sailor/mascot.

A bewildering array of salt brands duked it out in the pages of women's magazines in the late forties and early fifties. In addition to Sterling, you had Morton's, of course, and Ivory Salt, and Diamond Crystal Salt, and confusingly, Morton's Ivory Salt, an ad for which appears in the same magazine as an ad for Morton's, so I don't know what was going on there.

I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for salt, even Morton's. I guess once they ran Salty and his fellows out of business, Morton's didn't need to advertise any more.

The all-American puddle of goo

2007-06-23T14:28:00.000-05:00

Who knew that bread and gravy was America's "favorite dish"?

Or that March was once National Bread and Gravy month? (For all I know, it still is, though Google seems never to have heard the phrase.)

That crusty old guy for once isn't the revered founder of the company (Wilson & Co.); he's George Rector, their "food consultant," and his "recipe" tells you how to make gravy by, basically, making gravy, and then adding Wilson & Co.'s product, B-V.

I'm guessing B-V is short for "Beef-Vegetable," since the fine print reassures us that B-V is a delicious blend of concentrated meat extract and selected vegetable flavors. The label, however, cautions "artificially flavored."

Wilson & Co. also produced Mor, which, like Treet, was routed from the canned meat-like substance field by Spam. But I like the legend (which I've just realized I cropped out of this scan) "The Wilson label protects your table" (in almost illegible cursive at the bottom). All the cans look like a little aluminum army ready to defend Good Old Bread and Gravy from the yellow peril of fresh vegetables and lean fish.

The virtue of simplicity

2007-06-22T15:33:00.001-05:00

The copy for this ad seems to me to have been written by someone not quite at home in the English language. Maybe it's the repetitious quality: For pancakes yes! (Against pancakes no?)

But if you feel an ad slogan ought to accurately describe the product, you have to admit they hit this one out of the park: "Sweetose--It's really sweet!"
Really?
Really!

How sweet?
Sweet enough to do things with!

What it is, is corn syrup. Which already existed in 1947, but not like this! This was sweeter.

I know that last bit is true not because the ad says so, but because I looked up the A.E. Staley Mfg. Co. listed in tiny tiny type at the bottom of the ad, and learned that it's the same A. E. Staley who founded the Chicago Bears, and you can read all about him and Sweetose in this book called The Kernel and the Bean.

Donuts!

2007-06-13T11:29:00.000-05:00

Woah, check out the vegan donuts for sale via the Google ad I just caught on the site!

And they also sell Dan Piraro's artwork.

Another 21st-century triumph

2007-06-13T11:08:00.000-05:00

Since 1947, we've vanquished polio, TB, malaria, and Communism--and we've also (thank God) conquered that catastrophic fat shortage:

You do have to wonder, how did we become so adept at manufacturing fat in the last sixty years? What do we know about fat that Dwight Eisenhower didn't know? Was it something that came out of Los Alamos? Did we steal fat-creating technology from the Nazis? Do we import it from Asia?

Just got a new batch of 1947-1951 Family Circles. Good times ahead.

Have a Pepsi, scoliosis victims!

2007-06-03T19:44:00.001-05:00

OK, as a still-in-student-loan-debt holder of a B.A.A. in Studio Art, I once again call No Way:

Her spine is bad enough--now look at her foot.

That's supposed to be her right foot.

So, then . . . is that her right knee sticking out toward the back? Is she kneeling on her left knee, and that's her left foot causing the right-angle bulge at the rear of her skirt? No, that doesn't work either, unless her right thigh is twice as long as her left, or the foot belongs to an otherwise unseen third party.

Did this couple honeymoon in Las Vegas and fall prey to a disreputable magician who sawed the lady apart and didn't put her back together correctly? And perhaps he made it up to them by granting them the power to magically levitate bench- and table-tops?

Or did the artist just patch together two sketches from two completely different poses?

Perhaps people in 1957 got so thin from drinking "today's Pepsi-Cola, reduced in calories" that their bones snapped like candy cigarettes.

I had not realized that Americans were worried about "staying slim" as early as December 1957. But if their preferred method for doing this was to drink lots of soda, I can see why obesity is an even bigger problem today.

Party time

2007-05-05T07:55:00.000-05:00

I just survived a week of flu and sinus infection, and now that I'm on antibiotics, I feel like a party!

I love this ad because it makes some fairly boring cookies look so festive. I mean, apart from the pink and white coconut things, this is mostly fig bars and vanilla wafers. But if you add a few balloons and a bouncy font, even boring everyday existence can seem like a party.

Antibiotics are the balloons of my life.

Diabetes in a bottle

2007-04-16T11:34:00.000-05:00

OK, so, syrup, pancakes, butter. Nothing unusual here, really,

Except HOLY MOTHER OF GOD HOW MUCH SYRUP DO YOU NEED ON A PLATE OF PANCAKES?

Sure, I overindulge sometimes too. I like syrup. Who doesn't? Frankly, this ad is totally making me want pancakes right now.

But when the syrup actually submerges your pancakes entirely and threatens to overflow the plate, you need to cut back.

It's not like this is low-calorie syrup, either; they say right there in the ad it has "plenty of real maple sugar" in it.

That's a hell of a lot of butter too.

Happy Easter ads

2007-04-07T07:53:00.000-05:00

Still stuck in April 1956, our Wayback Machine gives us a double glimpse of Easter past.

First, Dubble Bubble. Fleer's Dubble Bubble. Because "dubble" isn't funny enough. Frankly, if I could find this stuff today, I'd put it in my kids' baskets. But it doesn't come square anymore, at least not where I shop. And without the funnies, facts, and fortunes, it's just bubble gum.

I think you can still get Palooka Joe, which is square and has a cartoon, but it takes, as I recall, bitter and crumbly, and the cartoons are stupid, because who even knows what a palooka is these days?

Then there's the NEW Dromedary mix for Fruity-rich Easter Cake, which of course is just fruitcake, but you put frosting on it. "Make a few at a time," the ad advises. "They keep." Really? Well, wouldn't they keep just as well unmade, in the box? And then I could make one whenever I wanted it? Because all I have to add is eggs and water?

Wait, I forgot, I don't even like fruitcake.

I guess G.I. Joe there in the corner is supposed to remind us that ANYTHING tastes good after six months freezing your ass off in Korea. Even fruit cake that came from a box and was baked in the pan that came in the box, and then sat in the pan for four or five weeks while the Army shipped it halfway around the world.

What ever happened to Dromedary? I thought they were still around, but the Internets were leading me to think they had been purchased by Dole. Not so; it turns out Dromedary is still an active brand name used by California Redi-Date, which also packages dates for Dole. But you can't buy Dromedary mixes anymore, alas.

I had to read a contract packer trade journal article on servo technology to find that out, when I should be dying eggs.

Happy Easter!

UPDATE: Oh, right, it's Bazooka Joe. People probably still know what a bazooka is (if anyone knows the names of obsolete WWII-era weaponry, it's our nation's ten-year-old boys). I was starting to get queasy about the idea of naming bubblegum after weapons, but a little more research leads me to believe the bubblegum may actually have been named after the musical instrument that gave the weapon its nickname. Wikipedia says the bazooka was popularized in the 1930's by radio comedian Bob Burns. The gum's been updated, I see.

Magic herb, circa 1953

2007-03-21T21:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it's oregano. What a difference a decade makes, huh?

I love that oregano is so exotic they have to run a PR campaign for it.

Another clue to how strong the status quo was in the 50's: the other exotic spice in this ad is vanilla.

I can name that pie in two bites or less

2007-03-13T08:52:00.000-05:00

Another recipe I have tested.

Yes, they call it "Brownie Pie" (notice they have one of those weird alien-brownie guys above the ice cream?).

But it's actually a chocolate pecan pie.

It's a good one, too; it's just not new. Not even in 1953. Shame on you, Betty Crocker!

Noted without comment

2007-03-12T10:04:00.000-05:00

A farewell to yarmulkes

2007-03-09T08:49:00.000-06:00

OK, forgive the stupid title of this post, but can anyone come up with a better explanation for the association of ham with Easter?

Witness: It's April, 1953, and what's on the menu for Easter dinner?

Ham with mustard? Or ham with molasses? Or perhaps ham with corn syrup? Ham baked in foil? Ham with pineapple? Ham garnished with cherries and stabbed with almonds?

Or, my favorite: Ham with jellybeans!

I thought I was having better luck with photo alignment, but alas I see the suckers are all in one column. Blogger, would you PLEASE get it together?. I NEED to post the "Find the Ham" refrigerator ad contest.

As always, click on the images for larger versions.

Adding, well, that's a little better.

Jolly old St. Nicotine

2007-02-27T11:55:00.000-06:00

Another possible reason for Santa's unhealthy complexion in the 50's is his raging tobacco habit. And he's not content to ruin his own health; he has to drag all the good girls and boys down with him.

In the 50's, good children also traditionally received a fifth of Scotch in their stockings on Christmas morning.

Cardiac Santa

2007-02-22T07:49:00.000-06:00

Here's the logical outcome of all the 50's candy-is-good-for-you ads: A candy-laden Santa who appears to be in the midst of pulmonary thrombosis. Ad Santas got ruddier and ruddier in this era, until they all looked like radiation burn victims.

Don't know what happened to the Fairhill line of Whitman's chocolates, but Wikipedia reports

Besides the Whitman's Sampler, Pickaninny Peppermints were also a popular Whitman confection. However, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and, at the time, NAACP lawyer took issue with the name. In a 1941 article directed at Whitman's published in the Afro-American, Marshall urged Whitman's Candies to realize its racial insensitivity. Whitman's denied the term was racist and responded to Marshall by saying that it meant "cute colored kid." Still the product was soon dropped.

Good call, Whitman's.

Unfortunate metaphor #3,786,452

2007-02-13T16:11:00.000-06:00

Sweet, sweet candy. Since you'll probably be getting some from somebody tomorrow (even if it's just the person at work who leaves a bowl of conversation hearts in the kitchen), this ad image seemed fitting. Sadly, it reminds me of a long-past Simpson's episode where a drunken Homer rails "So I said, blue M&M, red M&M--they all wind up the same color in the end."

But what a magical cornucopia! Into its crisp, beribboned maw go corn syrup, butter, eggs, and enough sugar to choke a diabetic horse. And out comes . . . well, the gumdrop looks lame, but man the commercial artists sure knew how to render candy in those days (December 1945--Life magazine, in fact). The little box at the top got cut off, but it reassures readers that they'll be able to get all the CANDY they want as soon as sugar isn't rationed anymore. (As always, click on the image for a larger version.)

I miss the lack of self-consciousness in ads like this; candy these days has to advertise itself much like liquor and tobacco, knowing full well it's bad for people. In pre-obesity America, you could still make the case that candy was good for you, full as it was of "food energy" (calories). Don't be ashamed, candy! There is nothing wrong with you!

As Amy Sedaris's brother told her, "When shit brings you down, just say 'fuck it!' and eat yourself some motherfucking candy!"

Happy Valentine's Day.

Monday Linktacular!

2007-02-12T11:24:00.000-06:00

There are oodles of 50s image galleries at Plan 59, which will be going up in the sidebar momentarily. You'll notice some familiar faces in their Gallery of Demonic Tots and Deeply Disturbing Cuisine. The images you see at that link are THUMBNAILS--click them for the FULL picture AND (yay, references!) the source. And in some cases a link to the recipe, for the stouthearted.

Video!

2007-01-22T12:06:00.000-06:00

I am not a MySpacer, so can't embed, but do hurry over there and watch Pattern for Smartness.

Brought to you by Dress a Day (which I thought was in the links sidebar but will be shortly).

Rainy Saturday

2007-01-13T11:37:00.000-06:00

Forgot to mention a Christmas gift I got myself: Fabulous 50's Advertising 2007 calendar!

And here's April:

Am I going to inflict this on my family? Do you even need to ask?

How we vanquished our mutant asparagus overlords

2007-01-09T08:11:00.000-06:00

By devouring them in Tasty Sandwiches.
Seriously, what is it about pre-1960 asparagus?

Mercifully, you don't see asparagus like this anymore: monstrously huge, swollen, pale, phallic--a vegetable reminiscent of J. Edgar Hoover. Do we have Julia Child to thank for pointing out that asparagus this big, cooked until it was soft, tasted like wet grass?

This book is copyrighted 1941, and though it might just be the photography, most of the sandwiches in it resemble alien life forms that have been run under the broiler for 2-5 minutes. But don't take my word for it:

Don't they look like something out of H.P. Lovecraft?

As always, click on an image to enjoy all the gory details.

Adding, I apologize for the wanky formatting; Blogger doesn't make it easy to post multiple images.

Christmas Gifts, 2006

2006-12-30T13:53:00.000-06:00

From my husband, after several pointed hints:
Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons--Lynn Peril. Anyone who refers to "femininity" as "the other 'F' word" is going to sell me a book.

From my sister:
Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice--James Lileks. Not on par with his classic Gallery of Regrettable Foods, but still fun.

Also from my husband:
The Complete Peanuts 1959-1962 Box Set--Charles Schulz. Bringing my collection current at six volumes, twelve years.

And a buncha other stuff, not 50's-related.

Holiday Customer Service

2006-12-29T22:40:00.000-06:00

I've done so much textile work over the past month, and was hoping to post some images of that and all of the Christmas recipes I tried out (chocolate peppermint cookies!). But our Canon PowerShot A70 is on the fritz, and although Canon Support auto-generated an email reply to me on Thursday, so far they haven't made good on their promise to contact me "during
our normal business hours of 6 a.m. to Midnight, Eastern Standard Time." Maybe in the New Year.

A Dress a Day

2006-12-05T10:54:00.000-06:00

Going up momentarily in the sidebar: A Dress A Day!

Stuck in traffic

2006-11-08T07:45:00.000-06:00

Yeah, sorry about that--I even forgot there was one more criminally ugly craft to show you:

Would you call that a "gay face"? Would you think it was suitable for children?

Would you glue anything to a placemat and hang it on your wall?

Picture frames to make in minutes

2006-09-28T10:41:00.000-05:00

. . . and regret for years to come. And sadly, many of these frames turn out to be kind of a pain in the ass to make. The aptly-named "Number 2" requires you to enlarge your snapshots to 5x7" (not as easy in 1966 as it is now); buy six small frames; spray-paint them; cut and paint a piece of plywood; and nail or glue the smaller frames to the plywood.

Well, anyway. Remember bazaars? The carnival bazaars at your older brother or sister's elementary school? Where your friends always won a goldfish by throwing a ping-pong ball in the bowl, and you never did, but the fish always died within a week regardless?

Remember the craft sale? The potholders, pinchsions, aprons, and crocheted slippers with the toe shaped, as a colleague of mine memorably expressed it, "like a cat's anus?"

Remember the wall of lynched dolls? Remember before China made all our stuffed animals, and a child might actually want one of these?
Actually, the book says the "hug-me-tight" dolls are favored by teens, and maybe they were; drugs were already making serious inroads into youth culture by 1966. I mean, the Beatles recorded Revolver that year.

And I am a bit partial to #54 myself. Wouldn't want to sew it though; too skinny in the arms and legs. You'd drive yourself nuts turning and stuffing them.

I would stick to potholders.

But wait, there's more!

2006-09-22T08:34:00.000-05:00

Honestly, wasn't this worth the wait?

You'll be interested to know that those flappy things are "petals," and the color scheme is "buttercup bright." You're supposed to sew and quilt a bajillion or so of those things and then sew them onto a perfectly innocent bedspread.

The book notes that the pattern would be "equally effective in showy pinks, shades of burnished orange, or compelling magenta."

Or how about all three?
This lovely item is Number 2 on our list of Things that Make Ill-considered Decisions about Hot Pink. It's a rug, made out of felt. Goes great with the russet plant and the white marble hearth, doesn't it? Doesn't it????

I realize I'm beating a dead horse here, but the book ends with the ugliest little table of them all, also in hot pink and non-matching colors. Under the heading "Unusual Crafts." Yes. A hot pink table top spattered with red and mustard (the candles match, notice?). I would say that's unusual, and thank my lucky stars, too.

But hopefully the candles will set the curtains on fire and burn down all the stylistic abominations in this house.

Adversity

2006-09-21T10:13:00.000-05:00

There seems to be a conspiracy to prevent posts to this blog between Blogger, my nine-year-old's immune system, and my husband's dim understanding of what happens when you close an active browser window.

While we adjust, why don't you crochet some lovely rust-colored epaulets and glue them to the wall?

Smoked ham!

2006-09-19T09:13:00.000-05:00

I just noticed the smoked ham ad above. I'm waiting for someone to advertise mail order meatloaf on this blog.

By the way, if you think my spelling has gotten a lot worse lately, it's because Blogger has decided it doesn't like me editing posted items, so anything I catch after posting has to stay there. I think it's some problem with the photos feature--the browser seems to get hung up trying to verify the location of the posted photo in the entry and then just grinds away until I force quit. This morning I left it alone from 4 a.m. until 8 and still had to force quit and restart. Sigh, Blogger.

Nursery school crime scene bedspread

2006-09-19T03:54:00.000-05:00

BHG recommends perpetrating this craft if you haven't got the patience for actual quiltmaking: "Add originality to a ready-made bedspread with these paper doll beauties." I don't know about you, but I can feel the scratchy polyester quality of that bedspread.

I'm amused at the way books and magazines of the 50's and 60's harp on originality as the ultimate goal of decoration and fashion--completely unrelated to qualities like aesthetic appeal, function, good taste, etc. Well, maybe craft publications have always done that. It just seems especially ridiculous with these projects.

See what I mean about the rooms? Cold, sterile, and gloomy, this one. With a tacky white bedside table to make you say "huh?" when taken in alongside the modular, globular hanging lamp. And a milk glass bowl of flowers--a glass bowl in a child's room? But wait--what books are on the table? The only one I can read the title of is apparently The Unanointed, a 1958 novel by Laurene Chin. It's not in stock at Amazon.com, but The Book Review Blog tells us it's a "Fascinating historical fiction about the people around King David from the Old Testament. People like Job, Abiathar, Reba." Not exactly bedtime reading for the toddler set, is it? So does that mean this is a room for . . . grownups?

And then there's this atrocity, featuring a pointless pattern that we are told represents "crowns," plus a wooden headboard with leather pads remeniscent of those found in your better quality bus stations. And more ugly glass and a powder-blue porcelin lamp that really doesn't go with the avocado walls. But then, neither does the bedspread. The book calls this bedspread "subtle."

These motifs are appliqued to the bedspread, which is really pretty labor-intensive, so you'd have to spend a lot of time on this project to get it looking this bad. It makes me sad to think someone may have actually done this.

1966: When ugly craft items were proudly made in America

2006-09-18T07:15:00.000-05:00

Before Hobby Lobby and Michael's and the importation of cheap chipwood baskets and fake flowers made in China, America worked long and hard to produce its ugly, ugly handicrafts. And then it took pains to display them in the worst possible ways. Better Homes and Gardens promises us in this tome "a complete guide to the most rewarding stitchery and craft projects for the whole family." A big promise, and largely failed.
It isn't always the fault of the craft itself. Take these rocking chair cushions (please! ba-da-bing). I've often felt hot pink was a color more sinned against than sinning; the combination here with red, orange, and purple is ambitious, but the angular shapes help to make sense of it. But then the photo stylist felt it would be a good idea to place the chair in a red room with an orange-covered table. That's way too much of a bad thing.

What often strikes me about home furnishings spreads in later-1960's magazines is how uncomfortable rooms look. Wrought-iron wall hangings and lamps. Ugly, brittle, and cheap looking--they promise pain if bumped against and give the look of a medieval torture chamber (as a teenager I babysat at a house with, honest to God, fake maces hanging on the living room wall). Painted brick walls in bedrooms with tile floors--cold, hard, and unfriendly. Spindly Formica furniture paired with faux-Americana wood pieces. The conspicuous, purposeful ugliness of it impresses me.

As the week progresses, andd we wade through more of this crap, you may find Craftzine a helpful antidote. I bought some Kool-Aid this week to try out one of their projects.

'Nother new link

2006-09-06T11:35:00.000-05:00

Check out Stitchy McYarnpants, now added to the links list on the right. Hellish knitting patterns from the 60's, 70's, oh, all the bad fashion times. Who would have thought there could be so many?

Sexy, sexy electricity

2006-09-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

Oo-la-la. Looking a little less like Snow White this time, and a bit more like the evil queen, our heroine now confesses that "I talk calmly about how cheap and fast electric heat is, but I can't resist raving about its cleanliness!" Does electricity make you feel all tingly inside? That's the current, honey; you've got your finger in the socket.

I'm intrigued by technique #1: "Use utensils with flat bottoms which cover the heating unit, Straight sides are preferred." Are they ruling out cauldrons, then?

Electric refrigerators are another product this book shills, and they spend a lot of time yelling at us about how to store foods properly. "There is a right and a wrong way of storing food in your electric refrigerator," we are warned. "There is a proper place for everything and there must be sapce for circulation of cold air." "Everything that goes into your electric refrigerator has a right place," intones another caption, with a helpful graphic showing where to place your cooked vegetables, cake and waffle batter (a staple in most households, right?), dessert, pastry dough, and white sauce. White sauce? Who stores that? The arrow points toward an enormous pitcher of it. I'm not posting the photo because it's pretty boring--there's not even a ham, so you can tell this was before the heyday of refrigerator sales when there was ALWAYS a ham. Playing "Spot the Ham" is a favorite pastime of mine whenever I get a new batch of 50's magazines. There's one in every fridge.

This is the "Oven dinner for after the bridge club." Beef ring filled with carrot strips, baked potatoes, green salad, and prune and apricot upside-down cake. I'm both charmed and repelled by the cake. It's got a 1930's look to it that I find appealing--bold, a little jazzy--but I can't see myself seving it. "Oh, don't worry!" the clueless hostess assures her poor guests, "it has apricots AND prunes! Everyone gets both!"

I'd say more, but I have to go take Lois Kanago's cake out of the oven.

How Thomas Edison invented cake

2006-09-01T07:05:00.000-05:00

Sherman, set the Wayback machine for the year 1937 and the wonders of E-lectricity!

I love this booklet because there really aren't any recipes in it that can't be cooked non-electrically, and yet they go to great lengths to convince you that cooking with electricity is different and modern and not at all like cooking the old-fashioned way, which admittedly in 1937, before rural electrification, probably meant wood-burning ovens for a lot of Americans. Still, heat+food=cooking, so what's the big deal?

The booklet was co-sponsored by Thomas Edison's Electric Institute, which may explain its portentious tone, as it asks, "Can you resist the new technique?"

Well, this gal surely couldn't:

I love love love this picture because 1) she looks so happy; and 2) she's wearing such a fabulous dress, with neck darts no less! It's classic 1930's; and 3) how on Earth did she get that giant cake out of such a little tiny pot? and 4) she appears to have frosted the cake with fingerpaints.

It's just too charming, it almost makes up for some of the books more reprehensible recipes, like the sour milk steamed pudding, or the page on canning that actually instructs you to put filled, sealed canning jars into a hot oven for processing. Can you imaging the carnage? Can you imagine cleaning shattered glass and plum preserves out of your new electric oven? Oh, the humanity.

No, I wasn't hung over

2006-08-31T22:05:00.000-05:00

Late posting today--my apologies. As promised, here's the rest of our tour of the Carioca rum distillery in Puerto Rico.

Quite a facility, eh? I especially like the way they have a large patio set up for the workers, with festive umbrellas and little tables. I'm sure the workers hang out there between shifts and sip cold drinks.

I can't fgure out why you would need to write "rum distillery" in huge letters on the roof of your building, except perhaps for the benefit of tourists flying over in airplanes, but surely in 1943 that wasn't a consideration.

But boy, take a look at the inside of this place! No third-world conditions here! Spic-and-span! The people even wear white clothes. That's so . . . white of them.

They look curiously immobile, it's true. And I don't think the safety inspector would like that guy standing on the desk to reach the packing conveyer, but how many safety inspectors could there have been in Puerto Rico in 1943? Don't you know there was a war on????

Maybe the problem was too many Zombies imbibed between shifts on the patio.

Zombies are one of the few drinks featured in this book that are actually supposed to be made with rum. One has to wonder, though, about the effect of pre-mixing and bottling. Zombies really require fresh fruit juice. Adding carbonated water and ice isn't going to do the trick.

Offensive and wholly un-Puerto Rican label image, though? They've got that part nailed.

As always, click 'em to bigger 'em.

Yo-ho-ho, etc.

2006-08-30T07:11:00.000-05:00

Here's a weird thing I picked up somewhere; I think at a used book store in Seguin (notice the sticker on the cover refers to Johnnie's at 10th and Red River, presumably Austin--there are still two Johnnie's Liquor Stores in Austin, but neither at that location).

What freak, huh? What's with the morterboard? Is it just to distinguish him from the sombrero-wearing peasants worshipping at his feet? Do they even wear sombreros in Puerto Rico?

This tiny booklet is copyright 1943, which may explain why Puerto Rican rum was "the largest selling in the U.S." Sayeth Puerto Rican Life: "Rum's popularity has waxed and waned over the centuries. In the 1800's it was largely replaced by American whiskey in the United States. It enjoyed a brief revival in the U.S. during World War II due to a whiskey shortage. Due to the Organic Act, which said that any excise taxes collected in the United States on Puerto Rican products would be returned to Puerto Rico, those few boon years had a huge impact on the Puerto Rican economy. For example, in 1940-41 Puerto Rico received $4.5 million in internal revenue payments, but in 1943-44 they received a whopping $65.9 million. Unfortunately, once whiskey production resumed at normal levels, rum sales decreased."

Which is kind of sad, since they could have used that money to upgrade the educational system in Puerto Rico. In 1943, according to this pamphlet, bartenders ran the universities. If you look at the table of contents here (I know, it's tiny; click the image for a larger version) you'll see that they are telling how to make any kind of drink with rum instead of with whatever liquor usually goes in that drink. A rum martini. Rum Alexander. Rum mint julep. And so on.
Now, the canapes, they show a little variety. Chive balls. Olive cheese balls. Tartar balls. OK, scratch that, they don't really show variety. And I think I'd have to drink something stronger than rum before I'd eat anything called "tartar balls." I hope to God that's some kind of translation error from the original Puerto Rican.

You'll notice I have steadfastly said "rum" rather than "Carioca" throughout this post. I have resisted the hypnotic commands of the little man with the moustache. Pray that I am strong enough to do so again tomorrow, when we will visit his factory.

Part 2 of the endless parade of wieners

2006-08-29T07:50:00.000-05:00

So many, many things wrong here:

- The "Bacon Wrap-ups" at the top left? The recipe recommends canned Oscar Mayer Prefried Bacon.
- The "Gourmet Meatballs" contain liverwurst. Also dried onion soup mix, making them "gourmet" in the same way the Lipton Party Meatloaf that gives this blog its name is "party" fare.
- The "Ham Puffs"--I dunno, just something about packaged cream puff mix and canned ham, it seems wrong.
- "Rainbow Sandwich Loaf": Guess what makes the green layer? If you said "lettuce," or "spinach," or "avocado," or indeed anything organic, go to the back of the room. If you said "green food coloring," step up and claim your prize. It's a bottle of Maalox.
- The "Little Wieners and Little Smokies in Mustard Sauce." Again, sauce. Weiners. No. Putting mustard in it does not expiate the inherent sin.

On the bright side, there's no meat in the avocado dip (and unlike many mid-century guacamole recipes, it does not call for mayonnaise).

And finally, as we get ready to close out August and move into autumn:

Guess how much pumpkin is in the Pumpkin-Hollow Dip? Go on, guess! One cup? Two cups? Three cups?

Trick question, of course: There is no pumpkin in the Pumpkin-Hollow dip. Just Braunschweiger Liver Sausage, cream cheese, and onion juice. Onion juice. I see that in recipes from time to time but I've convinced myself it is just a theoretical contruct, like pi. Onion juice can't really exist.

Note: I belatedly realized I was mispelling Oscar Mayer all day yesterday. My apologies to the company for that. And only for that. They got bought up by Kraft too, which means you can now look for Jello recipes and play Wiener Pong on the same web site.

As always, click to enlarge the images.

80 years of misbegotten wieners

2006-08-28T08:28:00.000-05:00

So you wish you were an Oscar Meyer wiener?

Be careful what you wish for. This booklet looks promising on the cover: beer, pumpernickel, and sausage. Alas, its purpose is to celebrate 80 years of Oscar Meyer products (one recipe per year, you see), which dates it around 1963. This is close to the nadir of convenience cookery; recipes from this period have all the celebration of caloric consumption of the 50s, plus the pull of the new decade meant people were trying to be exotic and different and forward-thinking. Always a bad idea. But it explains the MO of most recipes in this book: take a perfectly good dish and defile it with the addition of wholly inappropriate Oscar Meyer products. Exhibit A:

Wiener shortcake.
Sorry, Little Wieners Shortcake; the "Little" somehow makes it even more horrible. There are several things I don't understand here:
1) Why Cream of Chicken soup? If God had meant for hot dogs to be served in sauce, He would have created Cream of Wiener soup. He did not.
2) The only non-processed foods in this recipe are milk and green onions. And the green onions didn't make it into the pictured dish.
3) The French-style green beans are an especially unlucky choice. They make the whole dish look like something the dog threw up after eating grass in the backyard.
But having had 80 years to formulate their evil plans, Oscar Meyer doesn't stop with LIttle Weiners Shortcake. Oh no.

Wiener curry.

Sorry, Smokie Orange Curry, made with those appalling Smokie Links. I would not have thought they could be made to taste worse, but now that I think about it, cornstarch, canned mandarin oranges, and curry powder would pretty much do the trick. Top it with coconut and bacon bits, and the nightmare is complete.

There's more, but I think it will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm feeling a little nauseated.

As always, click the images to increase the nausea.

Cookbooklets!

2006-08-27T10:18:00.000-05:00

Talk about tempting fate--I am scanning like a madwoman today, so Blogger better behave itself this week (yes, I have checked all my punctuation).

This little gem was given to me by a friend who knows me far too well. Have you ever wondered why Jello is so popular at cafeterias? Wonder no more. It turns out Jello actually costs nothing at all to serve, so every penny customers spend on it is pure profit. Or something like that.

Now, we are warned that "Food costs in this book are based on prices of June 1950," but still--2-cent Jello desserts? What's not to like about that, at least for the cafeteria owner who's charging 75 cents?

But as always, things that look too good to be true generally are. Ribbon Fluff Mold? It's jello, topped with Jello that's been whipped. (I always think "mold" is a bad word to put in a recipe title, even if it is gelation.) Jello Fantasy? It's Jello with a little cream poured on top. No, I'm sorry, it's actually "a mystery dessert with feathery trickles of cream." My mistake. In this version it has scored banana slices on top, which I guess is kind of mysterious. People will wonder "Why are they there? Why don't they sink?" Not my idea of a fantasy, but to each his own. Jello Jewels? Jello smashed through a colander.

The pricier recipes don't improve much. The most expensive thing in the book is Strawberry Chiffon pie (strawberry Jello, strawberries, egg whites and whipped cream) at 6.5 cents per serving, which doesn't seem bad, but with the fresh strawberries and everything, the Jello hardly seems necessary.

And guess what's on the last page? Tapioca recipes! Including Peppermint-stick Cream! In this version, you dissolve crushed peppermint candy in the milk as you make the tapioca, ommitting all sugar, and top with chocolate sauce. It still sounds awful, but hey, it only costs 3 cents a portion. Myself, I would gladly pay 3 cents, or even three dollars, to be excused from eating it, but I do not live in 1950 and I don't have to make my living selling food to people at 8000% markup.

On the back cover, I think you can see a dish of Jello Jewels on the left. Not sure what flavor that would be. Maybe orange? It looks like something that came out of a distressed sea creature, don't you think?
As always, click on the images to enlarge them, if you dare.

Do not bring your evil here

2006-08-23T07:21:00.000-05:00

"Throwing a luncheon for the threewheeler set?" chirps this October 1950 ad from Good Housekeeping. Nothing will delight them more, we are assured, than a dish off tapioca laced with peppermint shards and dribbled with chocolate sauce.

Personally, I love chocolate and peppermint, and I'm willing to admit there are people out there who enjoy tapioca. Sunset magazine tells us that "tapioca recalls visions of warm pudding swarming with tender, clear beads that seemed to resemble fish eggs." Mmm, fish eggs.

In the 50's probably more people enjoyed tapioca, since previously it had been one of the relatively quick (partially pre-cooked) pudding options. But this, this . . . I guess I just think a lot of recipe creators should quit while there ahead. There are not that many ways to make people like tapioca if they don't already, and this certainly isn't one of them. It reeks of desperation. Jello and My-T-Fine were gobbling up market share with there quicker, more varied, smoother (except with the coconut) recipes, and you could make pie out of them. You can put tapioca in pies (to thicken fruit fillings, usually) but I sincerely hope there are no tapioca pie recipes out there.

Luckily for the tapioca growers, someone eventually came up with bubble tea. I still don't like it, personally (fish eggs in tea, mmm), but you sure can't make it with Jello.

1950's sales strategy #37: Humiliate the weak

2006-08-18T07:17:00.000-05:00

Boy, is This One Depressing. In October 1950, Listerine ran an ad much like all the other ads they ran from the 1910'a all the way up until someone invented dentistry: cruel, shrill, exploitative, and chauvinistic. This time, they added Pointless Capitalization (for the First Three Paragraphs).

As always, click on the image to enlarge its bludgeon-like message.

Unpacking the assumptions herein makes me want to curl up in a fetal position and weep for the soul of womankind. It's not bad enough that Dora has bad breath; not bad enough that she's losing her only chance at romance, marriage, and family (the shameful potential fate that haunts every page of every women's magazine in the 50's); not bad enough that, because of her ignorance, she never even had a chance. They have to call her dumb. Dumb with a capital D, Dumb.

What an idiot, not to recognize that the odds are always in favor of a woman being offensive. What a moron, not to realize that halitosis was so common, and so offensive, that every woman who wasn't raised in a barn ought to know to spend three minutes a day painfully burning her mouth with alcohol. What an idiot, not to be ashamed of herself, her body, and her expectations. No wonder she isn't popular; she's been turned back from the border of popularity by the homeland security agents of offended Mankind.

Toonpedia tells us

The phrase "Dumb Dora" was slang in the 1920s for a not-very-bright female, made popular by the vaudeville act of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Allen played Dora, who was so dumb — and what followed would be a typical bit of her illogical logic, of the sort that got huge laughs from vaudeville, movie and eventually TV audiences. (The schtick was revived decades later on The Match Game, but with audience participation added — right before the punchline, in unison, they'd shout, "How dumb was she?")

Chic Young's Dumb Dora (actual name, Dora Bell) debuted from King Features in 1924, as a seven-day feature. Despite her subtitle, "She's Not So Dumb As She Looks". she sometimes did look very, very dumb. She was a typical young woman of the flapper era, with a reasonably steady boyfriend, Bing Brown, and a crowd of other suitors.

So at least the original Dumb Dora got some dates.

Possibly more food than in Farmer Boy

2006-08-16T10:22:00.000-05:00

Catherine Woolley, author of the Ginnie books (and the Libby books, and the Cathy Leonard books), is renowned for her ability to connect with young readers. But I read her books for one reason: the food.

Ginnie was the first and best of Woolley's pre-teen protagonists, and before she transitioned to mystery-solving (Ginnie and the Mystery Doll, Ginnie and the Mystery Cat), she tended to have problems that revolved around typically 50's domestic issues: taking care of young children (Ginnie's Babysitting Business), winning a cooking contest (Ginnie and the Cooking Contest). These two books were written in 1963 and 1966, respectively, but the domestic picture they paint is pure 50s.

In Ginnie's Babysitting Business alone, the following foods, and descriptions of their preparation, adorn the modest plot:

Lemon-jelly cake (see yesterday's post)
fudge
fudge, again
and again
coffee, muffins, and scrambled eggs
steak
hamburgers, potato chips, tomoatoes, pickles, and toasted rolls. Also marshmallows (lesson for children's book authors: never hesitate to interrupt the plot with a cookout).
turkey with stuffing
sirloin steak, French fried potatoes, and cherry-stone clams
hot fudge sundaes with chocolate ice cream and pecans (at Schrafft's!)
mincemeat pie
turkey sandwiches and cocoa
pancakes
jello mold with apricots and cherries, angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries, rolls, ham, tossed salad, potato cassarole

All this in a scant 160 pages (with illustrations). Ginnie and the Cooking Contest, naturally, is even more jam-packed with recipes and descriptions.

Woolley herself never married and had no children. But she lived to be 100, so maybe there's hope for the fudge-lover in all of us.

Running late

2006-08-15T22:16:00.000-05:00

Woah, sorry, the day got away from me. More on Ginnie tomorrow. Here's a teaser though:

Mother's fresh lemon-jelly cake was so good that both Ginnie and her father took a second piece at dinner. "That's really cake!" Daddy remarked, passing his plate.

I should warn you, I also collect Nancy Drew books. That Hannah Gruen was a heck of a cook.

Two that won't kill you

2006-08-14T07:38:00.000-05:00

Here are two cake recipes from the same Good Housekeeping as yesterday's, both of which I have made and both of which are edible. I can't say I've ever referred to anything I've baked as a "Yam-Yam Cake" (it sounds like something from Madam Butterfly). But if you call it a sweet potato cake people will get the point and no one will cringe and avoid your eyes. The recipe from yesterday's post contains the tail end of the sweet potato cake recipe: serve with whipped cream and walnuts, which you should do with practically everything, as far as I'm concerned.

The Jam Cake is a recipe I tried when I was looking for something approximating the Lemon Jelly cake in Virginia Woolley's Ginnie's Babysitting Business (a.k.a. Ginnie and Her Juniors). I think you could make this with lemon jelly but now, having found the recipe, I can't find lemon jelly in the store. Just lemon curd, and to hell with that. But, this is good made with apricot or pineapple preserves, and I've even made it with strawberry jam. But it is quite sweet--definitely don't frost it. It goes nicely with tea.

If you haven't experienced the Ginnie stories, be prepared to be bored to tears tomorrow!

Cakes I have made

2006-08-13T08:01:00.000-05:00

It's coming up on harvest time, which means, here in Texas, that everything outdoors is deader than a doornail. That's why most of August is hay-making season in Texas: hay is dead grass.

In gentler climes, as I understand it, they harvest things because of the approach of cold weather, not the omnipresence of hot weather. Which sounds lovely, except it leads to romantic blunders like this Harvest Ribbon Cake, from Good Housekeeping's November 1953 issue.

Full disclosure: I have made this cake. And I have even served it to guests, although admittedly they were guests with excellent senses of humor. I did not, however, decorate the cake with almonds and what are said in the recipe to be sprays of grapes, but which look more like prunes. Maybe I did the orange peel (yeah, it looks like coconut, and wouldn't that be even worse?).

And pardon me for being petty, but are those daises in the background? Which are not exactly fall flowers?

Already in '53 they are leaning on the cake mixes for novelty:

I love this woodcut. The little Puritan girl looks like a child in one of those don't-talk-to-strangers comic books. The woman appears to be offering her a pan of lard, which would horrify me too.

I think when I made this, rather than use half of one cake mix for cupcakes (who's going to want extra cake in the house after making this?), I bought one of those little Jiffy mixes that makes half a cake. (Hey, they will send you a free recipe book! I am so there! I wonder iff all the recipes call for two boxes of cake mix, like the ones online do?) The tiny Jiffy mixes intrigue me. As does Sea Foam frosting, which I actually made, with its peculiar, synthetic texture. I find it intriguing, but I don't actually like it. Most cake frostings used to be cooked, not buttercream (well, OK, in the 50s anyway). But buttercream is what I was raised on; everything else seems exotic but not very tasty.

But the real disappointment in this cake is that none of the three layers are chocolatee. I guess that would overwhelm the other flavors; chocolate is pretty strong. But the spice layer looks dark, and it makes promises it can't keep.

Tomorrow, Blogger willing, I'll show you two more cake recipes from this mag that I've made, which are actually pretty good.

As always, click the photos to enlarge--if you dare!

Mea culpa, Blogger

2006-08-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

So, after nine days or so of bitterly complaining about Blogger, emailing Blogger, and looking up other people's problems with Blogger, I finally figured out that this image, which I've been trying to upload all week, had a comma in the filename instead of a period.

Color me embarrassed.

Anyway, this is just a little one-off ad from that same Household magazine we savaged the week before last, featuring more of the same cultural insensitivity embodied by the Li'l Abner strip, which was evidently an integral part of 1950s cereal campaigns.

Post Cereal used to be called Postum Cereals, so maybe that's why they belabor the standard 50's Indian-speak for this ad--"hitum," "stayum," except why does the pheasant talk like an Indian? (The Indians did discover corn; I get that connection. I'm not stupid, except where punctuation is concerned.)

Wikipedia tells us, "The Postum Cereals company, after acquiring Jell-O gelatin in 1925, Baker's chocolate in 1927, Maxwell House coffee in 1928, and other food brands, changed its name to General Foods Corporation in 1929. General Foods was acquired by Philip Morris Companies in 1985. In 1989, Philip Morris merged General Foods with Kraft Foods, which it had acquired in 1987 to form the Kraft General Foods division. The cereal brands of Nabisco were acquired in 1993. In 1995, Kraft General Foods was reorganized and renamed Kraft Foods, which currently owns the Post Cereals brands." So Post is now owned by a tobacco company, which is kind of ironic in light of this ad.

You can read the history of every tiny company the Philip Morris combine has sucked up over the years on Kraft's heritage page.

Silver linings

2006-08-06T08:08:00.000-05:00

So, while searching around for info on Blogger's photo issues, I stumbled on Auntie's blog. Take a look--a lot of her stuff is actually edible! Plus she talks about products you can still buy.

Damn Blogger to hell

2006-08-05T21:56:00.000-05:00

One solid week of error messages when I try to upload images. A different error message every time, too. Damn and blast.

Maybe I should just show you some ugly things from right here and now.

How about a recipe for "cracklin' cornbread," courtesy of Post cereals (a.k.a. Kraft) that calls for eggs AND Miracle Whip AND pork rinds?

How about a "cake" recipe that begins with broken-up Twinkies, and then adds pudding, Cool Whip, and Butterfingers candy bars?

How about a "salad" recipe that calls for crushed pineapple, multi-colored miniature marshmallows, and powdered Jello to be mixed and left standing overnight? Before adding crushed buttermints and whipped cream? ("Very colorful," the recipe advises.)

I'll tell you, there are some sick people out there.

Let sleeping Bloggers lie

2006-08-03T08:50:00.000-05:00

Did it work?

Nope. Still no photo upload. Sigh.

Blahgger

2006-07-31T11:56:00.000-05:00

Not interested in posting images today, evidently.