It being Thanksgiving week,
my thoughts have naturally turned to food.
(Okay, I admit my thoughts live there most of the time).And the prospect of Veg-All Salad (previous post) has led to a Hinckleyville discussion of a question that I believe deserves further Small Works exploration:
Did people have taste buds
in the 1950's?
It could be possible that their taste buds
were heavily deadened by all the smoking.Or it could be that they were drunk and giddy
with the post-war technological advances
that were modernizing their kitchen worlds at break-neck speed.
It reminds me of the scene from the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," in which his mother explains that she has been bagging up her green salads in lunch size portions and putting them in the freezer
and he says something like, "The freezer is a great invention, Mother, but it's not for EVERYTHING."
Which is exactly how I feel about jello.
In addition to things like tomato soup and shrimp jello, the 1950's also seemed to specialize in canned meat products and the many thrifty and appealing dishes you could make by utilizing them.
I had no idea that, at any point in history, one could purchase HAMBURGERS IN A CAN (hiding there in the back row, above.)
I'm trying to figure out what that would be. . . would it come out in a gloppy pile that you would then mold into patty shapes? Would it come out in a solid meat-like cylinder that you would then slice into patty shapes?
Somehow each image I conjure
seems equally suggestive of Alpo.
And when you combine the variety meat products of the 1950's with the inability to make food photos look appealing, you end up with things like this:
Which, although it is made with regular ground meat, looks something like I would imagine hamburgers in a can would look.
Unfortunately, Aunt Lillie's love of canned meats extended well into the 1970's so I was regularly treated to fried Spam. And my mother went through a brief fling with "Underwood Deviled Ham," which I distinctly remember as being a key player in my worst lunches ever.
To be fair . . . our newspaper's Taste section last week had some Thanksgiving ideas that were 1950's-ick, if you ask me. There was a recipe for brussels sprouts with bacon and figs, for instance. Now I admittedly detest brussels sprouts, and bacon could probably only improve them.
BUT FIGS??
Keep the figs out of my vegetable dishes
and only in my Newtons, s'il vous plait.
I prefer my Thanksgiving vegetables swimming in Cream of Mushroom soup and crunching with french-fried onions. Or mounded up into a giant gravy-stopping dam, a starchy vegetable engineering marvel that just barely manages to save the rest of my plate from disaster.
In my world, Thanksgiving is NOT the time for Nouvelle Cuisine. Or to coin a phrase from another movie oldie-but-goodie,
"The food's brown, hot,
and plenty of it."
But even though I am in no way an adventurous eater, I figured I may as well jump on the bandwagon and make a
Small Works Thanksgiving Menu Suggestion.
Because if one owns an extensive collection of vintage women's magazines, one probably has a responsibility to use them to research both homemaking and hospitality, lest a whole lot of swell recipes and hostess ideas just *poof!* disappear from our modern tables.
So I offer you "Thanksgiving Corn-o-Copias":
Just grab some bologna slices, slather them with mustard, stuff them full of corn and velveeta, pop them in the oven and garnish with the ubiquitous pimiento slice and parsley and you will have a Thanksgiving treat that is not only festive and delicious, but will remind you why you are glad to be eating Thanksgiving dinner this year instead of in 1952.
Happy Grocery Shopping!
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