Eating the food of the 50s

boing
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Looks like this site has been boing-boinged off the net.

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Apparently, I know you people a little too well.

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you must know about james lileks and his ‘gallery of regrettable food’, he’s even up in MN.

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Aye, I was cheerfully reeling in horror at Aspic Atrocities, and now it’s b0rked. :frowning:

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I made this Hot Dog Crown for a party a couple of years ago based on a gross old 1950s recipe card. Bonus, mine was vegan!

It got a lot of laughs, but nobody touched it. :’(

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Ever wonder what some of the 1950s cookbook horrors Cory posts here would look (and taste) like in real life?

  1. Cory posts stuff besides political rants and semi-factual rants about things outside the scope of his knowledge?

  2. Sadly I remember some of the things in this blog because my grandmother used to cook like that.

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I discovered his blog thanks to Cory posting about it years ago. Minnesota is one of those places where you can find examples of regretable foods showing up at pot lucks to this day. Then again, I’ve also seen such things in central Wisconsin and mid-Michigan. Within the last decade. :confused:

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What’s in the center, refried beans? Because baked beans might have made it edible.

I think for it to truly be 1950’s food, though, you’d have to skewer maraschino cherries and canned fruit like pineapple chunks or “fruit salad” with toothpicks and attach them to the tops of the hotdogs as jewels.

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My grandmother married a northern Wisconsin man and lived in one small town up there for the rest of her life. One year, sometime in the late 1980’s, she gave all of her granddaughters (note the gender) the Ladies Auxiliary Cookbook from her town. The salad section included not one single dish we would consider salad: no greens, in fact no fresh vegetables of any type. Every “salad” was a jello salad, some with canned fruit in them and some with canned vegetables in them. Full stop.

How any of these people lived a long and healthy life, I’ll never know. They’d eat about as many fresh fruits and vegetables in a month as our family does in a day. But really, when you’re in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, etc. in prior generations…how much fresh produce could you get from October - June every year, back before we were shipping the stuff worldwide every day of the year? Jello might have been the only way to stomach canned peas, beans and corn every day for months.

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Link back up, fwiw.

And can I just say: lamb cake! Not a Christian, but the relatives we visited every year at Easter were, so we had lamb cake every year. It’s a coconut cake…what’s not to love?

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There’s a picture of me, somewhere, with a lamb cake. Birthday or baptism?

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“vegan” is a bonus?

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s vegetarian food that apes meat. That’s like shooting an android and claiming you’re non-violent!

What is in the center?

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When’s your birthday?

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Neither: SACRIFICE.

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Mere anarchy. It won’t hold.

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There are plenty of winter vegetables, though I admit that many would probably suffer in Wisconsin, too.

Also, not amount of “healthy food” will offset the sedentary lifestyle of todays’ population.

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Well, sausages and the like aren’t meat, but meat dishes. There’s a difference.

If it works to make non-prime-cuts into edible food, why not use the same technique on other stuff?

I actually like tofu-sausages, for example, and I am a meat eater. Raw, spiced pork, rare beef, roasted chicken with nothing but a little salt, if any - yummy. Yes, these tofu sausages work splendidly with fried noodles, for example.

What’s wrong is selling and treating them as “This is just as meat sausages“, because it’s not a substitute. (Wrong texture, for examples, so you can’t handle it the same way.)

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Well, given what most hotdogs consist of, tofu ones aren’t that bad an option, I guess…

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I also eat vegetarian sausage (patties).

But when I go to a vegan restaurant and the only things on the menu are ersatz burgers ersatz hot dogs ersatz chicken etc etc I’m annoyed. It’s taunting me with meat, not rewarding me for avoiding meat. [Most vegan restaurants aren’t like that, probably. But some certainly are. And they annoy me.]

What, practically speaking regarding meat-eating vs vegan-eating behaviors per the context of this discussion, would that be?

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