Pizza Potatoes

The point of food styling is to make the food look good — more than good: inviting, delicious, evocative. It should tickle the senses, make your stomach rumble and your mouth water. It should evoke memory, inspire delight, and maybe even hint at what the ingredients are, or how best to serve it. 

 

Pizza Potatoes does none of these things. It is the epitome of anti-styling. It is a snapshot of something that presumably matches the recipe on the back of the card. It is unappetizing to the point of revulsion. It is the runt of the litter, its name a desperate attempt to describe its utility. 

 

The housewife who reaches for this recipe has just come home from work on the subway. Her latchkey kids have left the house a mess and demand her attention to mediate a fight as they whine relentlessly about being hungry. She pours herself a drink, lights a cigarette, and throws a packet each of frozen potatoes, pepperoni, and shredded cheese into a dish, along with a can of tomato soup and some water, and bungs it in the oven. While it bakes, she glances at the bills and tosses them, unopened, onto a pile. 

 

The kids want real pizza, and so does she. 

 

Pizza Potatoes

Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library, 1971

 

Pizza Potatoes — For When You Simply Don’t Give A F*ck

The Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library series from 1971 is a plastic time capsule of grotesque food photography.

Their food stylists and photographers never met a dish they didn’t shoot on a table set with a dizzying array of additional food accompaniments or props. A heavy emphasis was placed on hardware: the serving dishes, drinking vessels and various pouring devices which crowded their place settings. The food was never enough to speak for itself, always requiring the elaborate costume such clutter provides to suggest an appeal.

The dishes are always shot from an angle which places the card reader at the table — from a diner’s eye-level. The scenes are brightly, but artificially lit and appear to feature real food with a minimum of styling, which on occasion is sorely missed, such as when an element melts, creating an unappetizing look.

Although each and every card is a brightly colored catastrophe, one recipe distinguishes itself as a close-up which should not have been. In Pizza Potatoes, all we see is a gooey mess in a white bowl, with a curve of red tablecloth beyond it, chosen, clearly, to accent the pepperoni swamped by cheese. The interior of the dish is crusted at the edges and gives the impression of a difficult clean-up.

This is not a dish which lends itself to beauty or detail. With our faces just inches from the rim of the bowl, it feels as if we’re leaning in for a sniff. A swampy morass of melted cheese looks like a greasy heart attack, and there’s no hint of a salad to provide any relief. This is a recipe for pizza toppings on top of potato, after all — all of which come from packages supplied by General Mills.

Budget Casseroles Card #25 Pizza Potatoes, Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library, 1971

Why We Can’t Cook

Cooking: what is it, and how can I get involved?

Cooking is a long-lost ancient skill our ancestors used to prepare food to eat. Long ago, in order to eat, people had to “grow” “raise” “hunt” and “cultivate” edible things that they would then “cook” to turn into food. It took all day.

Today, cooking has become popular among a select group of hip individuals who wish to recreate this long-abandoned art in their own homes. People who do cooking are known as “cooks.”

What sorts of things do “cooks” make?

Take pizza for example. A cook will make a pizza using a “recipe” and techniques learned from “books.” They will actually make the “dough” (the stuff the base is made from) themselves using their hands, and the tomato part and the cheese part (although many cooks still buy the cheese). * Then they will heat it in an oven. This is also called “cooking” it, which may be confusing.

But why would someone go to all this trouble?

No-one really knows. You can buy a pizza at any supermarket.

What does homemade pizza taste like?

Again, this is unclear. Cooks rarely allow non-cooks to share their “food.” By the time you show up, it’s usually all been eaten. It is thought they do this to hide the evidence of their habit. The only way to know is to become a cook yourself.

Cooking sounds like a religious cult. Is it dangerous?

As with all new things, caution should be taken before attempting. Before trying to cook, you should document your whereabouts and alert your family, should things go wrong. It is a known fact that people who have taken up cooking have disappeared into kitchens, and are never heard from again. It can take years to track a cook down, and it has proven to be very difficult to re-integrate them back into society. Cooks have also been known to recruit their own family and friends into the habit: it’s a discussion you should have before you become hooked.

*Not the cheese you may be used to: this cheese is made from milk and enzymes which are mixed together and left to “age.”

Fast Meals Cookbook, Rockville House Publishers, 1972

Also from this book: Revenge Salad

Pizza Burger

25 minutes. Please write your answers in the lined test booklet provided.

“Giant burger boasts real pizza flavor! Broil the savory meat mixture atop a big slice of bread or toasted bun halves. Add mozzarella cheese and cherry tomatoes for a return trip to the broiler. Pizza Burger for Two makes a delicious and attractive lunch treat.”

Q: The Pizza Burger is neither Pizza nor Burger. Discuss.

1968 was a confusing time in world history. Mostly people went ape-shit crazy and killed everyone. There were people in space looking at the dark side of the moon and Led Zeppelin started tearing it up. No-one had any civility or rights. People wanted burgers like they always had but now they also wanted pizza. This is how the pizza burger came about. No-one lived with their family anymore so there was no-one around to put a halt to the madness. People were so afraid of being marched off to war that they only used one bun or a big slice of bread, and they’d never seen a real pizza. The cheese used in the photograph is clearly not mozzarella. One of the slices of bread is round and the other one is square, so two loaves of bread were used. The news on TV was so strange that it seemed 2 + 2 didn’t make 4 anymore, so people tried combining things that shouldn’t be combined just to make things make sense again, like mixing pizzas with burgers. It still didn’t make 4. The Age of Reason had come to a screeching halt. The Age of Arithmetic was a bust. A publication called Better Homes and Gardens bettered neither homes nor gardens. The 1970s were still two years off. The management of body hair fell by the wayside among all the confusion. People ate Pizza Burgers and wished they could go back in time and un-eat them. The Pizza Burger is a perfect example of the times. This is my discussion of the Pizza Burger. 

Cooking for Two, Better Homes and Gardens, 1968

Also from this book: Goodnight Asparagus, Have A Coronary

Bomba the Jungle Boy and the Pizza of Death

Bomba the Jungle Boy, a character invented by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (not a crime family) and published under the pseudonym Roy Rockwood (not a gay porno actor), was a direct imitation of Tarzan (of the Apes). Bomba, a white orphan who grows up under the minimal care of a naturalist named Cody Casson (not Wild Bill) in the jungles of South America feels more kinship with his animal friends than his dark-skinned compadres/enemies and longs to discover the story of his English parents. He meets with many adventures along the way with extreme bravery, dressed in his puma  skin tunic and armed with a razor-sharp knife. Eventually he runs out of dangerous situations in the New World so he ends up getting up to much derring-do in Africa instead.

 Bomba doesn’t so much ante-date Tarzan as he pre-dates Elmo (of the urban jungle) in his actions and speech. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” establishes Lord Greystoke’s pidgin English, but at least he speaks in first-person, therefore demonstrating his awareness of personhood. Bomba, by contrast, generally speaks in third-person: “Bomba is glad,” except for when he feels compelled to demonstrate his origins, when his facility with the language improves spectacularly. There is little charm in the appalling racism, but much in the vocabulary of 1929: they are all going “yonder” and “athwart” and express “jubilation.”

Any recreation of Bomba for contemporary readers would do away with the Imperialist liberties, but what would they do with the plot? In the Swamp of Death, Bomba helps some white men find a red flower whose resin is distilled into a clear liquid (heroin!) — an invaluable medicine which helps Casson regain his shattered mind (in order to recall for Bomba his parent’s story). Casson’s injury was caused by shrapnel from an old rifle he was using to kill an anaconda. Any allusion, veiled or otherwise, to WWI is left unmentioned, though it would be clear to Bomba’s readers in 1929.

 A Tarzan-inspired TV series Zim Bomba features a very fit and articulate American man playing the role of Bomba and in no way replicates the books, in which Bomba is a shy English boy who does not speak like a cowboy gangster. As an act of cinematographic homage, Bomba is played by Johnny Sheffield, immediately recognizable as “Boy” from the original Tarzan films.

The Swamp of Death itself refers to a quicksand bog our intrepid hero finds himself embroiled in. It is a mire of unspeakable gloopiness which sucks you in and smothers you to death. As in all epic journeys, it represents an impossible obstacle only a true hero can traverse. Much like this deep pan pizza.

Fabulous Fry Pan Favorites, Patricia Phillips, National Presto Industries, Inc., 1984

Confetti Meatball Supper

The term confetti comes to us via the tradition of tossing sugared almonds at couples on their wedding day so that they may be fruitful. Being pelted with hard sweets isn’t much fun, however, and rice (which was also used for the same purpose) tends to get all swollen and rotten when exposed to moisture. Colored paper shapes are thankfully used instead — what we today consider confetti. It is not just limited to weddings either, since no-one gets married nowadays, so it is thrown at any festive occasion.

One assumes that the association with colorful fragments denoting joy is what allows any dish featuring a sprinkle of color in the form of chopped vegetables to be called a Confetti. The joy, sadly, is missing from this particular dish, though the caption strongly suggests the arrangement gives it “eye appeal.”

Note how the recipe for this delicious-looking Confetti Meatball Supper does not feature an ingredients list. This is because the ingredients are:

1 can condensed Cheddar Cheese soup

¼ cup ketchup

1 teaspoon minced onion

1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce

1 cans Meatballs in Gravy

Package precooked rice

1 can mixed vegetables

2 tablespoons canned pimento

¼ teaspoon salt

Some things are worth noting here, and it’s not that this involves mostly things that come out of cans or bottles. What does one do with the rest of the onion after you only dice a slice of it?

Please note the recipe for what can only be the bastard child of take-out cuisine: an Indian Pizza. This Frankenmeal is achieved through the clever addition of curry powder to a pizza. It’s neither Italian nor Indian: it’s just horrid.

After Work Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1974