Insouciance

Got company coming over? A ladies luncheon or coffee morning? Or a date with your mother-in-law? Perhaps you’ve invited the new neighbors over to introduce yourself.

Should you be compelled to entertain, but find that for whatever reason, you just don’t give a f*ck, then this is the perfect thing to serve. It says “I went to the trouble, but didn’t trouble myself too much.” It’s semi-homemade in a way that signals you’re a busy woman who wants to keep up appearances, but hasn’t got time to appear to keep them up. A dessert such as this acknowledges that you like tradition in the kitchen and fashion in the dining room. It says “I understand the fundamentals but like to throw them together according to my mood.”

Whatever message it sends, it’s sure to please the unfortunates among your crowd who will feel encouraged to gorge now and purge later, or perhaps to decline to indulge themselves at all in order to maintain their figures. You can go ahead and give it a fancy French name. No-one will know what it means. 

Dessert Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1960

Imperial Strawberry Shortcake

To protect their community and ensure a successful growing season, the strawberries sacrificed the juiciest among them for a ritual offering made to the almighty Strawberry God.

For weeks, strawberry families contributed to the effort, some grinding flour for the cake, some milking cows for the cream, and some watching over their youngsters with an eye to which would look best all sliced up for the filling. Only virgin strawberries are chosen for the important upper layer, their pale insides slit open and cleaned of entrails, arranged in a circle facing the sun.

No living person has yet been able to witness the extraordinary ceremony whereby the vast Strawberry God himself appears before the assembled masses to survey the offering, UNTIL NOW.

You can sense the trembling fear felt by the fruit before judgment is passed. Will they have given their all in vain?

This Eyewitness To History moment brought to you by the Family Circle Dessert Cookbook of 1972.

Also from this book: Won't Get Foiled Again

Vive La Cuisine Franglais!

 In 1803, the young country of America bought a sizable chuck of land in its backyard from France for the princely sum of $15 million. Everyone was a winner: the United States gained Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, parts of Minnesota, Texas, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana, most of the Dakotas and the city of New Orleans, thereby doubling its territory and creating the vast breadbasket that would feed the new nation.

In return (in addition to the cash), the master military strategist Napoleon Bonaparte got the satisfaction of creating a potential naval power to rival that of its arch-enemy England. Assuming, that is, those upstart Yanks didn't develop a "special relationship" with the dastardly Limeys. 

That worked out well for France.

A mere 160 years later, Better Homes and Gardens heaped insult upon injury by unleashing one of the most unwittingly offensive cookbooks ever: Meals With a Foreign Flair. In it, all the world’s cultures suffer equally the indignity of culinary stereotyping on a grand scale, including those hapless cooks, the French.

Take, for example, this delightfully futuristic rendering of a classic French dessert: strawberries on sticks poked into a ball of strawberry leaves magically embedded into a bowl of green stuff, or, as we say in Franglais, “Fraises a la mode gros folie et dangereuse aussi.”

The book recommends serving this monstrosity with Demitasse made from mixing “3 tablespoons of instant coffee and 2 cups of boiling water.”

Bon Appétit! (or as we say, “Vas te faire encule!”)

Meals With A Foreign Flair, Better Homes and Gardens, 1963

Also from this book: Bohemian Rhapsody, Sweet-Sour Pork