Hide-And-Seek

Guess what’s hidden inside this aspic sarcophagus?

Missing sock

Loose change

Lottery ticket

Engagement ring

Turkey breast

Parking ticket

A summons

Dead mouse

Live mouse

All your hopes and dreams

Pair of dentures

Car keys

Stapler

All of the above

All-Time Favorite Salad Recipes, Better Homes and Gardens, 1978

The Versatile Turkey

— Oi, Fred.

— What?

— Where are you going for Thanksgiving?

— Church, I think. Let me check: yep, Church.

— But it’s Thanksgiving, not Christmas. This is America.

— Ah — no mate. I’m not going to church; I’m off to the Church’s. They’re expecting a big crowd.

— Oh! The Church’s. You should have said that to begin with.

— I did. Where are you off to?

— No idea.

— That’s too bad. You don’t have any family you could be with?

— Chance would be a fine thing.

— No need to take that attitude….

— No — I meant I wouldn’t mind going to the Chance’s. I’ve heard they put on a good spread.

— That they do.

— Do you ever dream about going to the White House? I always used to wonder if I’d get to do that. Must be nice.

— Tell me about it.

— But then there’s always wondering what to do with yourself the next day, isn’t there? Do you just sit around or what? It must be a bit lonely, I’ve always thought.

— You’ve got a good point there. Come to think of it, I’m rather glad to be with the Church’s. She’s a cookbook author, you know.

— Seriously?

— Absolutely. Next best thing isn’t it? Going to a chef’s house?

— Got to be. But what if you end up with Tomato Slush? Or Mashed Rutabagas? Or Pink Grapefruit and Avocado Salad with Radish Chips?

— Surely not? At a chef’s house? That’s a fate worse than death!

— I kid you not.

— You’re making me think twice about this whole thing.

— Too late now, mate. They’re counting on you.

— Damn.

— How much do you weigh, anyway?

— 16 lbs, give or take. It’s all that corn I’ve been eating lately.

— That’s what — 14 lbs or so, dressed, right?

— I should think so, yes.

— Well, that’s perfect. Your fate is sealed. Feeds six, they say.

— I should hope so. You aim to feed six at least.

— It’s that or the dreaded Turkey Curry.

— Please don’t go there. You’re bring me down.

— Hey! I was only —

— Get stuffed!

— Get stuffed yourself, wattle-face!

Pennywise Party Perfect Dinners, The Good Cooking School, Inc., 1975

Mad Men

This picture of a turkey on fire is an ad for chewing gum. It appears in a Woman’s Day magazine from December 1969.

Here’s how the pitch meeting went down.

Dick: Tom, what do we have?

Tom: Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum.

Harry: Everyone loves delicious Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum.

Dick: Very useful if you can’t smoke.

Tom: What?

Dick: Sure. Imagine if you couldn’t light up. You’d have to chew gum instead.

Harry: But where?

Dick: I don’t know. On an airplane. Or at the movies.

Tom: The hospital. The maternity ward. School.

Harry: You have got to be kidding.

Tom: You’re right, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Speaking of which . . . give me a toke of that.

Dick: Where were we?

Harry: Hey, Tom. Tommy Boy. Thomas. Sir. Pass it along.

Tom: Oh man, that’s the good sh*it.

Dick: You can’t say “shit.”

Tom: I didn’t; I said “sh*it,” with an asterisk. It doesn’t count.

Harry: I’m hungry. Remember that turkey your sister made the other day?

Dick: The one she burned?

Harry: Yeah. Let’s use that. Let’s have a turkey on fire.

Tom: For what occasion?

Harry: Christmas. We could tell people to sing “Happy Turkey” instead of Happy Birthday. It would be hilarious.

Dick: It could work. It could work. My sister better not see it.

Harry: We could adorn it with burning sugar cubes. Anything will do.

Tom: It’s the work of a lunatic genius. Three lunatic geniuses. Like the Three Wise Men. We could drape the thing with a garland of cranberries.

Dick: You understand that we are using a birthday Christmas turkey which has been set on fire to sell chewing gum, yes?

Harry: It’s mad. It’s the work of mad, mad, very stoned men.

Dick: No-one will notice. We won’t be able to get away with this sort of thing in 1970. Better do it now while we still can.

Tom: What’s happening in 1970?

Dick: Looking for a new job, I expect. Going to get kicked out of this one for sure. Might as well go out in style. Wow, I’m high.

Woman’s Day, December 1969

More Yuckylicious ads: The Big Squeez, Behold The Versatronic, Gold Medal Memories, What A Douchebag, The Seven Year Itch, You Say Carat; I Say Carrot (Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off), It’s The Real Thing (What Is, Exactly?), Putting the Special in Special K

Currying F(l)avor

Once upon a time it was 1959. Life had been so good in the United States after World War Two that everyone in the world wanted to get on the gravy train. Except Fidel Castro, who started off the year by marching on Havana. He’s still there. America had the entertainment of Walt Disney and the Marx Brothers, and its little girls could play with the newly minted Barbie while its boys could fantasize about being astronauts. It’s men could drink and smoke all day long from sun-up to sunset and its women could finally cram their legs into pantyhose after 200 years of wearing stockings.

Russia liked America so much it sold Alaska to it for $7.2 million. The trouble was that Americans didn’t want to go on holiday in the far north. They wanted to sit on tropical beaches and wear bikinis. It was because men wanted to see women in bikinis — a garment named for a beautiful pacific atoll they blew up with atomic bombs a few years before — that they set their sights on the lovely Hawaiian islands as a vacation destination. Hawaiians became Americans and were required to eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and Americans got an endless supply of pineapples.

Cookbooks went pineapple crazy. Now, instead of eating Turkey a la King and Turkey Casserole with the leftover carcass bits, you could have Hawaiian Turkey Curry, a culturally confused mongrel dish consisting of ingredients that could not possibly have all been produced in the same place — the forerunner of pacific rim cuisine. It’s the opposite of the current trend of eating local and reducing your carbon footprint. Hey; it was 1959 — and the world was America’s oyster. I mean melting pot. I mean hot pot. I mean curry.

The world was henceforth America’s Curry.

Rawleigh’s Picture Treasury of Good Cooking, W. T. Rawleigh Company, 1959

Gobble Gobble Gobble

Thanksgiving is an American national holiday which celebrates how very very thankful the English Pilgrims were to have found a massive continent of unimaginable bounty and potential which had absolutely no people already living there. Because they were the first Europeans to set foot on it, they decided to celebrate their good fortune by holding a party. Representatives of the uninhabited land were invited so that they could be mocked for being such bad real estate managers. After dinner they played a rousing game of “Finder’s Keepers” which the Pilgrims won. The prize was the glorious gift of freedom. Then they sat down to eat a giant plate of parsley garnished with a roasted local bird.

All Holiday Menus, Barbara Grunes

Turkey a la Death

Where to begin?

How about with the contradictory instructions “DO NOT DEFROST” for microwaving a frozen turkey. If you willfully (and suicidally) ignore this warning, then go ahead and defrost it at medium-high power for 16 – 18 minutes per lb. Or you could do it for 5 – 6 minutes per pound (even more deadly), according to the instructions at the top of the page.

Or, we could just go with the obvious admonition not to put metal in the microwave, something the instructions in the middle of the page appear to ignore. Foil isn’t metal, is it? Oh, it is? How about the “small metal clasp” that the instructions advise leaving in “because of the large mass of food”? So metal buried inside the food is OK?

Maybe we could draw attention to the mysterious “browning agent” mentioned at the top right. It should be noted that a “browning agent” here is neither butter nor oil, which are the traditional browning agents for basting poultry. Sounds carcinogenic.

There is always the troubling idea that the inside of the defrosted turkey “may still be a bit icy” before it is cooked, which the lower illustration shows. (You cannot remove the giblets and neck by running cold water into a turkey, by the way; you have to actually reach into the bird’s body cavity and pull them out.) One wonders how such a thing might interfere with overall cooking times, not to mention cultivating a memorable case of salmonella.

The best thing to do is to AVOID PUTTING A TURKEY INTO A MICROWAVE OVEN TO BEGIN WITH, YOU IDIOT. Sure, you can stuff a turkey into a conventional oven and cook it overnight on low, or all day on medium. You can brine it. You can buy it fresh so that it’s not frozen solid. You can fry it or smoke it and burn your whole house down if you like, but please, PLEASE, do not try to cram a frozen turkey into a microwave oven and expect to come out alive.

The turkey’s had it; it’s deceased, has no hope of a future of any kind. Its head has been lopped off, its innards plucked out, its feet severed, and it has been completely plucked. It is dead. It ain’t going nowhere. It has bit the dust. It is, to borrow a familiar turn of phrase, a former turkey. It probably had a short, miserable, cramped, brightly lit life which is now over. Its mother was artificially inseminated because the genetically engineered breasts of its parents were so large its Daddy could not mate with its Mommy. You, however, and your entire family, probably want to see tomorrow. You might even want to eat leftovers. So do yourself and them a favor and seal the microwave up with bright yellow CAUTION DO NOT CROSS tape and step away.

Microwave Cooking Guide, O’Keefe and Merritt

Also from this book: Stick-Of-Sauce, Nights In White Frosting

How To Disfigure a Peacock

According to the Book of Genesis, 1-20: "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 
21: And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 
22: And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 
23: And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. 
24: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 
25: And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 
26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 
27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 
28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

No sooner had he done this, than human beings sought to dismantle the world around them like curious children left in a room full of Lego. They drained the lakes and razed the mountains, felled the trees and burnt the grass. They devised a hundred ways to undo the creatures they had been given for food. Then they came up with a hundred ways to describe these acts of butchery because Man is a creature who understands his world through language. Some of these terms are as beautiful as they are descriptive: to “unlace” a coney (or rabbit); to “allay” a pheasant; to “break” a deer; to “wring” a quail.

In the November 23^rd, 1946 issue of the Spokesman-Review, appeared this brief commentary on a wholly new addition to our dinner tables: the canned turkey. You “open” it. This bit of linguistic comedy as well as his twist on words in the first two sentences, “They are also never eating things they ate before,” marks Weare Holbrook as whimsical a wordsmith as those good scribes who produced an English Bible for King James in 1604.

The word “carve” not only means to cut something, but to create something with skill. In order to produce something of beauty you have to destroy something else. You have to break what something else has made. 

Top-Notch Turkey Loaf

 A recipe illustrating the old culinary adage: “if in doubt, grind up and squeeze into a loaf pan.”

This useful tip has saved many a housewife the terrible embarrassment of serving yet more turkey sandwiches after the holidays, and perhaps even the disdain of her family for a failure of imagination in the kitchen. Luckily, Better Homes and Gardens has come to the rescue with the masterful tome, Ground Meat Cook Book, most of which includes turning animal parts into something that looks like it came out of a can. Still, one must take into account delicate constitutions for whom meat whose source can still be determined is off-putting.

One of those tricks is to slather the meat product in sauce. Curiously, this particular example resembles what can happen if the person you’re serving has eaten just too much damn turkey and egg-nog in recent days.

It gives new meaning to recycling, doesn’t it? 

Ground Meat Cook Book, Better Homes and Gardens, 1969

Also from this book: Hamburger Helper?, Cooties Especial, Ham Strata, Meaty Surprise!, Peppy-Sauced Meatloaf, Tangiers Hash, King-Sized Balls