Seafood Garden

Q: What do small shrimp make?

A: Microwaves!

Once upon a time, the small shrimp which give this dish its tenuous connection to seafood, swam free in the vast ocean among their crustacean brethren enjoying a life free from stress and fear. They were ignorant of the non-aquatic life, and of the strange creatures who reside upon the land who rely on microwave ovens to cook their food.

In particular, they were completely unaware of what the folks at Ideals Publishing in Nashville, TN had in store for them. This is just as well, because they might have tried to escape the trawling net that inevitably captured them and the swift death that followed. Thankfully, while their souls were swept up (or down?) to fishy heaven, their bodies continued to play a valuable role in the food chain; once flash frozen and canned, and then shipped to a supermarket, they were purchased by Cyndee Kannenberg (or one of her associates) so she could demonstrate for us this recipe.

What remained of those dear, innocent shrimp were condemned to float among the congealed depths of a pool of cream of shrimp soup and cream cheese. Perhaps the asparagus reminds them of seaweed. 

Notice how this dish is presented with an offering of fresh flowers: are they a bribe for the diner or a reward? Or are they a bouquet some grief-stricken marine-lover has left upon their jellified grave?

Guide To Microwave Cooking, Ideals Publishing, Nashville TN, 1978

Jizzed Up Veggies

 Nothing says “healthy vegetables” like drowning them in “pasteurized process cheese spread” and bacon bits.

Kraft, the processed foods conglomerate who produced this cookbook for harried working Moms, has ensured that their products form the base for everything in it, no matter how inappropriate. As it happens, they needn’t have worried about whether people are getting their daily helping; Kraft Foods owns pretty much everything you see on a supermarket shelf. It would be harder to go a day without consuming a Kraft product.

While the caption uses the ridiculous phrase above, the actual recipe calls for what we all know it by: CHEEZ WHIZ. That’s a lot of Zs.

CHEEZ WHIZ came to the market in 1953, and consists of the following:

WHEY, CANOLA OIL, MILK, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, MALTODEXTRIN, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SALT, LACTIC ACID, SODIUM ALGINATE, MUSTARD FLOUR, WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE (VINEGAR, MOLASSES, CORN SYRUP, WATER, SALT, CARAMEL COLOR, GARLIC POWDER, SUGAR, SPICES, TAMARIND, NATURAL FLAVOR), SORBIC ACID AS A PRESERVATIVE, MILKFAT, CHEESE CULTURE, OLEORESIN PAPRIKA (COLOR), ANNATTO (COLOR), NATURAL FLAVOR, ENZYMES.

(Translation: the stuff left over when milk coagulates, milk, casein (the dairy stuff that gives you allergies and heart attacks), soy, salt, the stuff responsible for tooth decay, more salt, ground-up mustard, Worcester Sauce, unripe rowan berry juice, milkfat, bacteria and fungi, pepper essence extracted with gasoline byproduct, Achiote tree derivative, “natural flavor”?, enzymes.) There is no cheese.

Fully two-thirds of CHEEZ WHIZ’s calories come from fat. This recipe will provide you with half your daily allowance of sodium from the CHEEZ WHIZ alone (never mind the bacon bits, chopped nuts, crushed crackers, seasoned croutons and crushed potato chips it also calls for).

CHEEZ WHIZ is just one type of "American Cheese," which is not cheese at all, but legally defined as a "cheese analogue" (hence the deliberately fake spelling). If it's called "American Cheese" (any variety) and comes in rectangular form (or in a jar or aerosol can), regardless whether you buy it from the deli counter sliced or not, it most likely grew in a field, rather than came out of a cow. "American cheese" consists mainly of soy and occasionally casein, or milk fats. 

Get this: to encourage patriotism during wartime, the sale and consumption of anything other than "American Cheese"was banned in the US in May, 1942. But people missed their real cheese and knew a ruse when they saw it — the public morale plummeted instead, causing the ban to be rescinded only three months later. 

Kraft has always liked to advertise CHEEZ WHIZ as “cheese made easy,” but what they are doing is making cheese really complicated. Actual cheese is easy all by itself. For a start, you don’t have to add anything to it for it to be cheese. Come to think of it, you don’t need to add anything to broccoli for it to be broccoli either.

Next time you want to disguise the fact you are serving green vegetables by jazzing them up, go with Jizz instead: packed with protein, only 25 calories per average helping.

Actually, skip the veggies altogether. Everyone’s likely to have a better evening. 

Weekday Survival Guide, Kraft General Foods, Inc., 1991

Also from this book: Making A Spectacle Of Yourself

Chicken Mousse in Aspic (A Cult Classic)

The caption to this charming photograph reads:

"An all-season favorite, Chicken Mousse in Aspic features chicken, ham, whipped cream, liver pate, and mustard for a combination that is sure to please."

This comes from a chapter of Family Circle’s Salad Cookbook entitled “Molded Salad Riches” which was written by gullible people who have of their own free will joined a cult whose discipline is maintained by the forced consumption of massive quantities of LSD-spiked Jello. These are people who have lost touch with reality in a profound way. One can imagine their cult caretaker, himself drugged up to the eyeballs on Quaaludes, unlocking the padlock on the Family Circle fridge, seeing the paltry contents, and undergoing a slow-motion revelation about combining them as a perfect expression of a penance fit for testing the fortitude of the new recruits.

How else can this travesty be explained? What sane mind could possible come up with this introduction: 

"Heap up the goodness and fold or cover with gelatin and you have a molded salad. Lend them all the goodness of a full meal and you have a main-dish molded salad. In these pages you’ll chance upon many main-dish and side-dish molded salads."

It is not so much a culinary suggestion as it is a religious tract meant to invoke both awe and fear in those who recite it in hushed monotone in the “Family Circle” kitchens. Family Circle, my ass. The non-brainwashed mind sees the invitation to “chance upon” many molded salads as a threat, something to be ardently avoided and possibly reported to the authorities, not a promise for further means of devotion.

There is also a troubling amount of detailed instruction in this recipe, especially concerning the production of foil cones. This is a dead giveaway: once the acolytes are proficient at rolling foil cones, it’s just a teensy step away from the hillbilly crack pipe. Mark my words. 

Read the recipe at your own risk.

 Salad Cookbook, The Family Circle, Inc., 1972

Check out the militant-looking Family Circle logo in the corner (Dharma Initiative, anyone?).

Also from this book: What We Talk About When We Talk About Gelatin, Chicken Indienne, Salmon In A Sauna

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

Sausage Breakfast Bake with Crisco

 Call 911! There’s been a terrible accident! Some poor woman’s fingers were severed during the preparation of this delicious-looking Sausage Breakfast Bake. There they are embedded in the cake. Looks like the misfortune happened as she was pouring the batter and they’ve browned nicely in the oven. I don’t know about you, but nothing gives me a hearty appetite for breakfast like cake slathered in blood.

Oh — wait — it’s not blood; it’s Apple Maple Syrup. This healthy concoction is made thusly:

In a saucepan combine sugar and cornstarch; stir in the syrup reserved from a can of apple slices and cook until thick and bubbly. Stir in butter and maple syrup.

This glorious breakfast tableau comes from Crisco’s Favorite Family Foods Cookbook. This is not a joke. Such a book exists. The main aim is to incorporate as much Crisco shortening into ordinary foods as possible.

Crisco is the type of lard that long-distance swimmers use to slather themselves in to prevent hypothermia (and aid in glide?) when attempting feats of endurance that kill lesser humans, like crossing the English Channel (death by P & O Ferry) or swimming from Cuba to the US (death by shark or Coast Guard). It is not the sort of thing one readily admits to actually ingesting.

This breakfast menu would have you using Crisco in the Sausage Bake and the Sunburst Coffee Cake. The book as a whole would have you slip it into everything you can think of and many things you couldn’t. If you are really lucky, you might actually get through the entire book without having a heart attack (unlikely).

A note on crockery: plates and dishes with inner serrations like the one in this picture are a bitch to clean up. We won’t mention the baked eggs.

Crisco presents Favorite Family Foods, The Procter & Gamble Company, 1973

Also from this book: They Serve Coke at Parties, Don't They?, An Eye For An Eye

Fondue? Fondon't.

Oh Dear. This is very sad. These people have run out of food and have had to rely on serving a bowl of vomit and pieces of something they’re dipping into it on skewers. Perhaps their guests won’t notice because there’s clearly flirting going on. Look at how those fingers are suggestively curled around the metal….The recipe instructions say “Oops! The first one to drop his bread in the pot gives a kiss to the friend of his choice.”

(Why is it assumed to be the man who will drop his bread? And isn’t there a pretty high potential for abusing the fondue rule in order to kiss everyone? Or maybe just the one person. And what if she doesn’t want to be kissed? This could lead to violence in a jiffy — and they’re all armed with pointy sticks. So much for the Swiss being pacifists. What a crock of sh*t. Which incidentally brings us back to the photo.)

I wonder how long those apple slices wedged onto the mugs will stay there? Every tried to jam an apple slice onto a hard object? Let’s give special props to the food stylist who so carefully carved the notches out without breaking the apple. And for the all-red theme. Bravo.

On the next page are these lovely recipes for “Rabbit.” Not to be confused with the traditional “Welsh Rarebit.”

Cooking with Cheese, Better Homes and Gardens, 1971

Also from this book: Parsley Merkin

Creamed Eggs in a Corned Beef Crust

I don’t know about you, but when I think of a tart, I don’t assume the crust has been made from meat. This “appetizing” example of what not to do with food features a pie filled with that good old stand-by, mushroom soup. In case the sight of this doesn’t make you retch, the author has cleverly added islands of sliced egg and a sprig of parsley in case the overwhelming palette of browns makes you think no vegetables were involved. Don’t be fooled; they weren’t.

In the photo you can see a cake slice ready to serve this beast. One wonders quite how mushroom soup slices. Surely a ladle is the tool of choice? But then, what to do with the corned beef crust? And do you serve that in a bowl, or on a plate, or what? And what should you eat it with?

The charming composition has been helped along by three crocuses, presumably meant to suggest the Three Wise Men bearing the gifts of —well, something else to look at (there sure is nothing outside that window). It's dinner time! Four to Six whole people can be "entertained" by this recipe. Enjoy! 

Happy Living! A Guidebook for Brides by American Bride Publications, LA 1965

Also from this book: A Connubial Breakfast, Three Courses (Of Course), All For One And One For All!