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Given the strong-arm tactics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, some observers expect a return of the Cold War. If that prediction proves true, maybe the new Cold War will bring back some of the kitschy old recipes below, found in vintage cookbooks. Predictably, they emphasize canned veggies and preserved meats—perfect fare for bomb-shelter dining.
Best casserole: Frankfurter Crown
What can’t you do with a hotdog? This recipe card, printed by Curtis Publications in 1973, combines American’s favorite encased meat with green beans, potatoes, and bacon in a hot dish. The card suggests you serve it with coleslaw and rhubarb.
3 slices bacon
1 cup chopped onion
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 cup milk
3 cups sliced cooked potatoes
1 cup cooked cut green beans
1 pound frankfurters
Cook everything but the wieners and mix to form a filling. Then dump it into a casserole dish ingeniously lined with vertically stacked frankfurter halves. Serve with a straight face.
Best Chinese recipe that contains nothing Asian whatsoever: Ham Ling Lo
The Cold War spread to Asia at about the same time as American cookbook editors began to feature “ethnic” dishes, including many with Chinese themes. But not all of them were very authentic, as this offering from Good Housekeeping’s Casserole Book (1958) shows. Maybe the celery counts as Chinese? But where’s the soy sauce, for crying out loud?
2 lb. pared white potatoes
2 12 oz. cans luncheon ham, grated
1 can pineapple slices
5 teaspoons cornstarch
1 cup minced green peppers
1 cup sliced celery
Layer ham with veggies, topping with pineapple, in a casserole dish. Bake for 45 minutes or until the smell drives your company screaming from the house.
Best dish for a Tupperware party: Sandwich Loaf
Not since the ‘70s has it been fashionable to combine mayonnaise, cream cheese, and sour cream in a single dish. Add white bread and you’ve got the makings for an impressive sandwich-cake on which you can draw faces or special messages with mustard. Serves at least 15 people, not including the dozens who suddenly remember they’re not hungry.
4 hard-boiled eggs
1 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons chopped pimentos
1-pound can salmon
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 pounds cream cheese
1 cup sour cream
Small can chopped olives
2 tablespoons minced scallions
2 tablespoons minced celery
1 tablespoon minced onion
2 tablespoon walnuts
1 loaf white bread, crust removed and cut into five horizontal layers
Combine salmon with mayonnaise, eggs, lemon juice, olives, pimentos, etc. Spread this concoction between the layers of bread as you would a sandwich filling. Finish by “frosting” the outside of the loaf with cream cheese. Slice vertically with a bread knife while suppressing your gag reflex.
Chris Weber is an occasional contributor to mentalfloss.com.
This is nasty… let’s not forget the vegetable gelatin/aspic obsession of the 50s and 60s. I have an old Joy of Cooking that has practically a whole section on “salads” made with anything-you-can-think-of and gelatin. The meat & celery salad is my favourite, though I haven’t actually tried it, I can just imagine the tastiness though.
posted by Molly W. on 1-4-2008 at 12:30 pm
Oh man! I can almost believe these are not real! I remember summer gatherings with my aunt and her family when I was young and remember once seeing this strange looking dish. I asked what it was and the great-aunt who brought it said it was jello. It was lime jello, but with coconut, walnuts, pinaple niblets and maraschino cherries and something creamy (cool whip, mayonnaise? I still don’t know to this day!) that made it a pale green color. As a child, crunchy green jello was something I got over quickly and almost became afraid of!
posted by Kate on 1-4-2008 at 1:00 pm
Molly, Jello salads are completely nasty. When my Grandmother used to be in charge of cooking holiday meals, she prepared various gelatin salads. One year my mother guilted me into trying the lime jello with shredded carrots and the orange jello with green olive slices. I must say it was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever had. And to top it off, my hippie parents schooled me on the origin of jello at an early age so I also felt guilty about eating a transparent animal by-product.
posted by Sarah M. on 1-4-2008 at 1:02 pm
I love to cook, and as such got the book “The Gallery of Regrettable Food” as a gag birthday present. It’s a cookbook (with pictures and old advertisements) of many recipes like this.
Worth it for the photos alone.
posted by Mark on 1-4-2008 at 1:05 pm
luncheon ham(also known as spam) is actually wildly popular with asian people–my japanese grandmothers would go crazy for that…so good housekeeping may have been more authentic than they knew…
posted by brian on 1-4-2008 at 1:06 pm
i remember denny’s in SF’s japan town serving breakfast combos with spam and rice, or even better, vienna sausages and rice
and for the record, i love both of them…
posted by brian on 1-4-2008 at 1:09 pm
I have recipe cards that look just like these! I think I got them free with an order from Archie McPhee. I put blank stickers on the back and use them as postcards. (I figure there’s no harm in covering up the actual recipe - after seeing the pictures, no one would cook this stuff anyway.)
posted by Molly on 1-4-2008 at 1:17 pm
Mark,
James Lileks, the author of “The Gallery of Regrettable Food”, has another book called “Gastroanomolies.” Both are very funny and worth checking out.
He has many more “recipes” on his site, lileks.com.
posted by Amy on 1-4-2008 at 1:27 pm
I found an old cookbook in my mom’s kitchen this christmas. It was ‘the joy of microwave cooking’ or something similar. It was dated from 1976 or so, and included recipies for rack of lamb, whole chickens, fish, steak . . . and everything else I can’t imagine eating out of the nuke. Made me ill just reading about them.
BTW that sandwich loaf is one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen. I’d rather eat the plastic flowers in the picture — at least the ones that aren’t touching the loaf, anyways.
posted by EV on 1-4-2008 at 1:37 pm
I have one of those hanging in my office! I have no clue where the card came from, we just found it in the kitchen and somehow it now has a home with me.
The recipe is a seafood mousse. It’s an awful shade of gray, shaped like a curved fish on a platter, it has olive eyes, and some sort of orange goo to draw scales and a smile on it. Awful!
I’ll scan it and post it later!
posted by Bloodyfufu on 1-4-2008 at 1:40 pm
My sister and mom collect vintage cook books, and some of them contain the most disgusting and unappetizing foods you can imagine.
So one afternoon we decided we would make our own vintage recipes, complete with ingredients such as lime Jello, crowd-pleasin’ rhubarb, and fistfuls of human hair. Instructions involved wiping, scraping, balling up, and massaging. Of course there were garnishes (shoelaces, eyelashes, actual confetti.)
When we were finished, we compared them to the book and were pleased to find how authentic they seemed. Ha. Haha. Now I feel like making up more recipes.
posted by Sarah on 1-4-2008 at 1:40 pm
ok, call me crazy, but i’m thinking the frankfurter crown could actually be turned into something edible if you replace the green beans with green onion, lessen the milk, add some shredded cheese and then replace “frankfurter” with some kind of actually yummy sausage.
as for the jello horrors, my dad decided that last easter was a good time to share his cherished childhood easter dessert of lime jello with carrot slivers and pineapple chunks in it. not my favorite jiggly treat.
posted by tami on 1-4-2008 at 1:45 pm
Has anyone ever seen the website with the vintage weight watchers recipe cards from the 1970s? The pictures are just hideous, and the food ideas are scary. they’re at candyboots.com/wwcards.html
I crack up looking at them. The same sort of “creative” food ideas as the cold war recipes.
posted by jenny on 1-4-2008 at 1:47 pm
Bloodyfufu–is it this? candyboots.com/wwcards/salmonmousse.html
posted by jb on 1-4-2008 at 1:54 pm
This is for Kate. The concoction you are describing is called Ambrosia Salad and it’s still served in a lot salad bars and restaurants.
posted by Stacy on 1-4-2008 at 2:55 pm
Someone earlier made a mention to Spam and Rice for breakfast. I’m famous for my Spam and Rice stir fry. Horrible for you but delicious!
I recently found a cook book of my grandfathers. “The Encyclopedia of Modern Cooking” circa 1948. The recipes within almost all call for one of the following: a stick of butter, lard, bacon. Some of the recipes require cuts of meat no longer widely available like kidney, tongue and lung. One recipe requires 5 pounds of bone marrow… where can i get bone marrow?
posted by Jared Probst on 1-4-2008 at 2:59 pm
Jared - why, at your friendly neighborhood bone marrow dealer, of course! Or I guess from a mass murderer. (Same thing in some smaller towns.)
posted by Sarah on 1-4-2008 at 3:13 pm
Okay, so it seems like I am alone on this, but I actually want to try a bite of the sandwich loaf. I am fully aware of how bad it will probably taste, but I still want to try it. When it comes to new products, I am a huge sucker and will try just about anything… once.
posted by TuckSteele on 1-4-2008 at 3:14 pm
My mom made always made these one-dish meals using canned tuna or canned corned beef or boiled turkey legs or hamburger. Cream of Mushroom soup or Cream of Celery Soup frequently formed the basis of the sauce. My sisters and I had a great laugh when Hamburger Helper & Tuna Helper came out on the grocery shelves. Mom had those dishes down pat well before the stuff came out in a box.
posted by Peggie on 1-4-2008 at 3:16 pm
OMG great post and great link to that Candyboots site. I’m laughing myself to tears. Great way to end a Friday. :D
posted by mrs.djs on 1-4-2008 at 4:17 pm
My mom used to make stuff like this and my dad would always put those Mr. Yuck stickers on the dishes when she wasn’t looking. Yeah, Mom wasn’t too happy when she saw the stickers, but got the point.
posted by Melodye on 1-4-2008 at 4:31 pm
Hahah Melodye- your dad is awesome.
To be honest, I’d probably try the frankfurter crown too. I would try any of these, if my grandmother had made them, just to be nice.
And by the way… LUNG???? What. The. Hell. Please tell me people didn’t use to eat lung??
The closest I’ve come to eating lung is accidentally eating a few gills out of a steamed crab, which you’re not supposed to do, and which tasted awful.
posted by Molly W. on 1-4-2008 at 5:02 pm
C’mon, you got all these out of a Southern Baptist church cookbook.
posted by mike on 1-4-2008 at 5:38 pm
Ok guys, I have read and reread this post maybe eight times today, no joke, and just now I literally cried with laughter at TuckSteele’s comment (…I am fully aware of how bad it will probably taste, but I still want to try it….).
I printed this and showed it to everyone willing to stop by my desk, and every person who read it cracked up then proceeded to tell a story about some disgusting “dish” that their grandmother served. One incident was just two weeks ago, and involved the infamous lime jello, molded into a fluted ring, suspending contents of unknown origin and topped with cool whip and (wait for it…..) CHEDDAR CHEESE!! What. The. Fork. Even more hilarious than that is that a large wedge ended up in my friend’s dad’s sock drawer, in an attempt to save Nana some hurt feelings when she noticed that no one dared touch her green cheesy dessert ring. Poor Nana, but you have to wonder why she didn’t eat any herself….
posted by adrienne on 1-4-2008 at 8:15 pm
This post inspired me to peruse some of my mom’s old cookbooks, all wedding presents from 1981 or so. Let me tell you, I was horrified by what I saw. I found a rather disturbing photo of a sandwich loaf like the one featured here. In addition, there were quite a few gelatin molds of questionable edibility. (Is that a word?) I asked my mom of she ever made any of these nasty recipes back in her newlywed days, and she replied no. Thank God…my dad would have divorced her before they got around to having kids, and my brother and I would therefore not exist. This makes me very happy my mom has never been one for cooking.
posted by Sandy on 1-4-2008 at 10:30 pm
My mother decided to jazz up the cranberries this Thanksgiving, so she made . . . you guessed it . . . a cranberry jello mold. She was so dang proud of it too. Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to eat it.
posted by Jill on 1-4-2008 at 11:53 pm
I think this sort of thing had less to do with the Cold War than it did the Baby Boom. Postwar wives relinquished their careers and stayed home in the suburbs with their modern appliances to produce babies. Their creative outlet was to try and make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, to please their man and save a few of his pennies. This fueled the women’s magazine industry, which cranked out content to a ridiculous extent. A few years after The Pill was made available, they were able to catch their breaths and say, “Screw this, I’m getting a job.” And thereafter, the family ate at McDonalds.
posted by Miss Cellania on 1-5-2008 at 7:07 am
And we’re all still waiting with our fingers crossed for McDonalds to come out with a McGelatin McSalad (bits of french fry and coagulated burger bites suspended in american cheese-flavored jello). McJiggly!
posted by Molly W. on 1-5-2008 at 3:57 pm
These recipes are disgusting… but the whole jell-o and aspic fad really started with French cuisine. In culinary school I was required to take a garde manger class which basically teaches French cold cuisine. In this class I had the great pleasure of making forcemeats (weird sausages with designs in the middles made out of pates), galantines, pates, headcheese and best of all many different types of
meat and vegetable gelatin monstrosities…. and almost everything we did had to be covered with 5-6 layers of aspic (gelatin) to make it look good! Needless to say after all this, making rabbit pate pie, and a mandatory trip to the slaughter house, I couldn’t eat meat for quite a while….
posted by Dany on 1-6-2008 at 2:05 pm
I have a friend whose nickname is “Dances with Jello.” He makes some very creative dishes from jello that are amazingly tasty!
On the other hand, are the innummerable jello salads that turn up at pot lucks and family reunions all across America. My (least) favorite is the lime jello with apples topped with marshmallows and walnuts. Marshmallows do NOT like the fridge!
posted by Sarah on 1-9-2008 at 3:56 pm
Orange jello with green olive slices? That has to be a deliberate attempt at inducing “spontaneous regurgitation.”
posted by Lisa on 1-14-2008 at 8:40 am
I’m not going to lie: if I saw that sandwich loaf at a party, I’d probably eat the daisies, even if they were plastic. Then, I’d do some serious soul-searching on whether I want to continue being acquainted with the person who would choose to serve that.
posted by Melodye on 1-14-2008 at 4:29 pm