Betty Crocker has come back from the dead to ruin my life for an entire year

Betty Crocker will never die.

God, I SO NEED these recipe cards.

POW!

Heat all ingredients to simmering, stirring occasionally. Serve hot with celery "swizzle sticks" 6 servings (about 1/2 cup each).

RUMAKI

Cut chicken livers in half; cut each water chestnut into 3 pieces. Pour Teriyaki Sauce over chicken livers and water chestnuts in bowl; refrigerate about 4 hours. Drain. Wrap a piece of chicken liver and a piece of water chestnut in each bacon slice.

Secure with wooden prick; roll in brown sugar. Set oven control at broil and/or 550 degrees. Broil 3 to 4 inches from heat 10 minutes or until bacon is crisp, turning occasionally.12 appetizers

Teriyaki Sauce: Mix 1/4 cup salad oil, 1/4 cup soy sauce, 2 tablespoons catsup, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 2 cloves garlic, crushed.

The 'adventures in space' is the best - check out the inverted blood-red deathstar-shaped jello mold (the mark of satan obv.) and the forlorn-looking boy-king made out of bread (?!) with his lame-o jelly bean space-helmet.

also the beheaded clown with the mysterious cookie filling!!

"come for coffee"!!!

(Actually I recall reading that WWII was the big watershed for American cuisine, insofar as soldiers came back from Italy and France and told people amazing stories about how they used these exotic things called "spices" and "seasoning" over there -- which U.S. cuisine remained massively afraid of even as they assimilated them: the first use of garlic in a Crocker book calls for one clove in an entire large saucepan of spaghetti sauce, and you were meant to stick the clove on a toothpick so you could take it out later.)

"Have you thought about maybe bothering with the taste a bit?"

"Okay but can it still be a bit about making little cookie aliens?"

In retrospect, these card sets were recipes for people with a complete lack of imagination (or faith in their cooking skills) -- each card has a color picture so's you could agonize whether your finished dish "looked right" or not. And they were tragic waste of space, anyway. A moderately-sized cookbook could fit all those recipes and more in a size smaller than the avocado or rust-colored plastic box the cards came in.

And why all the twee names?

Bananas, cream, walnut halves...

Actually this whole thing has made me feel quite ill.

all aboard the nursery train! next stop: tummy ache!

Last night I did unspeakable, de Sadelike things to a roasting chicken with a trussing needle and food processor. Madame de Saint-Ange and Dolmance would have approved.

cookery-as-domestic-art between the wars was about impressing yr guests (= yr husband's boss, for example), and after the wars got caught i think between the triple poles of massification (ultimately a good thing, initially a catastrophe), paucity of affordable ingredients (which obv did not bother eg escoffier) and (relative) success of PRESENTATION as a device.

LOOK is of course empirically checkable in a way taste is not, if yr in an extreme situation of cultural intimidation: my Pork Gelatin Palace of Versaille looks like the picture = I am a Kitchen God. It tastes yuck = how the hell do I know what posh food tastes like? Rich ppl eat anchovies and olives ew ew ew!!! (If I wanted to be sarcastic and combative I wd compare this to Academic Institutionalised Modernism in the arts...)

Frm the 60s onwards, a Trust yr Own Tastebuds democratisation* combined with a upper fashion revulsion at Archietectural Pretension. In the UK the really posh often lived in spartan semi-squalor anyway and had a jones for exotic simplicity: the God of this was Elizabeth David, who made the Mediterranean Peasant her guru, and (in the end) helped revolutionise the foodhalls of the mid-range supermarket (= Postmodernism DO YOU SEE)

*In the UK this was arguably pioneered by cooking appliance corproations like the Gas Board and the Electricity Board, both of which put out regular manuals of HOW TO USE OUR SCARY MACHINE that were 90% recipes, 10% if you smell a leak don't look for it with a match)

(the AcMo vs PoMo dialectic posited above works to explode the way this FITE is generally elaborated btw, by the NoPoMo *and* the YoPoMo factions...)

Wow.

It's interesting that you correlate the move from looking good ==> tasting good with democratization. I think it depends on whose history is being told. There are perhaps different socio-economic arcs in cooking histories in the UK and the US. Whereas I would think the UK had easier exposure to French techniques, the average American was unfamiliar with French cooking styles until, as Nabisco correctly points out, a taste for Continental cookery was imported into the US by servicepeople returning from Europe after WWII, most notably, Julia Child.

Between the wars, US home entertaining was a bit hampered by Prohibition and then the Depression. Post-WWII cooking and entertaining in the US probably got wacky not only due to unprecedented prosperity resulting from the explosion in industrial production during the war, but also because of the advent of the television age.

A lot of the recipes from the 50's and 60's are designed to be compatible with television viewing, in that they are finger foods or easily served on TV-trays, and, from the Populuxe looks of them, perhaps even to compete with television (proto-MTVism). Television could of course give people an idea of how food should look, if not how it should taste. The wowee-spaceship aesthetic permeates American design of the era in general -- from automobile design to commercial architecture -- people were (relatively) prosperous and excited about life. It may look ugly and sound untasty to us now, but if it tasted (or looked) good to the people who made and consumed it, is that not democratization?

By the later 60's people were starting to calm down

felicity: yes, my story is v. UK-skewed and also ignores the rise of the fast-food industries (spiciness was democratised in the UK by the indian takeaway hurrah)

today EVERY SPICE she mentions is cheaply available in any supermarket, posh or street, and many bigger cornershops, whatever their ethnicity

I find fascinating the idea of UK utility companies (if I'm understanding correctly) publishing cookbooks. We have many famous examples of recipes created by companies to promote their products (e.g., the Fluffernutter), but our utility companies are always nagging us to turn off the stove, the lights, the heat, the water, etc. , so the idea of them encouraging any life-activity is cute to me.

Fluffernutters!

(Squirrels are used in old editions of The Joy of Cooking!!!)

Frizzle my schnizzle indeed.

everything is decorated with sliced pimento olives, fancy-cut hardboiled eggs and SERVED IN LETTUCE-LEAF BOWLS - this is the hautest of cuisine.

This will be my New Year's battle cry. It's confirmed. Thank you GOOGLORSgooglers.

Looking over the Betty Crocker site, I think I came up one really good reason: it's because American food in the wild didn't really photograph and print very well for a very long time (at least when printing processes appropriate to a cheap mass-market cookbook were involved). In my experience, both the high contrast black and white and "red shirt" color printing you find in '50's-'60's cookbooks often aren't subtle enough to accurately convey details in food. In black and white, the interiors of eggy, starchy, and cakey dishes have almost no detail at all; in early color, the exterior of cooked meat dishes often look like vast earth tone blots with a repulsive glisten. I'm guessing that to compensate, they were forced to feature food decorated with or forced into distinctive shapes just to give the cookbook reader's eye something to focus on and comprehend relatively easily.