Gelatin. Sour Cream. Frankfurters. Monosodium glutamate.
The cornerstones of mid-century suburban cuisine.
This blog is a reverent look at recipes found in mid-century cookbooks that our moms and grandmothers took as gospel. These cookbooks were published for the housewives of America with the goal of making cooking and entertaining easy and fun.
For many of us, they bring back memories of family dinners: the special sound of canned cranberry sauce slurping and sliding onto a plate, shimmying rings of jell-o salads the shape of hubcaps, or eagerly slicing into a steaming meat log after a long day at school learning how to duck under your desk in case of nuclear attack.
All of the recipes and ingredients come directly from the cited cookbooks and are not edited or manipulated by me in any way. I only add my commentary before or after.
Maybe you’ll recoil at the odd flavor combinations and naively simple ingredients. Or you might be strangely attracted to them, like moth to a flame. Go ahead. Try some.
You might consider doing a couple of theme blogs. As I grew up in the 50s, I believe an entire blog could (and should) be dedicated to that icon of entertaining at home – vienna sausage (the Spam of the elite).
That’s a good idea. Although I love making the entries about the books themselves.