Growing up with food ideas like this might explain some things about boomers.
I’ve had a little theory that post war American food is universally terrible due to everyone smoking and destroying their taste buds. Stuff starts getting better in the mid 90s when smoking rates start noticeably dropping.
Especially with coffee. People used percolators for years. You know how bad percolator coffee is? So bad that when Mr Coffee came out, it sold for about the same inflation adjusted price as a modern entry level espresso machine. It went into high end restaurants and people thought it was amazing.
I don’t know if this fully works, though. Much of Western Europe had higher smoking rates for longer, and the food isn’t so shit.
My guess is a combination of this and all of the lead everywhere
I feel like a lot of postwar US cooking could be explained by the following facts:
- A Americans lived through the great depression
- All Americans lived through world war rationing
- A huge portion of Americans grew up in a world where things like refrigeration, grocery stores, etc didn’t exist.
The end result was the food equivalent of giving a thirteen year old from the 1990s a smartphone for the first time. Just pure disgusting excess with no real rhyme or reason.
“Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created? …here on Earth?”
The “Serve with mayonnaise” got me at the end… I held it together until that point. Why was everything served with mayonnaise?
Shit like this is why meat eaters are not convinced going vegetarian isn’t a conspiracy.
This is what happens when you let capitalists control the food supply
This has to be fake. No one would combine these.
Post war cooking was wild.
My Silent Gen mom was an awful cook. Casseroles every damned night, same shit over and over again, zero tolerance for creatively changing a recipe. I could see her finding this recipe and serving it over and over again.
took me a LONG time to recover from high school cafeteria’s Friday tuna casseroles (complete with canned peas)
I love how fast and loose this plays with the definition of “salad”.
It used to mean any meal served cold. Later versions were encased in gelatin for better preservation, which contributed to the later post-war jelly salad recipes.
In the 70s salad was any sort of combination of plant material and sauce
Ah no. A salad was anything combined with anything else but not cooked (again). This led to some true abominations at the table. Too often, mayonnaise (and not even mayonnaise but Miracle Whip) served as the binder.
Yes! Throw some crap in jello, serve on a lettuce leaf, SALAD!
My wife’s grandma makes “pretzel salad”, which is crushed pretzel sticks that are tossed with a mixture of margarine and cream cheese, I think, then baked until crispy then crumbled.
In the meantime, cream cheese, maybe whipped cream?, sugar, a few other onesies and twosies, and canned shredded pineapple are mixed into an unholy slop.
Then, when is time to serve, the crumbles are mixed in with the slop and there you go. Salad.
Mmm, interesting. Pretzel salad for me is the layer of crushed pretzel and melted butter (no cream cheese here) baked, like you said, then a layer of a cream cheese frosting, then a layer of strawberries in strawberry jello. All separate layers, no unholy slop, and it’s sooooo good. But no, it’s not salad.
Is this a side for a meal, or a dessert?
I believe it’s a dessert
Right? Cover a fucking donut with mayonnaise, serve it on a single leaf of lettuce - boom, salad.
You watch, Dunkin’ Donuts will feature this next month as “healthy”.
Can’t wait to see a black forest gateau salad.
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Serve with mayonnaise.
😂 There’s a kind of innocent madness in this “recipe” that makes me happy.
making the mayo optional was the only mercy to be found in this recipe.
Keep in mind, some dude in the 50’s probably came home to this expecting meat and potatoes. Say what you will about “traditional marriage”, but I’d only wish this travesty on the worst of the worst.
This absolutely screams “I was zooted on lithium when I came up with this” 🫤
That has to be parody. “Serve with mayonnaise” is too perfect a what-the-fuck ending.
You don’t want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Babish did a mayonnaise cake.
Yeah, but… we know what he’s into.
I hope that “chef” spent the rest of their life in prison.
This is how I wish we served Brevik, considering we’ve resolved to “take the high road” and keep him around.
The recipe actually started off halfway decent until the donuts and mayonnaise lol
It definitely sounds like some classic 1950s cooking… The only things missing are maraschino cherries and cut up hot dog weiners
Then put the whole thing in a jello mold.
No one mentions how most of the bored housewives used drugs back then. This recipe is missing jello!!
Shoot to thrill!
“then cover everything in aspic”
It started with prunes and cottage cheese. That’s already bottom of the barrel right there.
Hey cottage cheese is fantastic. Not as an ingredient though.
And still not a salad lol, more like a dessert.
Well I think I can confidently speak for all “meat and potatoes” men when I say that not only would this not change my mind, I think I’d never be able to look at a prune in the same way again after eating this
“Eating this”?
I would possibly examine, dissect and document this. But eat?
It would change my mind about ever spending time with this person ever again.
No, in fact this was NOT a good meal. You get no points, and may god have mercy on your soul!
