Funny how many of those were weight watchers recipes. I think I have seen the perfection salad before. If that is what was being published at the time, I think it goes a long way to explain my grandmother's rather meager cooking abilities.

I've got a crown roast of frankfurters recipe in an old electricity company cookbook, except my version has a mashed potato filling in the middle and those little frills things on top of each hot dog. Talk about OTT.

Those bananas in the first picture are not properly prepared: they still have that little bitter black stem thing in the ends.

And don't serve that stuffed bologna loaf if I'm your company; frankly I'd much rather have a grilled cheese sandwich.

What was the deal with all the jellied loafs, salads, etc., anyways? And I'm sorry, that last one - those cup dumplings thingies - that looks like something that was surgically removed from someone. As a matter of fact, the jellied tomato thing looked like an item from some goulish cannibal's feast banquet. Yuck.

A Facebook friend has been posting some of these pictures, and I wondered where he got them, and what the purpose was. I figured he was having a Mad Men dinner party! LOL

OMG! Thank goodness most of these are before my time! I think perhaps there wasn't as much good affordable fresh food easily available to everyone then. We forget how much relatively cheaper food is nowadays.

As to the jellied issue, before Jell-o they were specialty items fed to kings and princes. They look impressive, hold together well, were a (post Jell-o) cheap way to extend ingredients, are colorful and "festive", easy to make, and unless they get too warm, are pretty easy to store and transport. And I think they come from before sugar was an ingredient in every packaged food, so the sweetness might have been valued.

In my childhood, Jell-o salads were still very popular and I ate plenty of them. Most of them were actually pretty good. Plus, when you're a kid, you don't mind if the salad tastes like candy. :)

"---- I think perhaps there wasn't as much good affordable fresh food easily available to everyone then.----"

Today, better transportation and computer inventory / ordering systems, better refrigeration ------.

dcarch

Gosh, I'd have to totally disagree about lack of fresh food being the reason. First of all, these are about 90% ads from the companies making a product used in the recipes. Secondly, that era was the first wave of the long, ultimately successful attempt by the food industry to persuade people to cook from boxes and cans instead of fresh.

Yeah, we have better refrigeration today, so that your peach which might as well be a zucchini for all you could tell the difference blindfolded may have been storage for a long time, instead of having real peaches only when they were in season within a thousand miles, that's certainly true.

i do remember seeing a lot of these in magazines, but never ever in real life. It's true, though, that aspics and jellied consommé were popular at the time. But the ones I ate weren't much like those. I used to love jellied consommé because it was so pretty in the bowl.

The banana one interests me, because it was thirty years or so out of date. The banana was the poached egg of the 1920s--they put them on everything, including hamburgers. All the inappropriate uses for poached eggs these days were thought up already all those years ago, only it was bananas back then instead.

I saw a recipe in Good Housekeeping from around 1924 where you breaded bananas and pieces of sausage and fried them, then tossed them together before serving.

I live in Iowa.....home of Jell-o salads. Not me to be sure but many many others.
Actually that jellied gaszpacho is pretty good...needs a shot of hot sauce though....and the "lime Jell-o marshmallo cottage cheese surprise" is also not horrible!
As many of you know I "do" church funeral lunches.....and before I volunteered, every lunch has an assortment of 8 by 12 dishes with a jello-"salad" or 2.
And a couple of yeas ago after I broke my shoulder, someone else did one lunch....and seved red jello with applesauce mixed in and a stawberry on top. !!!! "They seemed to like it" she said! LOL!
Evey Thanksgiving my daughter's MIL brings a cranberry, strawberry jell-o celery, pecan thing....un-molded on a lettuce leaf!
And a hot recipe currently making the rounds is a concoction of cushed pretzels, strawberry jello, frozen berries, and there's cream cheese and kool-whip in there some where.
Don't knock it until you have tried it....but I tried it and I can say it's icky!!

Writersblock, I didn't mean that most of the food wasn't fresh. I meant that for many people, the fresh food available wasn't always that good or varied, and they used Jell-o to pretty up and extend boring, ugly produce. Not for everyone, but for some people in some places. The reason I say so is that I asked a lot of why questions as a child, and a lot of the food ones ended up with "well, you know we didn't have..." Someone probably did, but not everyone.

ritaweeda, those cup dumpling thingies are mini steak and kidney puddings. A well made steak and kidney pudding is delicious, and I love the idea of individual ones, but the ad does them a disservice because those ones are not well made. They should be dry and lightly browned on the outside, not all watery and pale.

Haha!

Used to be a Flickr group called 'Magically Revolting' where folks would share those kind of photos. I have my own collection too:

Ugh, carol, that vomiting chicken!

plllog, thanks for the clarification. Yes, I would totally agree with that, although I know even today how well that "we didn't have" can be used to annoy the younger generation.

We lived in a nice new 1960 classic mid-century home in a suburban neighborhood right on the edge of the country when I was a kid. Now it's a notorious slum area. My brother once took his children by our old house and they were appalled. He just told them, "Well, you know, not everyone grows up as privileged as you kids are."

Fifty or 75 years from now, I wonder what the "What were they thinking?" food items from the turn of this century will make the laughable list.

I'd like to add that there's a good book on this topic called "Something From The Oven" by Laura Shapiro. I found it fascinating. It's a followup to another book she wrote about food & cooking during 19th-early 20th century called "Perfection Salad".

According to Shapiro, post WWII, manufacturers were trying to transition to civilian production & there were all kinds of new ways to preserve food & lots of new foods as well, so they began a concerted effort to push the use of these processed foods, with the aid of "Ladies" magazines. Hence the proliferation of so many recipes using canned, frozen & packaged goods. Unfortunately, taste was not always given the highest consideration in such concoctions...

Something From The Oven on NPR

Great stuff in this thread! I Bet people 30 years from now will look back at all of the buzzfeed tasty videos and make fun of it. Its funny how each generation has their own "meme food".

For a good laugh check out /r/memefood

Or this nasty cocktail

I think the clue to non laughable food, is to forget all the trendy stuff. Never put mini hotdogs on tooth picks stuck into a hollowed out cabbage with a burning sterno can. Don't sit around a table dipping little bits of meat into not quite hot enough oil so it comes out greasy and slightly cooked, forget ground veal shaped on a stick to look like a chicken leg.
If you don't want your dinner to become comic relief in 40 years stick to roast beef, fried chicken, grilled steaks, lasagna mac and cheese and fried fish.
I suspect that in 30 years we will laugh at all the people who are cooking in hot water in a cooler chest!

To be fair, linda, Chinese hotpot (if that's what you're referring to) has been around for longer than most countries :)

My impression is that Linda was talking about meat "fondu", which is pretty foul, at least the way I've encountered it.

Foods they'll laugh at? Probably the same ones we currently laugh at:

Bacon and eggs on everything in fine dining. (I figure it's to hide cheaper meats...or lack of good cooks in the kitchen.)

Bitter ice cream.

Cocktails with brunch on a swizzle stick in them.

"Pretend" foods--vegan "meats", for instance, rather than honest vegan proteins.

A lot of the homestyle molecular stuff.

Or as Linda said more succinctly, trendy stuff (fads).

Wow, jiggly food was quite popular back in the day.

And salted candy!!

Ew, ew, ew, that cocktail DOES look nasty! What was the brown sauce used on the glass rim, I wonder...?

The brown stuff on the rim was balsamic vinegar....then dipped in proscuitto which was fried and crumbled....the red square was frozen tomato juice and the liquid was vodka infused with grilled cheese sandwiches and shaken with tomatoes and basil muddled together....I can't make this stuff up!!

Gah, I'd rather have to eat the tuna mold than drink that cocktail!

I knew what everything else was, but that brownish red stuff looked like barbecue sauce!

Who else checked out Let's Remodel's imgur link? This one really caught my attention!

You have to see it to believe it

That is so wrong, carolb, but I confess I was rather taken by

This

and

This

And this is pretty cool too

Kool-aide chicken wings are pretty ghastly!

I remember jello molds very well. I think I even had a Tupperware thing to make them in. I only used it when I was going to pot lucks. The peas and carrots sandwich was bizarre.

Yum! on the sausage things - not so much on the bacon taco...

Actually my mother and I made that frosted ribbon loaf for a luncheon she had about 25 years ago. Each piece was frosted with cream cheese and had a little watercress sprig on top, not green sprinkles all over like this recipe. It was tasty and pretty for a luncheon, and we had a lot of fun making it. Good memory.

I'll second that. That sandwich loaf can be good and very pretty. I like a layer of ham salad, and a mustardy egg salad...and one of pimento cheese ( remember that?) and I add a bit of mayo to the cream cheese. Makes a great presentation!

one of pimento cheese ( remember that?

I'm told pimento cheese is chic again now, but not the kind in a jar.