Scary recipes! I noted the ungrammatical English in the tuna soup recipe- if there are more than two options, you can’t use ”either”.

Where’s the Jello, Cottage Cheese and Celery salad?😊

I’ve not had the pleasure of that one, jrb, but I’ll admit I like sunshine salad as long as my mom doesn't put nuts in it.

lpink - If those clippings are representative of the collection, what a hoot! Can you talk a bit more about the molded shrimp? You memtioned the mashed potato layer but what makes up the bulk?

Love it all!

FWIW, I used to follow a Flickr pool called Magically Revolting, that was all images from Mid century cookbooks, magazines and advertising - it was a hoot - the comments were super snarky funny too. I have a Flickr album of images like that.

And I actually have a collection of illustrated cookbooks - many acquired just for photos like that 😁

Here's one of mine:

Scarily, much of the floral decoration around Carol's pink blobby dish is not only unpalatable, but two of the plants are actually toxic. Just hope nobody would nibble on the garnish.

colleen, I couldn't get to via your link, but I could with this one:

https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/french/index.html

ETA: and now I have thoroughly perused every eyeful I could of it. Burst out with belly laughter multiple times. For some reason, what tickles my funny bone the most is "and fight"

Oh wow - hadn't thought about lileks.com in years! That's a very funny site 😀 (ETA, looks like colleen left off the 's')

P.S. Here's the link to the Magically Revolting group on Flickr.com. It was closed a long time ago, and a newer one was formed called 'Gee,That Food Looks Terrible':

https://flickr.com/groups/revolting/

In their defense, none of the dishes featured in those spreads are in and of themselves bad tasting or unappetizing, they suffer from bad food styling, perhaps bad print transfers as well. The second dish, (I went back and checked) is actually "Susan's Tuna Treat." I have absolutely no idea who "Susan" is, her face and identity is not shown, but the elaborate instructions:

"From a small can of tuna, Susan makes a lunch-in-one dish that her crowd raves about. It's creamed tuna with a cheese-flavored souffle-like topping. And when this tuna treat for 4 comes to the table, there are so many ohs and ahs that Susan hates to admit it's such a snap to make." And on it goes about how "Susan" prepares the dish.

It's basically creamed peas and tuna topped with a cheese souffle. Which is somewhat similar to a dish I make and like, fisherman's pie, except that has a mashed potato and cheese crust. Souffles were all the rage in the 60s. I remember making one with my Mom once, it was served at a brunch with a hot cherry sauce on top. Mom minored in French in college so was a bit of a francophile and of course everyone wanted to channel Julia Child and she made souffles. My feelings about souffles is they are fancy scrambled eggs with cheese. They have a short fluff life, so you have to make them right before serving them, and any leftovers will not be quite the same. If I'm entertaining, I don't want to be in the kitchen much after my guests arrive, it makes me feel rushed and hectic. Just my entertaining style. If my husband was busy making cocktails for our guests while I was fussing with taking the souffle out on time and gently, maybe I would do it. That's not my life, lol!!

I wasn't paying too much attention to the first photo instructions, it just caught my eye, obviously. It's actually just molded potato SALAD adorned with shrimp. It's a riff on a common Spanish tapas dish called "Insalata russa" which is an elaborate version of potato salad, often made with tuna or anchovies, and often elaborately molded and decorated. You can find some examples if you search that term online. I wouldn't bother making that shape of a mold with shrimp on top, because it would only look nice for a few minutes before guests had to serve themselves. I might add a few shrimp embellishments like folks do with sliced hard boiled eggs or olives. And if I was going to mold my potato salad, I'd use a more squat shape or a ring mold for ease of serving.

The last photo is not all that weird, it's just the standing hot dogs. Hot dogs and beans is a very common buffet dish, I just wouldn't stand them up as an aesthetic choice! A humorous one maybe . . .

I'm looking at the gallery of French food. I'm crying.😂🤣😅🤣

Sorry about that- I’ve edited to add the ”s”

Thanks for the link colleen and rob. There are literally some laugh out loud moments in the blog.

“ A lot of people are happy when you tell them that smooth sole-mousse is the main course, but when you say “it’s surrounded by a moat of creamy meat Jell-o,” that’s when the salivary glands really kick into gear.”

lpinkmountain I still prefer a hot chocolate souffle to a moltenlava cake. With cream of course.

hat French food site is hilarious. I'm SO glad we don't eat like that any more, although a chicken chaud-froid is really good LOL

yup, anything with jello

When I was growing up, my mother would buy a lot of food in cans. As an adult, I almost never bought food in cans - tomatoes are the main exception. I did like the fruit cocktail in cans that my mother bought, as well as pineapple. It has just never occurred to me to buy those - maybe I should!

I stock gelatin, but not jello.

My mother's main cookbook was published in 1947, I think, and I used a lot of recipes from that, which are quite different from the 1960s or 70s.

I was little in the 60s and remember that dried food was very fashionable. We had stuff called Vesta curry, Vesta Chow Mein, freeze dried peas........We had jelly in the house becaise Mum made trifle quite often. I dread to think of all the chemicals we ingested as children https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/food-drink/vesta-curries-2/

Yes, my Mom made a dish called "Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast" with dried beef. Sometimes peas were added. Not sure what she used to make the cream sauce. Probably a can of cream of something soup. I liked it. But it looked disgusting and had a nickname that I can't post here due to community standards, but it involved something disgusting "on a shingle" and had alliteration. I would not serve it now, I have to avoid dried and preserved meats due to many health issues. The high sodium does not jibe with modern times. I know even back in the day such foods weren't designed to be eaten whole, but rather put into broths with starches and whatever produce could be found.

Years ago my folks went on a trip to Puerto Rico and left us with a babysitter. She was mean and on the first night she made the above dish and insisted we eat it all. Common sense tells me you don't serve that first night to kids you don't know. You start off with hotdogs or chicken noddle soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Well I ate mine and my brother refused. She said he would have to stay at the table until he ate it. She didn't know my brother. He would have died on that hill. I imagined him sitting there at the end of the week, cobwebs all around him in a pile of excrement. The babysitter caved. Years later, I realized my brother has a lot of food sensitivities and allergies, which is why he was such a picky eater. He eats a very plain diet now, similar to "paleo" although he eats bread and butter. Just no sauces. Like me, he's sensitive to modern dairy. His triggers are tomatoes, soy, and anything with vinegar or any other fermented foods. I had another friend with a similar sensitivity, and another with a gluten intolerant kid. They all said that the reason they were so "picky" was not to be obstinate, they didn't feel well after eating certain foods.

Thanks for the chuckles, Islay - that summary you linked is pretty funny - and way harsh 😄

"The end result was a shiny brown stew that both looked and tasted like sh**. And which made your kitchen stink like a Calcutta cesspit."

I do recall lots of prepackaged dinners introduced by manufacturers back in the day - supposedly to make a housewife's life easier. We ate Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza kits and chow mein kits too - along with Kraft Dinners, of course.

^^Uh...Is this the place to openly admit I made myself a box of Kraft mac-n-cheese JUST LAST NIGHT?!? My only defense is I was in a junky food mood, what can I say {shrug}

I remember my mom making something that resembled Susan's crowning achievement.

Oh yes, Mom has to work or go to a meeting in the PM after dinner so that means a Chef Boyardee pizza, spaghetti O's, La Choy Chow Mein or Mr.s Paul's Fish Sticks, Kraft mac & cheese plus maybe hot dogs. I survived and lived to tell the tale!

Those meals were a treat for us kids, I recall. Frozen dinners were fun too 😀

Yes, I have to laugh thinking back on how excited I was when we got to eat spaghetti-Os. What a treat. The stuff makes me shudder now . . . although I do get the "fill you up fast" appeal of boxed Mac and Cheese. Spaghetti-Os are too sweet for my palate now. And the Chow mein is a little too gloppy, especially those mung bean sprouts . . . and of course there's the salt . . .

I also cringed at the hot dogs standing up in the beans, LOL, definitely an odd presentation for "beans and wienies"!

We used to make Appian Way pizza mixes, I think maybe they were cheaper than Chef Boy R Dee. They were terrible, even then. Grandma also made creamed chipped beef, which we ate on toast, and I used to make it for Ashley, she loved it. She also loved those little "boil in bag" things, they still make a "creamed beef" variety, I just saw it in the grocery store and thought for an instant of buying one, then remembered that it was probably why Ashley had a stroke at 27, that and the fried bologna sandwiches and the Cream of Mushroom straight out of the can, cold. Ugh.

I'd eat the shrimp with potato salad, but I can never eat anything that is jello-like. The texture is just so icky, I gag the minute I put it in my mouth.

L, I agree with you on souffles. I also don't see much of a difference between poaching an egg and putting one in a nonstick skillet with a little water and putting the lid or scrambling some eggs with cheese vs making a cheese omelette. It's all similar enough that I don't care to put in the effort. Others may find enough difference to make it worthwhile, I just don't. Of course, since we had the big snowstorm last weekend the B&B cancelled their weekend group and as a result I have 41 DOZEN eggs in my refrigerator so right now it's quantity over quality, LOL.

Annie