There was a time when bananas were considered a perfectly reasonable option for a dish’s main component. Food in loaf form was also popular. Cookbooks with names like McCall’s Great American Recipe Card Collection and Betty Crocker’s Dinner in a Dish Cookbook trotted these dishes out as quick and easy ways to feed your family and impress your guests, and similar recipes were also featured in magazines like Family Circle and Better Homes and Gardens.
We’re not sure if dishes like these were all some sort of prank orchestrated by the editors of these magazines, or whether Betty Crocker and Better Homes were getting serious kickbacks from the mayonnaise, gelatin, and banana industries. But believe it or not, everything here was published with complete sincerity, and, presumably, some people actually cooked these recipes and fed them to their families or friends.
Here are 17 recipes from the 1971 Betty Crocker card catalogue, a collection of dishes we should be glad we’ll (most likely) never be forced to eat.
1. Glamorous Grapefruit
The fruit salad cups themselves look great, but the sad, gloopy yogurt seems a little too pink. It does win a few Fergie points for being G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S tho.
2. Fonduloha
This so-called “American Classic” starts off with potential, with what looks like a tropical chicken salad. Could be a total win. But once the recipe calls for peanuts, bananas, and a pineapple boat, it’s just too much.
3. Round Steak ‘N Ravioli
Zucchini, mushroom spaghetti sauce, and canned ravioli. Imagine this kind of thing being put on the table in the ’70s with the warning, “You’ll eat it and you’ll like it.”
4. Curried Fish in Rice Ring
Dive right into this above-ground swimming pool of curried fish. No takers besides that simple garnish of... kumquats?
5. Cheese-Egg Bake
It’s like the photo was taken by someone who Instagrams their food in all the worst ways. Or like Martha Stewart’s food tweets.
6. Chicken Fricassee With Dumplings
This one might taste OK, but Betty Crocker calls it a “Men’s Favorite,” here to please your man.
7. Seafood Coquilles
“International Favorite!” This frozen seafood and condensed cream of shrimp soup pie will make you feel like you’re dining on the streets of Paris!
8. Plantation Ham Pie
The Parsley Pinwheels look OK, maybe a little undercooked, but the slop on the bottom is a no. Even less cool is the use of “plantation” to casually describe a casserole.
9. Pink Bavarian Cream
The saddest shade of mauve you’ve ever seen, and if you look a little closer, it’s stained a nice brown around the edges.
10. Cheeseburger Pie
Literally a compressed pie of ground beef with “cheese topping” and ketchup that looks like finger paint.
11. Frank-Bean Bake
Problem number one: The meal is primarily beans mixed with mushroom spaghetti sauce. Problem number two: Symmetric lines of glistening hot dogs.
12. Sombrero Pie
Gates of cornmeal pastry unfold and open up to a underworld of slimy ground meats. No gracías.
13. Bologna Biscuits With Vegetables
Be better than bologna biscuits.
14. Ribbon Meat Loaf
If Cheeseburger Pie isn’t your thing, and you’d rather have your ground beef and cheese molded together in a gelatinous log, this meatloaf is here for you.
15. Lime Ribbon Delight
This cake looks downright radioactive, and chunky in all the wrong places.
16. Man-Pleasing Appetizers
This dish is literally just chicken livers with a side of steaming beef broth. If you can stomach the actual recipe, the concept of “Man-Pleasing Appetizers” is still embarrassing for everyone involved.
17. Steamed Holiday Pudding
The worst of the worst is this holiday “Gift From Your Kitchen”. 'Tis the season for what looks like sawdust and topsoil mixed together and pressed into a Bundt pan. Also, the recipe calls for 2 cups of ground suet, or beef fat.
(via BuzzFeed)
For the most part this stuff is ptetty nasty, which is why it's not taken seriously now 60 years later.
ReplyDeleteThat said, whoever the poster was they do seem to have an inexplicable issue with bananas.
Just avoid artificial banana flavoring like the plague
it NEVER tasts ANYTHING LIKE real banana!
Some of these banana recipes might be pretty good and that lime cake actually might work.
Not to worry you WILL NOT get that color!
When hack writers are asked th write cookbooks for people who can't cook this is what happens!