How bad can it get?

Anyone who grew up in the 1950s-1970s knows that the culinary world was a completely different era. Vegetables were submerged in gelatin for what possibly could be eternity, hard boiled eggs, pimento olives, and parsley were common garnishes. I can still smell the pungent stagnation of the houses I visited as a child. 

I will continue to post pictures of the worst foods imaginable as a testament that it did exist! Food really was that long lost shade of pink. Ground beef was really made into burgers the size of pizzas and the thickness of a meringue pie. 

Enough time has been killed. Let's move on to the bad stuff!!

Here is the book where I have grabbed some culinary snippets, complete with my unfettering humor:

Cooking For Every Occasion, 1971

 Time to go to a place you would like to forget or a time of morbid curiosity.

Look at this glazed, crusty, hearty looking pie. Cut into it and discover it's Steak and Kidney. As per the caption on the side, it's an old fashioned favorite that is just as popular today. Okay, I will admit to being born in the mid 1970s. This book is before my time. In the 70s, I was not eating Golden-Crusted Steak and Kidney Pie. That begs the question: Who was? And was it popular?  Looks can indeed be deceiving in this case!!

 That was just the antipasti of what this book offers. It gets better. The next pictures show just how messed up food photographers were.

This Prawn Cocktail, topped with a well seasoned sauce that makes an excellent first course also makes me feel the plight of the prawn. Behind him in that wineglass are the pulverized remains of his buddies. He knows what's up. All he wants to do is jump and get back to the bottom of the sea, maybe hide in the seashell and hope he doesn't get caught. He's poised and ready.

The hen looking forlornly in the background is served with a grim reminder that she too can end up a headless, golden brown carcass with a sprig of parsley where her head used to be. The doily adds no comfort for her. She knows her time is short. She can smell the meat and wonders if insanity has kicked in because she likes how it smells. 

It's okay to feel sad. Wipe your tears, blow your nose and let's move forward. Let's go all the way to France shall we? That should be far enough away to forget about these ill fated beings.

Slap on the beret, light up a skinny little French cigarette because we have arrived in Le France. As we sit in the outdoor cafe, a steaming pot of french onion soup with an ill painted lid, we wonder just how lucky it is we got to this point...Oooh la la... Wait just a second here. That background is FAKE? But it seems SO real! Merde! 

Oh that clever, clever 1970s food background. It's just so real looking. 

There's something serious going on here. Maybe it's a game that was popular in the 70s. While I was enjoying patty cake, cups were strategically numbered and various liquids were put in them.  If the answer is #4, then that was not a hard game at all. Who has coffee mugs with numbers on them like this? Would it have thrown the game to have them in some kind of order? These are questions that may never get answered. Of that I am certain.

Breakfast time!! This beaut is also going to befuddle even the most monochrome sighted people.

The description is an Omelet that mixed and cooked in  minutes makes a delicious light meal. By the looks of this, there's nothing light about it. Nor is there anything aside from the strategically placed one cracked egg that makes one think of an omelet. It looks like a pan of lard. Maybe the secret is in that difficult to decipher recipe above the bowl. Maybe because it was undecipherable, the creator used the even more difficult to translate recipe on the bowl and combined it with the hieroglyphics of the written recipe. What is the lemon for? Anyone who can boil water knows that acid and eggs makes for a curdle. 

Time to take a trip to Italy. Italia! Campania! Benevenuto! 

Neopolitan Pizza. I spent three years living in Bella Napoli. I ate many a pizza from the great region of Campania. Right now my BS flag is flying higher than the green, white, and red flag of Italy. Never did I eat a pizza there that even remotely resembled this thing. There was no happy, happy joy joy of pimento stuffed olives arranged in a circle and a hole in the middle of the cheese. If anyone still thinks this might be what you find in Italy, there is no hope for you!

Down that carafe of the house wine first! It's going to take a battle of wits to eat this so called cannelloni. Did someone spill milk in it? That just doesn't seem like it would mesh well with the chunkage of the tomato sauce. Milk. 

Arrividerci Italy and this blog for the day. There will be more. Oh yes, there will be plenty more!! And maybe I will be better at this blogging thing. Okay, I am asking too much. 


Ciao Ciao!