A great example is the Pillsbury “Tunnel of Fudge” cake, since one of the main ingredients is a frosting mix that’s not made anymore. Probably the most common issue is products that no longer exist. Many 1950s recipe books were sponsored by major processed food businesses, like the Campbell Soup Company’s “Cooking with Condensed Soups.” Collectors Weekly: Do you come across ingredients or techniques that modern cooks would be completely unfamiliar with?Ĭlark: Yes, sometimes. It might not turn out perfectly, but there’s so much out there that we have to work with. There are so many more options for everybody. People won’t accept food unless it’s a certain kind of food, and I think that going back to the mid-century cookbooks is opening up-well, especially mine and Tom’s world-in terms of what we can eat and what’s really out there. I think they’re becoming more of the same. People think the proliferation of food blogs has made our tastes more diverse, but I actually think it’s the reverse. “When you’re talking about cans of condensed tomato soup or ketchup, it’s a little more difficult to put those into a dessert.” There was definitely a change in palate in terms of spices, which I think is why people consider it to be a bland type of cooking.

Or a recipe for chili might only have a quarter teaspoon of chili powder in it. Surprisingly, back in the ’40s, people used a lot of curry powder, but they would only use an eighth of a teaspoon of curry powder. Collectors Weekly: I always assumed food from this period was boring and bland.Ĭlark: Well, it was blander, because people used spices a lot less than they do now. That’s easy to do with some stuff, like salt, but when you’re talking about things like cans of condensed tomato soup or ketchup, it’s a little more difficult to put those into a dessert. The other side is that many of the crazier recipes came from brand-specific cookbooks produced by companies trying to put their products into every single part of your meal. If you watch that show “Chopped” on Food Network, I kind of think that’s what the mid-century cook felt like: We have all these weird ingredients, and what are we going to make with them? Well, let’s try this. People were experimenting with all these things they had never seen or used before, and they didn’t quite know what to do with them.

People were testing out these new things discovered in World War II, like foods from different cultures, and also changes in technology, like frozen foods, that made more food available to more people. The mid-20th century saw an explosion of changes in all of American culture. Make a cake faster, make a soup faster, or use frozen foods for shortcut cooking. They were trying to get housewives to try these new products and use all these new techniques to make your life easier. Her blog is an everyday cook’s version of the Julie & Julia project, featuring the food that real people made in mid-century America.Ĭlark recently gave us her experienced take on the marvels of mid-century eating, and the lessons contemporary cooks can learn from it.Īnn MacGregor displays the diversity of edible freezer options in a 1957 image from her “Cookbook For Frozen Foods.”Ĭlark: Experimental. Clark typically cooks one vintage meal per week, which she documents through scans of the original recipe, photos of her re-creation, and detailed tasting notes (often featuring amusing photos of her husband, Tom, attempting his first few bites). So when Ruth Clark took the obvious, and daring, step of actually making these retro recipes for her fascinating website The Mid-Century Menu, it’s not surprising she received a bit of hate mail. Today, foodies typically look back on this era with an upturned nose, preferring to mock its foods rather than eat them. Hence the debut of frozen airline foods and canned meat products like Spam. As Laura Shapiro explains in her book Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, at the war’s end, packaged food companies realized they had to convince domestic consumers to purchase their wartime products or risk shuttering their businesses.Īs a result, during the late 1940s and early ’50s, a new crop of ideas about eating were thrust upon the public as the industry tried to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations,” writes Shapiro. World War II spurred an industrial food boom, introducing many technologies to keep foods fresh longer, from freezing to dehydrating. Often the strangeness of this era’s food stemmed from innovations being tested on our nation’s taste buds. Above: Decked out in mid-century modern garb, Clark poses with a sour cream recipe book.

Top: Shrimpy, gelatinous, mid-century bliss.

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