When Food Was Sad, Pt. 2

Last entry, we explored the surface of Recipes, Party Plans, and Garnishes, and the somewhat horrifying period of food it comes from.  Here follows party food that I'm pretty sure should not grace any party table whatsoever.

It was pretty much like this all the time.

Now again, in all fairness, when I said last time that postwar, we went crazy for three decades with food, I have to contrast that with the world surrounding it (you may be hearing a lot about that world, since my reading list and hopefully thesis are all postwar-centric) and why the insanity seemed like a good idea at the time.  Shit was nuts then, guys.  We were living in the World of Tomorrow while simultaneously wondering if The Bomb would obliterate us all.  We thought in-the-wall stoves were good ideas, and that having a phone in the kitchen was a sort of ultimate luxury (you learn so many things from MST3K), and that maybe soon we would have robots that actually made our lives better.  We were rocking out to Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald and if I've learned anything from my new postwar-hits Pandora station, that music makes you feel like bouncing around the kitchen in a big dress and getting stuff done.  What I'm saying is that the food wasn't an isolated thing.

That doesn't mean that some of it was not downright inexcusable.

Without further preamble, the contents:  We are mostly safe in the appetizers section, although there are some selections that seem to be there for the hostess who doesn't give a crap and doesn't particularly want her guests to come back.  An example of this is "Cucumber Pickle and Cheese Appetizer," which asks that you scoop out the centers of large, firm pickle halves and fill them with "snappy yellow cheese spread" and cut them into half-inch thick slices.  This and an unhealthy fixation on Roquefort are an excellent reason to skip to the end of the appetizers.

There is an entire section on garnishes, which I find alternately charming and horrifying.  There's directions for making geese out of small yellow summer squash, which is charming, and also directions for using china colonial dolls, sticking them to egg plants with toothpicks through the holes in their waists, and fashioning a lettuce dress for them, which I'm pretty sure has been added to my subconscious's nightmare fuel.

The "Meats and Poultry" section is where things really start to get exciting.  There's almost a whole page at the beginning on preparing brains, curried, cutlets, and with mushroom sauce.  Mmm, gray matter!  There's the timidly flavored chicken curry with generic curry powder, Worcestershire sauce, and apples, which you make "Indian" in this way:

"put in a large bowl, on buffet, next to a large bowl of dry, fluffy rice.  Around this, have small bowls containing following condiments; grated Parmesan cheese, grated ham, grated toasted peanuts, grated cocoanut, raisins, crumbled, crisp, breakfast bacon, Chinese noodles, fried onion rings, English chutney and crumbled sardines (optional).  Guests serve themselves to a large portion of rice, generously covered with curried chicken and a spoonful of each of the condiments.  This is, of course, a complete meal."

I don't know about the rest of you, but I sit there imagining a hopeful and naive hostess, perhaps holding a theme party, serving this to people who have eaten real curry.  "Oh, why didn't you put any fried onion rings or Parmesan on your curry?  It's supposed to have everything, that's what makes it Indian.  Well, except the sardines.  Those are optional."

Then we get into the obsession with gelatin molds.  Imagine taking perfectly good food, and then thinking it would be so much better if it were contained in a massive, quivering shape.  Imagine doing that once, and thinking it was a good enough idea to do it again.  And again.  Get creative with it - almost any food can be subjugated to your jello whims!  Then read the following list, and admit that you never would have gotten this creative:

Chicken curry mold, jellied chicken, chicken-vegetable molded salad, crab meat salad molded, fish molded in cucumber aspic lake "pond lily garnish," frosty salad rings (I interject here to note that these contain lime gelatin, horse-radish, lemon juice, and cottage cheese, and that's it), lamb mold, molded lobster salad, pineapple cheese salad, sweetbreads and asparagus ring, jellied tongue.

You may go wash your brain now.