Active Resistance to an Active Woman's Cookbook

Are you an active woman? An inactive sloth? A laid-back housecat? A moderately hyperactive dog who kind of pees a little when life gets too exciting? A bird who realized the dryer vent led to someplace warm but did not anticipate being trapped in the house at the end of that journey and who is now frantically bouncing off the windows in an attempt to escape?

Well, the good news is, I have a cookbook for exactly one of those categories. (Hint: It's not the bird.)

Yep, it's The Active Woman's Cookbook (Avon/ Ideals, 1980). Damn. I shouldn't have built the introduction up so much now that you're all trying to imagine what a hyperactive dog cookbook might look like.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure it's a cookbook for active women either, based on the cover. It's apparently a cookbook for people who enjoy arranging their produce, dessert, and salad on a nondescript counter, which doesn't really seem like a hobby for anyone with a particularly active life.

The recipes hint that "active" might be a euphemism anyway. Maybe it means "too busy to really care about what most people consider to be a 'hero' sandwich."

I don't know anyone whose favorite is baked beans, hot dogs, and cheese dumped into a  half-loaf of Vienna bread. (I love the specification of a half loaf! On the one hand, the goopy filling is more likely to spill out, but still, only half a loaf means you're left with less bread soaking up low-grade Beanie Weenies.)

Or maybe "active" means "so busy they're willing to cook meat in the microwave rather than taking a few extra minutes to actually brown it on the stove."

Of course, drowning the meatballs in onion, tomato soup, brown sugar, and pineapple chunks pretty much guarantees they'll be gloppy and sickeningly sweet anyway, so the microwaving won't really matter in the greater scheme of things.

Maybe that sickening sweetness is the key-- "Active" people need to be filled up with sugar so they can keep buzzing around. 

What's chicken without brown sugar, oranges, cherries, and two kinds of grapes (raisins and green seedless grapes)? 

Or maybe "active" just means "actively delusional." For example, check out this "diet" food.

I don't know what makes these cookies diet cookies. The recipe uses regular sugar with no artificial sweetener. Regular margarine usually has as many calories as butter. Replacing three tablespoons of whole milk with three tablespoons of skim milk for an entire 60-serving recipe makes virtually no difference in calories per serving. Coconut has plenty of calories. The only thing that makes these diet, as far as I can tell, is that there are 60 cookies in a recipe with only 1-1/2 cups of flour. Make any cookies small enough, and they become "diet" food if the serving size is one cookie.

In the end, I'm left wondering what makes this an "active woman's" cookbook, but I always love to speculate. Even if my active theorizing technically makes me active, I still don't think I'm in the intended audience....