A semi-inspirational post, mostly about nonfat dry milk

 You know how you can just go to the grocery store now and find Cool Whip Lite or Egg Beaters or 27 different brands of diet buttery spread? Today, The Slim Gourmet Cookbook (Barbara Gibbons, 1976) is here to remind us that dieters haven't always had it so easy. People who wanted "diet" foods used to live in a strictly diy world.

So what was the equivalent of Cool Whip Lite?

If you guessed that it would involve nonfat dry milk, you were right on the money! There's also gelatin, of course, since no old diet recipes were complete without gelatin. (And the note has the exciting news that there's a whipped topping mix for those who are too lazy to start from scratch-- but it's still a mix-- and aerosol whips are okay too.)

Egg Beaters did exist back then, but they weren't easy to find or convenient, plus diy was cheaper, so...

Cooks had to just make their own with a dozen egg whites, the ubiquitous nonfat dry milk, some yellow food coloring, and a single yolk if they felt really daring.

What about diet buttery spreads? Well, there are two options. For the decadent cooks, it's actually REAL BUTTER.

It's just butter whipped with an equal amount of water, so it will look like you're getting twice as much butter as you actually are. (I imagine a lot of dieters ended up using twice as much butter as they normally would to make up for the diluted flavor, and figuring "Why the hell not? It's low-calorie anyway.")

For the more austere dieters, there's a version with margarine too.

Even the "Almost Butter" is still a quarter butter, though, so Gibbons was only willing to compromise so much.

Of course, cooks in the '70s needed one more thing that modern American cooks rarely think about anymore. (Hint, it was on EVERYTHING in the 1950s and though perhaps fading by the 1970s, was still pretty popular.)

White sauce was still so popular that it needed not one...

...not two...

...not three...

...but FOUR whole recipes. And they're basically all a skim milk product, a thickener, and some fake butter flavoring. Still, a cook had to have options!

So here's my big inspirational speech of the day: When life sucks, just remind yourself that you don't have to spend your days churning out disappointing replacements for butterfat like '70s cooks did.

Yeah, I'm not much one for inspirational speeches.