Betty Crocker tries to get fancy with meringue mix and American cheese

Feeling fancy? Well, Betty Crocker's "Frankly Fancy" Foods Recipe Book (General Mills, 1959) is here for you. 

What were 1950s ideas of fancy foods? Well, aside from the Shrimp Luau and Pink Alaska Pie on the cover, the booklet recommends "fancy" breads, like Mushroom Muffins.

I will admit to loving the slightly salty and rubbery bits of canned mushrooms on top of a hot pizza, but I can see them, and I know why they're there. Unexpectedly biting into one in a muffin would probably be cause for alarm (and perhaps a decidedly un-fancy spit-it-out-to-try-to-figure-out-what's-wrong-with-this-muffin moment-- not the best thing for an elegant gathering, though many current upscale cooks would argue that canned mushrooms and American cheese don't belong there in the first place). 

The book also includes fun punch recipes, such as using meringue mix to make fancy, frothy, super-sweet mocktails...

...and cooling down the tomato juice that seemed to be required for 1950s gatherings with a vegetable ice wreath.

Everybody had seen ice rings with citrus slices and mint sprigs for sweet punch, so a with-it '50s host needed cucumber and radish slices, carrot curls, and parsley floating in the tomato cocktail.

My favorite section, though, has to be the appetizers chapter. At this point (before pizza rolls, bagel bites, and other tiny versions of the snack were available in the nearest freezer case), teeny pizzas were a fancy appetizer.

They also had to be called "Bambinos" so they would sound appropriately Eye-talian, and baked on pie-crust-style pastry so they could drop flaky crumbs on your cocktail clothes if you weren't careful. (And of course, as with a lot of "fancy" cheesy stuff in this book, American cheese was expected.)

From the looks of the inner circle of appetizers in this picture, guests would be unlikely to get enough cheese to really taste it anyway. 

And what do you see skewered on colored toothpicks on the outer edges of this wheel of appetizers?

Yes, it's Cock Kabobs! I spent the longest time trying to figure out whether Betty Crocker was intentionally being a little naughty here. I mean, there's no chicken in this recipe-- the most common cause for the word "cock" to appear in a mid-20th-century recipe title. It calls for sausages, after all. Come on! But maybe Betty is just abbreviating "cocktail" the same way that thoughtless grocery clerks abbreviate "assorted," and the result is a name that is likely to arouse ideas that she would deem filthy rather than fancy....

At least speculating on the name as the host slipped off to the kitchen to refill the tray of Cock Kabobs would make for some fun cocktail chatter. Gotta keep the guests entertained somehow, especially in the late '50s middle class suburbs.