Gettin' Festive with Betty

The cover of Betty Crocker's Festive Fixin's with a Foreign Flare (General Mills, 1964) pretty accurately sums up its contents. 

It's full of sweet baked goods-- great for holiday sharing, but less so for a blog that focuses primarily on the more horrifying aspects of vintage recipes. (About the meanest thing I can say about the cover is that the bûche de Noël looks like a loaf of sandwich bread with a BIG outie belly button and the start of a mold problem.) But you just know I can persevere and find at least a few weird odds and ends in such a booklet.

The most cynical aspect of the booklet is that it's partially intended to help sell Saran Wrap, so it includes a couple of decorating ideas that will incidentally require anyone who follows them to waste yards and yards of Saran Wrap to make pointless decorations like imitation bunches of grapes out of hard candies.

Yes, why put out actual grapes (or even cheap and no-effort bunches of plastic grapes) when you can waste a couple hours of your time Saran Wrapping hard candies to thin wire, briefly boiling them (so the wrap will be good and tight), using florist tape to wrap them all together, and adding artificial grape leaves? It's not like you've got anything else going on in December.

Alternatively, if bright green wreaths with red decorations are a little too cheery, you can waste your time turning nuts still in their shells into a big brown wreath using similar methods.

I'm sure the squirrels would agree with the observation that "a nut wreath also makes an attractive outdoor decoration." (I really don't see a flimsy layer of plastic as being too much of a deterrent.)

If you want actual recipes, though, there's an interesting one for gnocchi. I used to think that gnocchi was always made from potatoes, but I've watched enough Food Network by now to know that while choux gnocchi might not be the first kind to come to mind, it's also not that uncommon. Putting it inside a tart shell, though?

Can't say as I was expecting to see gnocchi in a pastry and covered in a cream sauce and cheese! The pastry seems wholly superfluous, but as a carb lover, I could see this as a pretty fun treat.

Most of the recipes are for European baked goods, but America does make a brief appearance near the end of the pamphlet.

We are a nation of snackers lorded over by overdressed creepy dolls, apparently. And General Mills thinks your snacks should be Cheerios-based, obviously. If you're more the traditional "Chex mix" type of person, then Festive Mixin's will turn Cheerios and Kix into an approximate equivalent.

Or, if you want a peek back into the time before Cheerios was trying to equate itself with heart health, there's Crispy Mixin's, loaded up with bacon and Cheddar.

I can't imagine trying to eat this-- sounds like it would be a big, gloppy, greasy mess-- but maybe 4 cups of Cheerios would be enough to absorb all that animal fat.

Okay, fine. If you really want an actual cookie recipe with a European pedigree, I'll leave you with Viennese Devils.

Mostly because the cookie looks kind of horrifying. The torso makes me wonder if this is about to become a scene from The Thing. And on that happy note, I will leave you to whatever you are busy with at this time in December. I'm gonna go Saran Wrap some nuts.