Watch out for the clown...and the jazz hands

It's a good thing I didn't get EHP Cook Book (apparently short for "Ekco Home Products," undated; online sources give varying dates, so I'm just going to go ahead and say this is probably from the '60s) for its recipes. I picked this up because I loved the woman on the cover, dancing around with her pots and smiling because her pink hair matches her pink dress. She is unfazed by the fact that cucumbers, fish, salt and pepper sets, corn on the cob, and even a green chicken carcass (I wouldn't recommend serving that one!), mostly roughly the same size and thus out of scale, are raining down upon her. She is ready to party with her EHP pans.

To give you an idea of why the recipes are not such a draw for this book, here is an illustration of many of the glorious recipes you can make by cooking "the waterless way."

Steamed peas! Steamed French-cut green beans! Steamed cauliflower! Steamed corn! Steamed lima beans! Each pile of steamed veggies gets its own little melty pat of butter. You can make all of of this--and more! (Steamed carrots! Steamed asparagus! Steamed beets! Steamed turnips! Steamed... Oh, you get the idea.)

Yeah, there's some fried-looking chicken in the middle and mashed potatoes hanging out way in the back, but they're not exactly ground-breaking recipes either. This is not the booklet to pull out if you're looking for creative recipes. The closest it gets is this:

They're not really exceptional biscuits, but you have to cook them like English muffins to prove that EHP cookware can serve any purpose at all. It's not just steaming vegetables.

The choice of table setting is sometimes creative too.

Maybe it's not quite as creepy as Wilton's packs of disembodied clown heads, but I still think the kid wearing the weird be-pom-pommed clown hat on the soup tureen looks as if he's daydreaming about  dropping by on a couple making out at the lake...

Promising that foods cooked in EHP cookware will make your canary sing, impress your mother-in-law, and give most of the rest of the family jazz hands...

...seems like a bit of a stretch, but it's still a fun book to look through. It almost gave me a case of the jazz-hands, and I thought I had a natural immunity.