Having some food with our foil

Has Alcoa been providing us with enough foily goodness this year? Well, they're good for funny/ horrifying decorating ideas, but lighter in the recipe department. Today we'll fix that shortcoming with recipes from Reynolds Wrap Creative Cooking with Aluminum Foil (Eleanor Lynch, 1967).

I know the salad on the cover is served in a lettuce-lined bowl, but something about the lettuce's color and texture makes it look like tissue paper to me. Yum! Oily green tissue paper...

The salad gets upstaged by the prettily browned chicken, heady beer, and cheery place mat, so I guess it doesn't have to feel too self-conscious.

All kinds of recipes await inside. Some are pretty simple:

Smear ketchup on frankfurters. Roll in cornflake crumbs. Bake on heavy duty foil. (Why we want ketchupy cornflakes on hot dogs is unexplained, but that's no surprise. You just gotta do seemingly random shit to food in these old cookbooks because it's your job.)

Some recipes lead to lengthy multi-serve sandwiches that make me feel oddly sad about their dismemberment:

The cheese diamond pattern makes me think this sandwich is a poor snake getting hacked up. I'd add some olive eyes and a pimento tongue to complete the illusion.

This "snake" isn't made out of snake:

It's essentially meat loaf baked right on top of the bread, so every slice can sop up all the fat lovely juices that run out of the meat as this behemoth bakes.

Some recipes are a little more complicated...

...and they fall into good old "bananas and meat" territory. These bananas are broiled over ham with honey and Parmesan cheese, along with some green beans and tomatoes to round it out. (I guess it's not creative enough to be happy with the classic Italian flavors and leave out the honey and bananas?)

These recipes may not have the flash of the Alcoa decorations, but they have... Well, uh, they have ingredients. We could eat them, unlike, say, some circus animals and anxiety-inducing clowns made out of wadded up foil. Not that we would necessarily be more likely to eat these than the clowns, but the point is, we could. We could.