A dip into Kraft

Today I'm feeling Krafty.

The Kraft Cookbook: 75 Years of Good Food Ideas (1977, though the 75th anniversary was 1978) offers plenty of food ideas. Whether they're actually good ideas depends largely on your tolerance for Velveeta/ Cheez Whiz, Kraft salad dressings, and marshmallow creme.

Some recipes take perfectly delightful traditional recipes and "modernize" them. Do you love lasagna?

How about if the ricotta is kicked out and replaced with Velveeta? The notes insist that kids will love it, but I suspect the adults will revolt...

And speaking of horrifyingly mangled traditional recipes, how about some guacamole?

Of course the guacamole has to be turned into a gelatin mold flavored with that staple of Southwest cuisine, Italian dressing, because it was the '70s! That's not enough of an indignity, though. The mold also has be filled with Mexi Bean Salad, although I have no clue what makes kidney beans in sweet pickles and French dressing Mexican. The recipe is a lot of work to ruin a couple of defenseless avocados.

The book includes plenty of highly questionable dips, spreads, and dressings. Need something festive to start a fall dinner? Try Festive Fall Fondue:

Applesauce and cinnamon in Cheez Whiz! Teens will dig it. (A lot of old cookbooks claim to be authorities on what teens will love, but I somehow doubt their expertise...)

If you want a dressing for fruit salad, just mix random sweet stuff with mayonnaise! Here are my two favorite examples of the genre:

Mayonnaise with sherbet is a classic choice, but if you want a recipe that really embodies the ethos of this book, it would be hard to do much better than this dressing:

Mayo AND marshmallow creme! If they could just work in some Velveeta, it would be the holy trinity.

Both dressings are supposed to be great on gelatin molds. (I don't think the Guacamole Ring with Mexi Bean Salad was quite the gelatin mold they had in mind, though. At least, I sure hope not!)

Besides all the dips and dressings, the book focuses on (supposedly) kid-friendly cuisine an awful lot. I suspect that some Kraft home economist hated kids just as much as I do. Take this perfectly innocuous-looking after school snack:

We have nubby, golden-brown cookies and a pitcher of a creamy orange drink, with jacks and a ball set off to the side as if the kid was so excited for snack time that the toys were simply tossed aside. The snack looks so sweet and wholesome. So what's in those cookies?

Yes, Bran Apple Cookies are part of the long and ignoble line of recipes that allow desserts to pretend to be healthy as long as there is some fruit and bran flakes hidden away in all the sugar. But look closer. Yes, there's a cup of shredded American cheese in these cookies too! A slice of good Cheddar cheese on apple pie is a polarizing issue, but who is ready to defend American cheese in bran apple cookies?

If you think the beverage must be better... well...

Sunshine Refresher is mostly orange juice. But it's mixed with marshmallow creme to give it the throat-searing sweetness kids love and raw eggs for protein/ salmonella. Someone has got a sick sense of humor if this is the after-school snack. Pretty damn Krafty.