Putting a little Lipton in your life (or at least your sour cream)

When I post from a soup cookbook, it's usually a Campbell's book. They were very eager to sell cans of soup via soup-centric cookbooks. They weren't the only ones in on the soup game, though. Somebody had to sell those dry little powdery soup packets!

Enter Souped Up Recipes from Lipton (1978). This booklet offers soooo many ways to cram Lipton Onion Soup Mix into pretty much everything... and a lot of those ways start with the '70s-ubiquitous California Dip. (For the uninitiated, it's a packet of the aforementioned onion soup mix blended with a pint of sour cream.)

The asparagus on the cover is coated with a California-dip-based sauce, for example, and most of the recipes in the snacks and appetizers section start with it too:

Maybe the bright orange and yellow flowers will temporarily distract you, but you might notice how brown and goopy the deviled eggs and the dip look. That's California dip color!

Granted, I HATE mayonnaise, so I would probably like these "devilish" eggs better than the typical deviled offering:

I have to admit that the creamy cat barf consistency makes them look pretty unappealing, though.

You might wonder what kind of dip is in the bowl at the bottom of the picture. Maybe an odd California-dip-based bean dip?

Nope! It's pre-browned guacamole! You won't have to worry that it will start to look "off" as the party goes on. It looks off from the beginning.

That's not to say that all the recipes start with dip. A lot of recipes put the soup mix right into ground meat, like this one:

You might wonder what makes this straightforward recipe worthy of the "Round-the-World" title, but the answer is the variations:

Dinner can be "Typically British" with some cheddar and Worcestershire or "South-of-the-Border" with tomato and chopped chilis.  Sour cream, raisins, and curry powder turn the burgers Indian, though I might recommend using ground mutton or chicken instead of beef!

Lipton did have one idea for tacos that seems so sensible, I'm not sure why it didn't catch on:

You might be so busy looking at the very green pitcher of something (Margaritas, maybe? It doesn't say.) on a yarn-covered platform that you don't notice something unusual about the taco meat.

Look closely. It's not all poised to fall out!

It's filled not with loose taco meat, but a sausage-shaped Taco Burger! That means when the crisp tortilla inevitably shatters, diners won't be showered with loose, greasy bits of spicy meat. It will just be shards of corn tortilla, under-ripe tomatoes, and finely shredded lettuce. Yay! Okay, maybe it's not quite as practical as I initially thought. Maybe they should bind it all together as a taco salad using "guacamole" as the dressing. Now that I think about it, I'm kind of surprised they didn't.

Thanks for reading about old packets of onion soup mix! I am glad others are also easily amused.