Saturday, April 28, 2018

Pizza with a side of "huh?"

Maybe this picture from Better Homes & Gardens Casserole Cook Book (1961) will seem perfectly normal to you.


But when I saw it, I was kind of like this cabbage from Better Homes & Gardens Casserole Cook Book (1961).


Yep, my chili sauce brain was jumping out of my head and my corn dog Bronco (Ahem. Sorry. Corn dogs are called "Broncos" in this book.) hair was standing on end.

The crimped edge made me think I was looking at a savory pie of some type. Then I noticed the "pie" pan was flat and the outer rim was covered with typical pizza toppings. So it's pizza, right? But then who stuffs curled-up lunch meat, whole olives, and parsley in the middle of a pizza for no apparent reason?

The pie is identified as a sausage pizza...


...but even the recipe doesn't suggest plunking a load of poorly-integrated toppers onto it to make the whole thing hard to cut and awkward to eat.

The caption helpfully suggests the garnishes, with steps that include fastening the "salami cornucopias" with toothpicks. Add the possibility of choking on a cheese-camouflaged sliver of wood to the dubious delights of this confused pie. Even if '60s cooks never contemplated crusts stuffed with mozzarella or hot dogs, they still had their ways to make pizza weird and maybe a little deadly.

4 comments:

  1. So this is why the older generations always told us not to play with our food. They were afraid that we might do something stupid like these recipes (or maybe that we would imitate what they did while making fun of it).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The latter is definitely the bigger danger now.

      Delete
  2. I have another name for those Broncos: Erector Sets. HEE! I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy

    ReplyDelete