Tuna, tuna everywhere...

Tuna: A Saga of the Sea (Tuna Research Foundation, undated, but the historical section ends in 1948 and online sources suggest the booklet is from the 1950s) has plenty of recipes in addition to information about the history, nutrition, and canning of tuna. ("On their arrival to the cannery the fresh or thawed frozen fish are eviscerated, washed and placed in wire mesh baskets in which they are cooked in steam retorts at a temperature of 218° for three to six hours depending on the size of the fish.")

To give you a good overview of the booklet, I've made one of my patented menus of mayhem, starting with an appetizer that looks like a cat barfed on some Saltines and the host thoughtfully topped the mess with pimento:

If nothing else, it's a great way to waste a perfectly-good avocado.

Now, we'll need a salad. No, not the usual salad of canned tuna with mayo and a little celery.

How about canned tuna, mushrooms, and grapefruit with a little celery in a nice tuna-oil-and-lemon-juice dressing? That will put some hair on your chest (making you look more like a commercial fisherman!).

Maybe we should try to find something a little more dainty and cheerful for the main course. How about a dish that looks like lima beans, black olives, and big wads of tuna festively bobbing in a pool of melted vanilla ice cream?

Relax, it's not really vanilla ice cream. It's just white sauce.

White sauce that somehow got associated with Catalina, though Catalina denies the connection.

I'll admit, this tuna booklet is one of the few specialty food booklets that does not suggest that the specialty food can do absolutely everything. That's my delicate way of admitting there is no chapter on tuna desserts. I'm not going to let that stop me, though! I'm going with the tried-and-true "Is it a salad or is it a dessert?" conundrum, and I'm declaring this salad to be a secret dessert:

You read that right! It's Banana Split Tuna Salad. Okay, I'll admit that few desserts include chopped onion, celery, and green pepper along with the titular tuna, but all the cranberries, nuts, sugar, orange, and bananas should make up for it, right? And besides, it's called a banana split, so it must be a dessert treat.

This ended up being much more riveting reading than I expected from a booklet that thought explaining the temperature of the steam retorts in the cannery would be exciting.