Adventures in Florida Dental Hygienist Food

Adventures in Food (St. Petersburg Junior College American Dental Hygiene Association, ca. mid-'60s to early '70s) proves to me that Florida has always been a pretty ... uh  ... imaginative place.

I've long been puzzling out what "Pigs in a Blanket" is supposed to mean, but the future dental hygienists went in a completely new direction:

They make Herring in the Blanket, which are herring dipped in batter and deep fried. Plus, I learned that herring are far more particular than pigs, as they must be wrapped in the blanket, while pigs will settle for any old blanket.

The hygienists also buy into the idea that shortcakes should not be limited to fruity variations:

While I'm sure that white sauce full of canned peas, chopped celery, and hard cooked eggs is fine survival food when there's not much left in the pantry, I imagine the sting of having to resort to it is made all that much sharper when it's called a Glorified Egg Shortcake.

The recipes also help highlight how much it used to suck to be on a special diet before there were entire corporations eager to supply people with low-carb, gluten-free, vegan avocado-flavored Greek yogurt with aronia berry and chia crumble.

People used to have to combine diet chocolate shake mix (Fun fact: I Googled "chocolate alva 77" for an embarrassingly long time before I finally figured out that this meant Alba shake.) with crushed pineapple and freeze it to pretend they had actual candy bars. There was definitely an untapped market for better diet foods!

(Am I missing something about the variation? Why would anyone mix pineapple juice and applesauce and freeze it as a candy substitute? Did, perhaps, the person mean to substitute the applesauce for the pineapple rather than the shake mix?)

Of course, the book had its share of "salads" that really stretch our idea of salad today. The gelatin-based salad isn't just a regular sugar-on-sugar salad, though.

I think Tapioca Salad is the first salad I've come across to incorporate both a gelatin dessert mix and a pudding dessert mix. Of course, if extra-sugary fruit seems like it's too light and you want a real stick-to-your-ribs salad, there's always Baked Potato Salad.

I don't see too many salads calling for a dozen potatoes, a full cup of margarine, a pound of "Velvetta," plus bacon and olives. You can tell that this is light and healthy, though, because it's a salad and not a casserole. As always, I've got to love the optimism about what is healthy! Those dental hygienists are always looking out for the rest of us.