Casseroles as TV Dinners

The illustration on the cover page of The Casserole Cookbook (director Melanie de Proft for the Culinary Arts Institute, 1956) suggests what the cookbook is all about:

Mom wants to be able to watch TV with the rest of the family and would feel bad if she kept serving Swanson TV dinners all the time, so it was this little book to the rescue.

Of course, the combinations were sometimes strange compared to the turkey with buttered peas and potatoes Swanson offered, but I'm sure the per-serving costs were waaay lower.

The kids might not be too thrilled with deviled eggs served over noodles in an evaporated-milk-and-tomato-soup sauce, but they might shut up if eating it meant getting to watch The Wizard of Oz or Ed Sullivan, making mealtime an easier battle to win than bedtime.

Maybe mom could even talk the kids into believing the bread crumbs on top were straw that had fallen off of the Scarecrow.

Or she could build a yellow (okay, golden-brown) brick road around the edge of the casserole...

Emphasis on the brown because the biscuits are bran, floating over a swamp of chopped up hard-cooked eggs and canned peas in white sauce. So nothing like the yellow brick road, really, but she tried, okay?

I also liked the reminders that this cookbook was before the wave of carbophobia hit mainstream America. This geometric casserole...

...uses a pastry crust on top of a Tuna Spaghetti casserole. I kind of wondered why a casserole that is supposed to serve eight only has six pastry wedges on top, but I guess it's so the smart asses like me who point out the redundancy of pastry on top of noodles can be deprived of that flaky delight and get a sad, crustless pile o' noodles.

And finally, the same pages with this recipe point out to those of us who may be inclined to feel sorry for the poor tuna:

The fishers only catch the dumb ones. The ones who paid attention in school learned about fishhooks and stayed away! (And the ones who played hooky to watch The Gumby Show instead are now in front of the TV once again, this time in casserole form. Stay in school, kids!)