Earlier, I promised you some military-grade whimsy from the pages of Best Foods' The New Way to Cook Is with Karo! (1963). Today's pictures are here to deliver on that promise.
What's more whimsical than prettily decorated petit fours?
Petit fours glazed by a hot air balloonist with a massive spoon and cat whiskers!
What kind of picture should illustrate Orange Baked Pork Chops?
If you're not powered by corn-syrup-derived creativity, you might just draw pork chops. Baked. With oranges. The power of Karo brings us an orange-juggling pig, though!
Much cuter!
While you may blanch at the thought of how tooth-achingly sweet Chewy Butterscotch Bars are likely to be....
...our friend in the illustration is just concerned about how flaccid the bars are when they're used as a diving board.
I also have to marvel at just how far his butt juts out in that old-timey swimsuit! It would make a better diving board than the butterscotch bars do!
The almonds (too carefree to even be clearly affiliated with any specific recipe as far as I could tell) are not such picky divers, as one prepares to land directly atop the other in a vat of...
...I'm gonna say caramel. Just because I'm trying to be nice for a change and not gross you out. (And with that bit of misdirection, I have you contemplating exactly what I was planning to claim that yellowish liquid was. You're welcome.)
Of course, all this whimsy does have its darker side.
Do you seriously think a cookbook from the '60s could have a recipe for Cantonese beef...
...without a racist picture of Cantonese cow?
...and then notice that Miss Saucy Tomato is only holding up a towel to distract you from the fact that she is standing heels-deep in tomato skins. And she is using "His" towel to dry off after she washed away all the blood.
The Spicy Baked Oranges may sound like an attempt to serve potpourri at a meal...
...and they are actively happy at the thought of flattening your troops!
The innocuous-seeming Pineapple Upside-Down Cake...
...gets paired with the diabolical pineapple serial killer.
He's even got the head tilt down as he holds up a tray of his dismembered victim.
And perhaps most sinister of all, the Fudge Sauce Cake requires sacrifice.
I mean, a real sacrifice...
...as in, your second-smallest child has to drop a tiny, tiny coffin into the the pan of melting chocolate and Nucoa margarine. Don't ask what's in that tiny, tiny coffin. Just know that it will make fudge sauce cake that much sweeter. Well, unless the Karo does that. But you definitely still need the mystery coffin sacrifice for the cake to come out right, so don't skip it!
I hope you enjoyed the lighter and darker sides of Karo illustrations! Come back next week when I pit the tomato, orange, and pineapple against each other to see who wins. Second-smallest-child gets to bury the losers in a vat of boiling syrup. You won't wanna miss it.
Hopefully you don't find any cat whiskers in your petit fours glaze. The pig makes me think of Charlotte's web as the pig keeps thinking of ways to keep performing so he doesn't end up being pork chops.
ReplyDeleteBeing a juggling pig would be a good gimmick!
DeleteOranges were commonly believed to LOVE being shot full of cloves in the 1960s. That's why pomanders were so popular as gifts in the '60s. (Well, that and they were an easy and relatively cheap gift.)
ReplyDeleteI'd think the Chewy Butterscotch Bars would make the old guy's butt squishier, but who knows? The physics of the Karo Syrup Universe work in mysterious ways.