General Foods wants you to put frozen food in everything

I picked up General Foods Kitchens Frozen Foods Cookbook (4th ed., 1964) because I loved the colorful cover. It's got space-age-looking appetizers exploding outward in the upper left, tomatoes stuffed with some swampy green gunk to the right, the frozen favorites of lima beans and French fries in the foreground, and front and center, a big pie with multicolored fruits peeking through its lattice. The whole cover a thing of beauty.

This work of "Modern Living with Frozen Foods" is not always terribly creative, though. Recipes for appetizers often just call for stabbing a few reheated frozen tidbits onto skewers, often with other bits of flotsam, like these fancy-sounding Hors d'Oeuvre en Brochette.

I guess General Foods used the French name to distract from the fact that this recipe is just an excuse to sell frozen pre-cooked scallops and potato puffs. Alternating them on a skewer with whatever happened to be around the house made the ploy a little less obvious. Pimiento? Onion? Green pepper? Mushrooms? Mandarin orange segments? Pineapple chunks? As long as it's something that was ubiquitous in the '60s and could be skewered (that second criteria is meant to remind us that Jell-O and canned soup were no-gos), it would work.

Pickabacks are a similar attempt, this time alternating pre-cooked fish bites and cut-up pre-cooked fish sticks with a suspiciously similar roster of additions.

It's a bit odd that cheese slices are added to this list of add-ons, though, especially if the apps were supposed to be kept hot in a chafing dish or electric skillet. That would be a big, gooey mess...

Still, you've got to admit that General Foods can make a lovely gray stick of nondescript foodstuffs.

There are also instructions for cooking straight-from-the-freezer veggies in less-conventional ways. Need some roughage for the family camping trip? Pack the cooler with blocks of frozen veggies and then grill the veggies right in the boxes.

Just make sure to wrap the cardboard in foil first, I assume so it won't catch on fire. When you pull the boxes off the grill 30-60 minutes later, they will look...

...well, still pretty much like a box of frozen vegetables. Only hotter. As a bonus, they will probably taste cardboardy.

At least the book had a few somewhat creative recipes, like this non-standard take on the infamous Tater Tot Casserole.

I knew from the title that Puff-Top Tuna Casserole would be unusual in that it uses tuna instead of the usual ground beef, but it's also weird because it uses condensed chicken with rice soup instead of cream soup as the canned soup component. I'm always interested to see a new variation on Tater Tot Casserole.

My favorite thing from this cookbook, though, is that I found another method of differentiating a salad from a dessert. In addition to our previously-established rule of served on lettuce= salad and served on a lettuce-free plate= dessert, the makes-sense rule of less sugar= salad and more sugar= dessert, and the wtf rule of I'm pretty sure that extra sugar means it's salad, not dessert, we have a new the topping makes the difference rule. For Jellied Raspberry Special, mayo topping= dinner salad and whipped cream topping= dessert salad.

The Strawberry-Grapefruit Chill postulates a similar rule.

Here, it's mayo topping= dinner salad and custard topping= dessert salad. I guess the thinking here is that if you are willing to eat mayonnaise on Jell-O, then you can claim it's whatever you want and still get a separate dessert guilt-free. If you dare to top the sticky-sweet confection with an appropriately sweet topping, then you have to admit that it's just straight-up dessert and no, you don't get to pick something else out for dessert.

While much of this book is just a primer in skewering reheated foods on kabobs and coating frozen foods with a medium white sauce with some pantry staples mixed in, I loved discovering more about the salad v. dessert wars. The half-assed attempts to pass off frozen food as some home-cooked delicacy by putting it on a skewer or throwing it on the grill were a fortunate bonus. This is not always the most exciting cookbook, but it's still fun.