Tiger Recipes for April!

I was intrigued to receive a tiny four-page brochure (if you count a single sheet of paper printed on both sides and folded in half as four pages) in an envelope full of cooking ephemera that I received recently. 

It's Kraft TV Recipes for Spring Weekends! As seen on the TIGER, TIGER Nature Documentary! This little slip of paper is undated, but I figured a bit of digging would tell me when the documentary aired. It was on a major network and merited a TV recipe advertising booklet, after all. However, finding the air date wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. (So many search results thought I was looking for Tiger Woods!) I did finally find, in the Blake Issue Archive, a notification in the summer 1977 issue that "On 28 April CBS-TV aired 'Tiger, Tiger,' a documentary on the Bengal tiger, an endangered species." That's the long way of saying that this is apparently from 1977.

You will be relieved to know that there are no recipes calling for tiger meat. I was a little disappointed that there weren't even any recipes for cookies or kids' sandwiches that looked kind of tiger-y. The brochure is mostly for pretty boring salad recipes, I guess in the quest to sell more salad dressing. There's also some advice for ways to zazz up sandwiches, like adding Kraft singles and beet strips to an egg salad sandwich. Oh, boy! 

I was a little confused about the recipe for "Taxco Salad." Was this a misspelling of "Taco Salad" or simply an old-timey spelling of "taco" that I hadn't encountered before?

I tried searching "Taxco Salad" and Google immediately asked if I meant "Taco Salad," so I thought it was just a misspelling. I also found out that there's a small Mexican city called Taxco de Alarcón, so maybe I'll be very generous and suppose that this is not a typo but in fact an assertion that the residents of Taxco love covering mounds of iceberg lettuce with beef and kidney beans mixed with French dressing, tomatoes and green peppers mixed with more French dressing, and guacamole made of avocados, Miracle Whip, onion, and bacon. In fact, it's the dish their city is best known for. (Wikipedia suggests Taxco is known for dishes that include jumiles-- a type of stink bug-- so I can see why Kraft wouldn't go for that particular angle.)

The brochure also includes the 1970s-required gelatin salad. 

Of course the lemon gelatin has to include Kraft Real Mayonnaise, along with vinegar, celery, cabbage, carrots, green pepper, and onion. This is definitely going for actual salad vibes, and not "Let's all pretend this dessert is really a salad so we can unapologetically eat another dessert at the end of the meal."

I was also a bit surprised by the booklet's version of a Waldorf salad. I'm used to seeing recipes for Waldorf salad that call for apples, celery, mayonnaise, and maybe some walnuts and/or grapes. It sounds terrible to me mainly because of my white-hot hatred of mayonnaise, but I guess I can understand that others would be attracted to the lightly sweet and refreshing crunch. Kraft's version, on the other hand...

It doesn't just go for the crunchy-but-mostly-flavorless celery as the vegetable element. It also includes more assertive cauliflower. And instead of walnuts for the fattier crunchy element, this tops off the salad with raisin bread croutons! I can't imagine that too many people are really begging for cauliflower with raisin bread croutons.... Will using French dressing instead of mayonnaise make this unholy mixture better or worse? I have no idea because pretty much any type of salad dressing is a crime against nature as far as I'm concerned, though your mileage will likely vary...

I'm sure tigers would vote for raw meat above any of these recipes, though. In this case, I may reluctantly have to side with Kraft. (I only said "may," though, so I'm not fully committed either way. For all I know, Taxco may be right and the stink bugs may be the best bet....)