Prunes will make your blouse's shoulders extra pointy... among other things...

My first thought upon seeing Sunsweet Recipes (California Prune & Apricot Growers Association, 1950) was "Mondays and Thursdays."

I know that response means nothing to anyone else, so I suppose I should elaborate. My first real job was as a cook for a nursing home. On Monday and Thursday mornings, we served stewed prunes as part of breakfast. Nobody generally wanted to go on lunch breaks with the nurses' aides because their goal in life was to tell about the grossest things they'd had to deal with so they would ruin everybody else's appetite. Mondays and Thursdays were of course their real days to shine. (Granted, I was pretty much immune to their talk because both sets of grandmas firmly believed that the absolute best topic for dinner discussion was describing in as much detail as humanly possible any medical procedures they and/ or their friends and acquaintances had recently undergone. I just tried to avoid the nurses' aides because I try to avoid most people in general.)

So... I guess my point is that prunes only make me think of the nursing home being even shittier than usual. While Sunsweet did want readers to know that "Prunes are universally recognized as an excellent regulatory food and one of the best of nature's mild, natural laxatives," they bury that information in the back of the book and spend a lot of the time trying to convince readers that prunes are more of a party food.

I somehow can't imagine that Sunsweet Prune Birthday Cake (complete with pitted prune candle holders) was a top choice for birthday celebrations. (Have to admit that I'm really digging the illustration of the woman with the incredibly spiky-shouldered top icing her cake, though.)

And if the Sunsweet Birthday Cake is insufficiently pruny, it could always be augmented with Sunsweet Cake Filling.

This one is mixed by a woman with very angular boobs, which she seems just a little bit smug about.

The book is mostly desserts, but it offers a few main courses, like Sunsweet Pork Chop Skillet.

You know the thought of pork chops with catsup, lemon, onion, Worcestershire, prunes, cloves, sweet potatoes, and brown sugar does not thrill me (given my aversions to sweet plus meat and most condiments), but I know your mileage may vary. I mostly picked this recipe because I love the pig salt and pepper shakers in the accompanying picture.

Look at their plump little faces and blinking eyes! Look at those little neckerchiefs! (And maybe avert your eyes from the pile of grayish masses that are apparently the be-pruned chops.)

The most important question about this booklet, though, is "Does it have gelatin salads?" And my answer is, "Does a bear shit on the Pope?" (Yes, if a bear has had sufficient amounts of prunes, it can shit on anybody.)

There's a salad that combines two common mid-century cooking moves: stuffing foods into other foods and carefully arranging foods in the bottom of a mold so they can be covered with a layer of gelatin.

Stuff prunes with cottage cheese and then cover with lemon/ apricot gelatin for a treat that screams 1950! (And make sure to serve it on lettuce so everybody knows it's a salad and not dessert.)

And there is also, of a course, a WTF salad full of... well... anything that was on hand.

Apricots! Mustard! Vinegar! Paprika! Sugar! Evaporated milk! Celery! Guaranteed to be so impressive it will emit shiny lines in all directions and make the proud cook's shoulders extra pointy!

Maybe she will think back to those glorious pointy-shoulder days 40-some years later when the nurses' aides are getting ready to make her the star of their Thursday lunchtime stories.... Everything in her life is thanks to Sunsweet.