Are you ready for some ad copy? I hope so, because "Sealtest Cottage Cheese is truly 'The Cheese of a Thousand Uses.' It combines wonderfully with all the summer fruits and vegetables, and, like them, is now in plentiful supply. And it's just as nutritious as it is tasty and delicious." At least, so claims Sealtest in Number 84 of The Sealtest Food Adviser (1950).
This little booklet is not overly ambitious, as you might guess from the Cottage Cheese Pinwheel Salad on the cover. It is exactly what it appears to be...
...a big splop of cottage cheese in the center of some peaches and strawberries artfully arranged on a bed of watercress. Like anyone really needs a recipe for this.
This booklet also offers a few desserts that are lighter spins on cheesecake and a handful (Eww!) of salad dressings. My favorite offerings, though, are a couple of other salads. I was initially surprised by the item offered as an appetizer salad:
Who is really going to want a meal after downing a banana covered in pineapple-y cottage cheese, chopped peanuts, sour cream, and Maraschino cherries? I mean, it doesn't sound like a full meal, but it's also not exactly a little nibble to pique one's appetite before the main course...
And then I saw the recipe claiming to be a dessert salad and I understood.
While plenty of gelatin-based salads masquerade as desserts, the vinegar, cucumbers, radishes, and onion mean that this is clearly not intended as a dessert! (Plus, the fact that the title is "Lime Appetizer Salad" kind of gives it away.) The editor was clearly not paying too much attention. The appetizer salad is, in fact, the salad with "appetizer" right in the title, and the dessert salad is a concoction to sadden the heart of anyone who might reasonably have expected ice cream in a banana split. I'm not sure Sealtest's best strategy for selling more cottage cheese is to send out recipes that will make people wish they weren't eating cottage cheese, but then again, I'm not a marketer. I'm just a weirdo who likes weird old recipes.
Maybe these recipes are really just a ploy to get your family to say that they are good with a plain old bowl of cottage cheese.
ReplyDeleteI am, as long as it's large curd (and full fat, but usually that's the only way you can get large curd).
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