Swimsuit season is just around the corner! And back when women were required by law to care about such nonsense, they might have pulled out Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim (copyright 1968, but mine is from the 1974 9th printing and originally belonged to my best friend's mom). (Also, my friend is very happy that her mom never made any of the recipes from this collection as far as she remembers.)
Despite the appearance of the cover, the recipes are not all super-plain: pile of plain lettuce, plain roast with a pile of cooked but otherwise very plain mushrooms. Let's see how interesting it could get with another Menu of Mayhem!
Notably, dieters were allowed to start with an appetizer (though most of said appetizers, admittedly, are just small drinks). This one is the prettiest.
So what is in this Double Deck Cocktail besides the watercress garnish?
If you guessed that it's just tomato juice poured on top of pineapple juice, then congratulations! You could be a recipe writer in the 1960s. You win a box of nonfat dried milk!
Now, we'll need a salad. As I said, it's not ALL just piles of lettuce.
Sometimes, the pile of lettuce is encased in green Jell-O.
While that wobbly green ring of low-calorie lime-flavored gelatin with vinegar, shredded lettuce, and sliced green onion could be filled with tuna salad...
I'm going to be a bit more indulgent and serve a sandwich instead. I like the perky sound of "Peachy Ham Swisser."
Not only does it stack the titular ingredients (peaches, ham, and Swiss cheese) on a slice of rye bread, but it also covers them with a sauce of low-calorie mayonnaise, skim milk, chili sauce, and finely-chopped dill pickle. Sounds... confusing at best. I guess if you overwhelm your taste buds with a bunch of random ingredients, maybe they will shut up for a while because they're scared of what you might try next?
But if you insist upon dessert, try a Ribbon Fudge* Parfait.
*Contains no fudge-- just low-calorie chocolate pudding from a mix combined with instant coffee and fluffed up with whipped egg whites. Then layered with even MORE air... I mean, low-calorie dessert topping.
This collection also has the distinction of ending with eight pages of exercises to help with the slimming! This may be my only cookbook that ends with pictures of people doing stretches.
And the editors of the book must have really needed some extra pages. The exercise section could easily have been half as long because the exercises are divided by gender, but there are almost no differences between them other than whether the picture shows a woman or a man demonstrating the exercise. The one difference I could spot was in the push-ups.
And yes, the book did recommend different reps of each exercise for women and men, but the recommendations were just in the headnotes, which could easily have been combined...
Oh, well. At least the editor got to 93 pages somehow! And that's all that matters (because we know dieting is largely a scam anyway, and it's not like my friend's mom really needed more recipes that she had no intention of making...)
I knew that the drink had to use liquids of different density, I just didn't know which ones. I remember making layered tea where you dissolve a bunch of sugar in hot water, then put your unsweetened tea on top. I never really thought about how much difference there would be in sugar content between pineapple juice and tomato juice. Then there's the bigger question about why anyone would want to drink them together. I guess that the calorie savings would be that people opt to drink water instead.
ReplyDeleteThis also made me reflect on the fact that I've never owned parfait glasses and somehow I still think of myself as an independent adult when I'm clearly not prepared to be one.
They are really buying into the concept of people eating with their eyes and not their taste buds. Everything is so pretty, and layered, and disappointing.
Don't tell anybody, but you can just layer things in regular glasses. No special equipment required!
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