Every Woman’s…

Saturday, 15 January 2011

So, since the books, magazines, papers, memorabilia, memoranda, and knick-knacks above our main bookshelf have now nearly touched the ceiling, we figured it was a good time to sort through that stuff.

We used to have a lot of magazines, but thankfully, we’ve whittled the number down quite a bit. We used to have stacks of Entertainment Weekly, but now we just have a single issue – that one from 1995 that’s entirely dedicated to Star Trek (which, now that I think about it, might be my favorite issue of any magazine, ever). We also have just a single issue of Discover, the one that’s all about Einstein.

We also have a few issues that are noteworthy for being from a special moment in history. For example, I have the issue of Newsweek that came out right after the Challenger explosion, and I even have the one that came out following Dr. King’s assassination.

We also have a couple issues of a magazine titled Every Woman’s (billed as “The Woman’s Guide to Better Living”). They’re from the 1940s and 50s, so the fun in keeping these magazines is that everything inside them has become a sort of time capsule.

Especially the articles and ads about food. I decided to scan in a few images for your viewing pleasure:

So, here’s an image that accompanied an article featuring recipes (what women’s magazine would be complete without recipes?). This food item, at least by 1954 standards, must’ve been so appealing that this same image made the cover of this issue, too! So, what, exactly, is that food? I mean, just looking at it, it doesn’t look too bad, does it? Personally, I don’t care for hard-boiled eggs, but if I came across this sumptuous delicacy at a buffet, I would probably help myself to a nice heaping slice of that stuff in the middle.

Get this: it’s tuna salad molded via a mold tin and mixed with aspic to give it that full-bodied, Jell-o look that you’ve come to expect in your seafood. And that red stuff sitting around the blended fish? Those are cubes of tomato juice mixed, again, with aspic.

I can just imaging myself taking a serving spoonful of those red cubes, believing I’m gonna finish off my meal with some Jell-o, only to nearly vomit on the fact that it’s straight-up pasta sauce. I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it. And the reason why I know that putting something in my mouth that I believe is a dessert but which, in fact, is some concoction of culinary arts gone horribly awry, is because it happened to me once before. I will never, ever forget that gut-wretching moment that, alas, you will have to wait until February 23rd for me to write about.

Oh, if you don’t believe that those are the ingredients, here’s the facing page:

And it’s time for one more gentle rip on Every Woman’s. Now here are two plates of food that don’t look too bad; the top one features corned beef hash with peas, and the bottom one is a spread of broiled lamb chops with peas. Okay, even if those aren’t the sort of things you care to eat, at least there’s nothing weird about them. …Right?

Think again, future human! Take a look at that lower plate of food (and you can click on the picture for a bigger version). Do you see that glob of otherworldly green? What is Stokey’s advertising department trying to get us to eat? It’s not quite applesauce, and it’s not quite cranberries. Is it more aspic? Did some form of aspic have to accompany every meal in the 1950s? Or perhaps it’s a parrot fish’s abandoned mucous cocoon.

Yum! Who’s hungry?