I started collecting vintage cookbooks about three years ago, but not for the recipes – for the food photography. Food photography has come a long way since the 60’s and 70’s. But you can’t blame the nasty-looking food entirely on the pictures – there were also a lot of recipes that make you want to laugh and puke at the same time. Some of my favorite “delicacies” and “luxuries” include Weiner Winner Pizza, Molded Pork Loaf (shown below with the caption Cool Molded Pork Loaf is an appetizing work of art.), Danish Garden Salad (the white loaf shown below) and Spicy Liverwurst-Ham Nibblers. And for those of us who didn’t spend their 20’s and 30’s at key parties with ironed hair, we think of Jello as a dessert food. But some of the best savory food photography and recipes in my collection come from the pages of my vintage Jello cookbooks. So, a toast to my first blog post (and all of those brave baby boomers who ate Ring-Around-the-Tuna): “May all of my posts that follow be more appetizing than this.”
