Retro Recipe Attempts
July 14, 2010 7:14 AM   Subscribe

Retro Recipe Attempts : Sit back with your Hot Dr. Pepper, munch on a bit of Pie Plate Salad, and start cooking! Brought to you by the fine folks at Mental Hygiene.
posted by gwint (29 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Neat, but hamantaschen aren't exactly retro - they've been made pretty consistently by Jews for Purim up through the present day.
posted by amro at 7:24 AM on July 14, 2010


Dammit, these look gross but at least they're different to every single dinner party meal I remember from the 70s, which I recall to be prawn cocktail followed by something runny with rice followed by flan with tinned mandarin oranges on it. And grapefruit covered in cocktail sausages, cheese and pineapple.

Fondue if we knew someone posh. The 70s were not a time of great experimentation for my family.
posted by shinybaum at 7:30 AM on July 14, 2010


I drink hot Dr Pepper to this day. I found out about it at the Dr Pepper museum in Waco and tried it, and really liked it. I even made a cocktail out of it.
posted by Astro Zombie at 7:33 AM on July 14, 2010


I kind of want to make that fake salmon loaf. Yes, I have problems.

This is fun, though. I actually like random kitchen experimentation -- which seems like how a lot of these came about -- and I've been known to do plenty of it (usually because I have nothing to make a proper meal out of so I have to get "creative").
posted by darksong at 7:36 AM on July 14, 2010


Passive aggressive potluck offering. Or maybe just aggressive aggressive.
posted by availablelight at 7:50 AM on July 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


Hm, that's the first time I've thought about hot dr. pepper in years, I used to drink it all the time as a kid. Although hot diet dr. pepper doesn't sounds as appealing.
posted by dead cousin ted at 7:55 AM on July 14, 2010


Ooo.
posted by sciurus at 7:58 AM on July 14, 2010


Mmmmm. Fake sal-mon loaf.
posted by psylosyren at 7:59 AM on July 14, 2010


This website is awesome. It's...awesome. Mostly inexpensive, easy to make...and while not necessarily gorgeous; totally nutritious and I bet tasty foods.

Not all of them. But...the egg drop soup? Yea, I'd eat that. Most of the confections? Yes. Egg nog? Oh hell yes. Sign me up.

I will be making some of these recipes. Soon.
posted by TomMelee at 8:27 AM on July 14, 2010


And grapefruit covered in cocktail sausages, cheese and pineapple.

Wait, what what horrible what?

I can't even make sense of that: grapefruit covered in...? Was it halved grapefruit, or segments on grapefruit in a bowl, or (I grudgingly admit that this makes the most sense) a whole grapefruit speared with tiny cocktail skewers loaded with cocktail sausages and chunks of cheese and pineapple.
posted by Elsa at 8:56 AM on July 14, 2010 [3 favorites]


I'm going to make the egg soup, too.
posted by theredpen at 8:59 AM on July 14, 2010


Yes, that - with a trillion more sticks.
posted by shinybaum at 8:59 AM on July 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


The passive-aggressive potluck link above reminded me of this thread seeking horrifying but tasty potluck dishes. To my ever-lasting shame, I recommended jellied salad Nicoise. It's well worth looking at the linked Flickr photos of the tasting. Blarg.
posted by Elsa at 9:02 AM on July 14, 2010


shinybaum: Phew! I was having visions of a slippery, citrusy-sharp, coktail-weiner-meaty, cheesy Lovecraftian melange of dread lurking with the hors d'oeuvres and waiting for someone to eat it. By comparison, a grapefruit porcupine of cheese cubes, sausages, and fruit chunks seems positively sane.
posted by Elsa at 9:08 AM on July 14, 2010 [1 favorite]


Shameless link to my Flickr stuff: I scanned and posted a 7-Up recipe book awhile back.

Seven-Up Salad...piquant...delicious!
posted by marxchivist at 9:27 AM on July 14, 2010


the jellied salad nicoise? IT BURNS MY EYES. i can't imagine what it would do to a human digestive tract.
posted by msconduct at 9:40 AM on July 14, 2010


Veg-All is a combination nostalgia/horror food for me.
Back when I would spend 12 to 14 days at a time in the mountains doing trail work, Veg-all was the closest we came to vegetables for long stretches of time.
We usually avoided cooking it to keep the flavors from melding and the vegetables from disintegrating.
We at it cold (as cold as something can becoming from your backpack), sitting in the dirt, passing the can and a spoon around the circle until it was gone. Liquid and all.
We did it because we knew we needed to eat vegetables.
We did it because we were hard. Or something.


It is the stuff of nightmares, but it makes me think of grand, loaded times spent in the woods with some of the coolest people I have ever met.

But that recipe. That recipe combines the horror of Veg-all with torture practices perfected by the US Military in the '50s.
posted by Seamus at 10:18 AM on July 14, 2010


But that recipe. That recipe combines the horror of Veg-all with torture practices perfected by the US Military in the '50s.

I was immediately reminded of this.
posted by availablelight at 10:40 AM on July 14, 2010


Drinking it hot actually increases the palatability of diet soda, surprisingly
posted by jtron at 10:42 AM on July 14, 2010


Perhaps this would be a good place to drop some links to some awesome recipes I have found while trolling Allrecipes.com. There's a way to sort recipes by "least popular," which is how I found most of these.

Congealed Chicken Salad Hard to say which is worse; the name, or the greenish hue of the thumbnail image.

Silver Fish a cocktail made with vodka, whiskey, gin, 2 cups chicken broth, ice, and a sprig of mint. YOU HEARD ME.

Red Beans and Spaghetti ingredients: red beans, spaghetti, salt to taste THAT'S IT.
posted by ErikaB at 10:43 AM on July 14, 2010 [3 favorites]


Well, ErikaB, I guess if you put in enough vodka, whiskey, and gin, the rest of the ingredients plus the horrible name hardly matter.

At least, till it tries to come back up.

I think any 70s recipe post makes it mandatory to link this.
posted by emjaybee at 11:02 AM on July 14, 2010 [2 favorites]


I drink hot Dr Pepper all the time... I live in Texas and my car doesn't have air conditioning!
posted by titus n. owl at 11:02 AM on July 14, 2010


Oh wow, I haven't giggled at Fluffy Mackerel Pudding in so many years, I had forgotten all about that little site!
posted by ErikaB at 11:13 AM on July 14, 2010


Thanks for linking to those Flickr photos, Elsa. I love this picture so much I think I want to marry it.
posted by MegoSteve at 11:23 AM on July 14, 2010


MegoSteve, I prefer this one (if only for the glimpse of Actual Horror Salad in the taster's mouth), but they're all pretty fantastic. This is precisely how I'd imagined the experience of eating jellied salad Nicoise.
posted by Elsa at 11:36 AM on July 14, 2010


I associate hot Dr Pepper with the Tulsa tradition of the Burning Of The Greens, where people would drop their Christmas trees off and the fire department would have a huge bonfire on Epiphany (aka Twelfth) night. They'd serve hot Dr Pepper to the crowd that would show up.

They stopped doing it a few years ago (given it's un-PC to burn trees and the recent dry, warmer winters make it a hazard).
posted by dw at 11:37 AM on July 14, 2010


Hot Dr. Pepper was a staple at a lot of high school football games when I was growing up. Usually served alongside Frito Pie served in the bag. The Frito Pie would warm one hand, and the Dr. Pepper would warm the other.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:33 PM on July 14, 2010


It was nice to learn that the reason there were so many gross gelatin recipes back then was so people could show off that they could afford refrigerators. I always wondered about that!
posted by cottonswab at 4:31 PM on July 14, 2010


Another fan of hot Dr Pepper here (in all its varieties, really).

I couldn't help but be irked by the constant reference to "cola" flavors in the post about hot DP, since it's not a cola.

I haven't tried hot DP with either the cane sugar or Dublin variety but I suspect it'll yield a better result than the grocery-store stuff.

Anyone know if they're bringing back Heritage Dr Pepper any time soon? I'm almost out of my stock from earlier this year...
posted by camcgee at 9:53 PM on July 14, 2010


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