November 14, 2007
That's-a Spicey Meat-a-ball!

Mike T. gets a no-prize my wife will beat him to death with if he ever actually tries to make any of these "Italian" recipes (scroll down to the bottom of the article.)

My grandma had cookbooks with illustrations like that. What the heck was going on, anyway? Some quirk of 50s offset printers creating day-glo illustrations? Or was everyone just colorblind back then?

Posted by scott at November 14, 2007 01:11 PM

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LOL--it's just like the over-saturated Technicolor movies back then.

I guess the philosophy back in the '50s was: "You can never have too much color...unless of course you're talking about Negroes!"

Posted by: Mark on November 14, 2007 01:48 PM

The color orange was still rationed because of the military's demands for target-drone and training aircraft use. It was not until early 1972 that the orange factories were able to meet full demand for this color.

Posted by: DensityDuck on November 14, 2007 03:25 PM

Like most of the books Lilek's features, it was probably more an experiment in marketing than a guide to producing edible food. No doubt some exec at Hunt's Tomato Paste thought that they could make people buy an abundance of their product with these recipes, combined with images that could only be duplicated by squeezing gallons of it into each dish, regardless of what the recipe actually calls for.

Thankfully, most marketers have since learned the fine art of subtlety.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian on November 15, 2007 06:58 PM
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