Teeny Wieners, Aspics and Gelatin: Cocktail Party Favorites from Yesteryear

Hello everyone!

Today's Friday and that means we get to talk all about Food! Tonight I was thinking back on the cookbooks in my house that are owned by me, my mom and my grandma. When I think about those old dusty cookbooks with stains on the insides of the pages I think about one things that makes me laugh: those weird pictures of the party foods displayed on the pages. We've all seen it, the yellowish pictures from the 1960's and 1970's cookbooks. The pages display a variety of ways you can create a jello mold or even worse an Aspic, a dish in which ingredients are set into a gelatin made from a meat stock or consommé. Meat you say? Yes, jello meat. As if Jello wasn't bad enough, the strange things they did with cocktail wieners and full sized hot dogs was interesting as well. The pictures always had the food displayed on a platter with garnishes all around to make the food look interesting and supposedly eye appealing.

I pulled a few pictures off of the internet to show you of recipes that others had saved, which I have seen before. They certainly are colorful...

Just imagine if you made your family one of these dishes today. Imagine the wide bug eyes staring at the patter on the table. Imagine your kids poking at the jiggling meat slice on their plate. One has to wonder what made people come up these weird concoctions. And one has to wonder if people actually enjoyed these weird concoctions or did they just use them for pretty pictures. To be honest, they look like more work than anything and for what?

Hope you enjoyed this funny look back in time at old recipe pictures and I'm sure you have plenty of your own that you also remember or have in your own old cookbooks. Sometime you should take the time to flip through you cookbooks and have a good laugh at what these pictures say they're actually made of.

Have a great weekend everyone!