Category:
Food

Potato Chip Casserole a la Gorton

WU-vie MJBIRD asks for the winning recipe associated with the first Potato Chip Queen. I found a slightly imperfect OCR of it here!

If anyone makes it, please report!

Potato Chips A la Gorton
2 tbs. flour
3 cups coarsely crushed potato chips
1 cup milk
6 medium size carrots
tsp. salt
8 medium size onions
tsp. pepper
2 tbs butter or margarine
[Illegible] cup grated American cheese

Scrape carrots and slice into [Illegible]-inch slices.
Cook until tender in boiling, salted water. Drain.
Pare onions and slice in [illegible]-inch slices. Cook until tender in boiling, salted water. Drain.
Melt butter or margarine in a heavy sauce-pan. Add the flour and blend. Add the milk and cook and stir until cheese is melted.
Arrange half of carrots in bottom of a greased casserole dish. Cover with a layer of crushed potato chips, then with half the onions. Cover with crushed potato chips.
Repeat layers.
Top with sauce mixture and a dash of paprika. Bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees, for about 20 minutes, or until thoroughly heated and lightly browned.
Makes 5-6 servings.

Posted By: Paul - Tue Aug 22, 2017 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, Reader Recommendation, 1940s

Sexy Pineapple Diet

This diet from 1970 was simple. Just eat only pineapple for two days every week. On the other days you can eat whatever you want. The book is apparently quite a rarity, because I haven't been able to find any used copies for sale.

Over at vice.com, a guy recently tried the diet and claims that he lost 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) in three days. Which, actually, isn't a lot. Evidently, he was able to find a copy of the book. He also discovered that one of its authors, Sten Hegeler, was still alive, 93 years old. When contacted, Hegeler admitted that not a lot of deep thought went into the concept of the diet:

"Pineapple with whipped cream was the preferred dessert back then, so I thought, 'My god, I can have as much pineapple as I want for two days,' and that sounded splendid."

And a bonus for linguaphiles: The word "erogetic" appears to have been invented for this book. I'm not sure what it means.



Fort Myers News-Press - Sep 16, 1970



Chicago Tribune - Nov 5, 1970

Posted By: Alex - Wed Aug 09, 2017 - Comments (6)
Category: Food, 1970s, Dieting and Weight Loss

Limited edition mayonnaise jar

Duke's mayonnaise is celebrating 100 years in business by selling limited edition glass jars of its mayonnaise — as opposed to those plastic jars all condiments come in nowadays.

Duke's has rather passionate followers. It's some kind of Southern thing. Southerners LOVE their mayonnaise, especially mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches. And Duke's is held in high regard as being the premier Southern mayonnaise. I've had it, and I agree it's pretty good. It's not a sweet mayonnaise. In fact, it has no sugar in it at all. It's like Hellmanns, but a bit tangier.

Anyway, some people love the stuff so much that they've arranged for their ashes to be stored in a Duke's jar after their death. So if you order the limited-edition jar, that's one thing to do with it once you've eaten the mayo.

Posted By: Alex - Mon Jul 31, 2017 - Comments (6)
Category: Death, Food, Mayonnaise

What does music taste like?

Science marches onward! Japanese company Nomura Open Innovation LAB has invented a machine that can translate music into blended juice drinks. It analyzes the music to determine the mix of emotions it represents. It then translates these emotions into juices, with sweet flavors representing happiness, sour as excitement, bitter as sad, etc.

The company promises that one day their machine will translate music into alcoholic drinks as well. More info: wcpo.com

Posted By: Alex - Tue Jul 25, 2017 - Comments (7)
Category: Food, Music

Moon Cheeze

July 20 was the anniversary of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Back in 1969, the Fisher cheese company, located in Armstrong's home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, capitalized on that achievement by coming out with "Moon Cheeze." It seems to have been just regular American cheddar cheese. Only the packaging was special. It came in a container shaped like the state of Ohio. Apparently it was so popular that they kept making it for years.



image source



Palladium-Item - Jan 19, 1969



Pensacola News Journal - July 18, 1969



Bonus: Armstrong making pizza in 1969. That looks like mozzarella, not Moon Cheeze.

via I have seen the whole Internet

Posted By: Alex - Fri Jul 21, 2017 - Comments (5)
Category: Food, Spaceflight, Astronautics, and Astronomy, 1960s

Man-Pleasing Recipes

The title of this 1971 recipe book was somewhat misleading. It claimed to feature "Man-Pleasing Recipes," but really it was a collection of recipes featuring rice as the main ingredient. The booklet was put out by the Rice Council for P.R. purposes. Part of an effort to promote rice as a manly food.

Can't say it succeeded. When I think of foods traditionally perceived as "manly," rice isn't one of the things that comes to mind.

source: Amazon.com


The Liberty Vindicator - Sep 7, 1972



One of the "man-pleasing recipes"
Shreveport Times - Oct 14, 1971

Posted By: Alex - Mon Jul 17, 2017 - Comments (3)
Category: Food, Cookbooks, Books, 1970s

Warhol Schrafft’s Commercial



In November 1968, the Manhattan restaurant chain Schrafft’s hired Andy Warhol to create a television commercial, hoping to make itself look more hip and relevant. Warhol created a one minute long commercial, promoting Schrafft’s new “Underground Sundae,” which Schrafft’s described as, "Yummy Schrafft's vanilla ice cream in two groovy heaps, with three ounces of mind-blowing chocolate sauce undulating within a mountain of pure whipped cream topped with a pulsating maraschino cherry served in a bowl as big as a boat."
Time magazine described the commercial as follows: "Onto the screen flashes a shiny red dot, which turns out to be a maraschino cherry, which turns out to sit atop a chocolate sundae, which turns out to be the focal point for a swirling phantasmagoria of color. All of which, it also turns out, is a 60-second videotape commercial for a venerable Manhattan-based restaurant chain. "The chocolate sundae," proclaims a credit line that rolls diagonally across the TV tube, was "photographed for Schrafft's by Andy Warhol.”
According to Harold H. Brayman: "The screen fills with a magenta blob, which a viewer suddenly realizes is the cherry atop a chocolate sundae. Shimmering first in puce, then fluttering in chartreuse, the colors of the background and the sundae evolve through many colors of the rainbow. Studio noises can be heard. The sundae vibrates to coughs on the soundtrack. 'Andy Warhol for a SCHRAFFT’S?' asks the off-screen voice of a lady. Answers an announcer: 'A little change is good for everybody.'"
And according to Playboy: "His recent widely discussed commercial for Schrafft’s restaurant chain was a long, voluptuous panning shot of a chocolate sundae, with 'all the mistakes TV can make left in,' the artist explained. 'It’s blurry, shady, out of focus.'" Warhol was quite pleased with the results. “‘It's fun,’ he says, ‘and really pretty, really great.’” Apparently, so was Schrafft’s, which claimed, “[W]e haven't got just a commercial. We've acquired a work of art."
Unfortunately, Schrafft’s failed to preserve the commercial, and no known copies exist. Accordingly, on Thanksgiving day 2014, Katrina Dixon & Brian L. Frye recreated Warhol's commercial, to the best of their ability. For the record, the hot fudge is homemade & based on Schrafft's own recipe.

Posted By: Paul - Thu Jun 29, 2017 - Comments (3)
Category: Food, Advertising, Avant Garde, Bohemians, Beatniks, Hippies and Slackers, 1960s

Vision-Dieter Glasses

The Vision-Dieter glasses were weight-loss eyeglasses, created by Arkansas entrepreneur John D. Miller who sold them for $19.95 each. They had a different lens for each eye: one brown and the other blue. Miller claimed that the different colors caused a low-level of confusion in a person's subconscious that led to a loss of appetite, and thus weight loss. In 1982 the U.S. attorney stopped the sale of the glasses because Miller hadn't registered them with the Food and Drug Administration. Also, there was no evidence they actually worked as a diet aid.



image source: Flickr



FDA employee Karen Kowlok models Vision-Dieter glasses
Newport News Daily Press - Mar 21, 1985



From the Wilmington News Journal - Aug 6, 1982:

[Miller] came upon the idea for the appetite-inhibiting lenses, he said, in one of his supermarkets. He noted that customers were attracted to shelves by certain colors. "If people could be controlled by one color," he thought, "they could be decontrolled by another."

Perhaps tinted eyeglasses could reverse the attraction to food by affecting the subconscious, Miller hypothesized. And he went to work.

The experiments began with employees of one of his enterprises, the Miller Vision Centers. Soon the research was extended to his patients.

At first, the results were mixed. He had chosen the wrong colors. Then he hit upon crimson brown and royal blue.

"It's crazy. I can't tell you exactly how, but it works," Miller said.

Soon testimonial letters were coming into Miller's office by the dozens. In virtually every case, people who wore the glasses said they weren't eating as much. He conducted control experiments with the help of a psychologist and claimed a 97 percent success rate.

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jun 29, 2017 - Comments (1)
Category: Food, 1980s, Dieting and Weight Loss, Eyes and Vision

Eating Infinite Jest

Comedian Jamie Loftus recently posted a video commemorating the first year of her plan to eat an entire copy of the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, one page at a time. She's never read it. She's just eating it.



This caught my attention because, as it turns out, I've got a folder on my computer where I've been filing examples of people who eat books, aka bibliophagia.

I've already posted one of the examples here on WU. It was the case from 1926 of the boy who was eating his family's Bible.

Then there's a report from 1936 of a schoolboy who, in order to win a bet of 20 cents, ate all 138 pages of "The Mountain Garland," a dramatic poem by Petar Petrovic Njegos.

The Uniontown Morning Herald - May 5, 1936



And a bunch of examples can be found in The Excursions of a Book-Lover by Frederic Rowland Marvin:

In 1370 Barnabo Visconti compelled two Papal delegates to eat the bull of excommunication which they had brought him, together with its silken cord and leaden seal. As the bull was written on parchment, not paper, it was all the more difficult to digest.

A similar anecdote was related by Oelrich in his "Dissertation de Bibliothecarum et Librorum Fatis," (1756), of an Austrian general who had signed a note for two thousand florins, and was compelled by his creditor, when it fell due, to eat it.

A Scandinavian writer, the author of a political book, was compelled to choose between being beheaded or eating his manuscript boiled in broth.

Isaac Volmar, who wrote some spicy satires against Bernard, Duke of Saxony, was not allowed the courtesy of the kitchen, but was forced to swallow his literary productions uncooked.

Still worse was the fate of Philip Oldenburger, a jurist of great renown, who was condemned not only to eat a pamphlet of his writing, but also to be flogged during his repast, with orders that the flogging should not cease until he had swallowed the last crumb.

Posted By: Alex - Fri Jun 16, 2017 - Comments (5)
Category: Food, Books

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Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes.

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