Fun With Food Flavors, 1945

Food Flavors – for when your food has no flavor! Or needs a surreal flavor makeover.

The ad man got a bit overemotional about the Burnett’s Flavors. Pure extract of poetry is what this is – you can tell because there’s a lot of ellipses. He kept getting overwhelmed – probably by all the whiffs of flavor. Or whatever he was getting a whiff of.

But no matter how overcome the writer got – it should be “its,” not “it’s.”  And I never heard of anyone putting flavor extract into a salad – or a soup for that matter. But you could probably have lots of fun messing with your guests, putting some mint in the casserole, almond in the soup…a whiff of celery, as this ad puts it, in – what? How ’bout in a gelatin mold? Maybe in the Pompadour Pudding or the Chocolate Fluff! There are 29 of these flavors, you know – that’s a lot of fun possibilities. You do the math.

The pie lady up there looks like she’s been up to no good. She spiced that pie up all right, with a whiff of something.

[Advertisement from the Ladies' Home Journal, 1945]

NOTE: The Culinary Arts Encyclopedic Cookbook (1971) gives a nearly-identical recipe for Pompadour Pudding, only with vanilla extract instead of orange, topped with a chocolate-meringue mixture. I’d be glad to post it later if anyone is interested. It doesn’t seem to be in most of my other mid-20th century cookbooks.

The Shape-Watching Salad

This late 1960s ad begs the question: can a salad actually watch something? What sort of salad are we talking about? Because I don’t want the salad to be looking around at anything. At first I thought it said “shape-shifting salad.” That actually would be kind of cool and psychedelic – very late-sixties.

(Oh, I know what they mean! It’s the kind of thrilling 1960s diet salad that you eat when you are watching your shape. Mmmm, that sounds really enticing. The 1960s were not fun dieting years – and I have the ads and cookbooks to prove it. Oh yes, there will be more of this stuff, never fear!)

Also I would like to know what they mean by the salad, which is watching my shape (which is enormously cheeky of it) tasting like – fun. What sort of fun? Fun doesn’t have a taste exactly, but if it did, I think that it would be more along the lines of the chocolate chip cookie rather than the iceberg-lettuce-and-anemic- tomato-wedge model.

Speaking of anemic models, the beehived lady does not appear to be having fun with salad. In fact the bottle seems to be pinning her down in a vaguely menacing way. That’s some kind of fun right there!

She is in black and white, the salad is in color. The salad must exist in some other dimension – an “outrageously tasty” dimension.

Kraft calls this stuff “low calorie liquid dressings” – isn’t the liquidity a given? Is there such a thing as a solid salad dressing? Maybe the “Fruit ‘N Slaw” flavor is. That sounds rather – solid. Not outrageously fun or tasty, though.