not the archduke of austria

First, you had a lot of commercially prepared products like Jello and Spam (Spam, Spam, Spam …) and things like that being available to the general public for the first time.  A lot of these recipes come from ads for processed foods; they’re “serving suggestions” writ fancy.

Second, the Jello molds in particular are a democratization of an old-fashioned and very upper-class way of preserving perishable foods, which was to encase them in a meat jelly called aspic.  The aspic would preserve the food by preventing bacteria from getting at it.  It took time and effort to make an aspic, so it was rich-people food, prepared by cooks in big houses.  Jello (in its more savory flavors) could do the exact same thing, except that one lone housewife could make a Jello mold cheaply and easily.  I’m not saying that aspic was necessarily the most appealing food out there, but it was high-status because it was associated with Fancy European Aristocrats.

Third, more people had refrigerators, not just iceboxes.  A lot of these dishes need to be chilled, so here’s a way to use one of your fancy new kitchen appliances.

Fourth, this is not everyday food, for which we are all grateful.  It’s Fancy Food, meant to show off.  You’d serve it at a party (and then, presumably, your friends would retaliate by holding another party and serving something else equally revolting).  So this is food that takes careful preparation, lots of time, and lots of effort.  You, as the Middle-Class Fifties Housewife, are showing off your new postwar prosperity.  You have the skill to make food look … um, “attractive,” you have the money to buy all these ingredients, you have the kitchen equipment and appliances to prepare them, and because your husband works a comfortable middle-class job, you have the time to stay at home all day and construct something like this.  This kind of food is the physical manifestation of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of Conspicuous Consumption.

Fifth, if you’re a housewife making this in the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s, there’s a good chance that you were born in the 20s or 30s, and that you grew up during the Depression and WWII.  You might have grown up poor, not having access to a wide variety of food, or not having time or a place to prepare it.  You might have seen fancy food in magazines, but not a chance that that kind of eating would ever trickle down to you!  And then … voila, it did!  I think a lot of this sort of thing is just a grownup way to play with food, to experiment with all the neat new things that technology, processing, and a new tax bracket could bring you.  These are adult mud pies; who cares how it tastes?  We can make it look Really Cool!  We don’t care all that much about specific nutritional value; we’re just so happy to have all this food, and sufficient calories, that we’ll just play with it and try it in weird combinations and enjoy it.  (Or, I suspect, “enjoy” it.)

It’s 11 at night, I get the last table before closing, and it’s a girl my age. She asks for tea and an egg white omelette. So I bring over her egg white omelette, and she starts screaming. Why? Because it’s not yellow like in the picture on the menu, it’s white, so something must be wrong. I explained that the yolk is what makes omelettes yellow, and she didn’t want egg yolks. She’s still mad, and yells again. And then realizes she could eat while she’s yelling, so she does, and I get to watch her chew with her mouth open while she rants about eggs. I’m exhausted and dying inside. She finally stops. I ask if she wants a refill of tea, and she says yes. She’s quiet for the rest of her meal, for which I am very grateful.

After she paid and left, I collected her receipt. On it, she wrote in all caps “I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW EGGS WORK BUT IT WAS YUMMY.” She left a $20 bill on the table as a tip. She also left some pills in a bag that my manager sent to the police, which were identified as some sort of amphetamine.