Cold comfort foods

Whoever wrote the food blog on retro foods from the 1950s and 60s, is a either candidate for the moronic twitdom hall of fame, or not a very adventurous nosher. Clearly she hasn’t tried most of the food she was bashing. She is no Anthony Bourdain, with skills to survive the 50s and 60s suburban culinary era, she’s more like from the fish sticks eating school. 

Admittedly a few of the weird concoctions the unnamed author cited were short term fads and most people did not make, nor did they like hot mulled Dr. Pepper, etc., and to this day, thanks to my aunt, I hate sweet potatoes with orange juice, brown sugar, and marshmallows, but most of the fare tasted good. 

We get that the myopic food writer doesn’t like Miracle Whip, she’s probably in good company there, besides, most people avoided Miracle Whip and Cool Whip, for the real deal, but most of the salads she objects to don’t have lettuce…

Clearly she doesn’t understand what a salad is. She writes, “We’ve put quotation marks on the word salad because we don’t consider this a salad. Salad to us means greens…” Can I say say tuna salad, egg salad, potato salad, carrot salad, Waldorf salad, bread salad, tabouli salad? The word salad come from the Latin and means any cold vegetable with salt.

She seriously has it out for anything with Jello, like ambrosia. My granny made some seriously wikkid jello-based salads. Nor does she grok the long history of aspic—that dates back to the middle ages. But picking on stuffed celery was just plain ridiculous. 

And bashing green bean casserole, cornbread, for no real reason, other than looks, and sweet potato pie because it’s—get this—not pumpkin pie? Someone please tell her most canned pumpkin pie filling is made from various winter squashes, like Hubbard, and not even pumpkin? 

All these comfort foods are part and parcel of the traditional Thanksgiving ritual.  I bet she didn’t even eat pitted black olive puppets from her fingers when she was a child either.