Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974 - EWWW!

[mzmolly]

Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974

"I found them while helping my parents clean out their basement a few years ago. They were neatly arranged in their own plastic file box. Plenty of the dishes seemed normal enough, but as I flipped through them, some of the recipes began to alarm me. And then I found the card for the "Rosy Perfection Salad."

I fell over. Like I Iaughed so hard I started coughing and I fell back on the floor and I waved the card at my mom, who just rolled her eyes. "Can I please have these? Please?" I begged. "What do you want them for?" she asked. "To cook?" "No," I said. She let me have them. I think they might have been my grandma's, but she never copped to actually buying them. Nobody else did, either.

These cards mystify me. None of them have calorie or nutrition information of any kind, and in some instances it's hard to tell what's dietetic about the recipes at all, except that they're unspeakably grim. And yet also, completely insane. They appear to be from a much kookier era of Weight Watchers. There's a certain serve-it-at- your-next-key-party freakiness to a lot of these dishes."



I hope that you can see that this is a jellied salad. Do you see it glisten? Do you require a close-up to understand that these beans and mushrooms and pimiento strips are one solid, glistening mass?

See how the Ceramic Mushroom Family has gathered to show their children what happens to bad little mushrooms.

Click below for more! :puke:

http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/czarina.html

[TheMightyFavog]

1. You might enjoy the Gallery of Regrettable food.

http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/

Even though the author is a screaming neocon, it's still pretty amusing.



If this food was any whiter, it would be wearing pointy hats and burning crosses on the lawns of recipies for black-eyed peas.

(snip)

On top, we have the Fruit Ring Mold with Dressing, perhaps the most nonspecific dish name in memory. Whether it contains more Mold than Fruit is up to you, of course. In the middle, Cheese Aspic. Also known as “A boil on a clown’s arse.” Below, a Cottage Cheese Log. Smeared on the walls, it yields enough light to read by.

[mzmolly]

2. LOL ... I shall take a look.

:hi:

[MidwestMomma]

3. Thanks so much for posting. Best laugh I've had all week

This one's a keeper. :yourock:

[mzmolly]

4. Another midwest mama here. It must be a midwest thing?

;)

[MidwestMomma]

7. Yeah, we don't see alot of Fluffy Mackerel Pudding in the Midwest

I think and that Bean and Mushroom Jellied salad are my favorites. I guess the Weight Watcher plan back then was to make your food so disgusting you couldn't eat it.

[mzmolly]

17. I wondered if the food = disgusting was part of the plan as well?

Heck, I can hardly return to eating after reading the cards! :P

[slackdude]

5. I have more of them at...

I have a whole stack of those that my wife found in my grandmother's house. I took the absolute worst and posted them, along with the actual recipe, at http://www.jasonbuckley.com/blog/recipes - There are a couple of duplicates with the site you posted, but many of them are different. I've been posting them once a week, and I only have 2 left. The last one I'm posting will be the best (worst), I promise!

[mzmolly]

6. No wonder people were thinner in the 70's!

:puke:



Thanks for sharing your experience with 70's recipe cards Jason. :hi:

[slackdude]

10. How about this one?

[mzmolly]

16. I'll never eat Frankfurters again!

:scared:

[donco6]

8. Funniest site I've seen in weeks!

That is just too hilarious to miss.

[cally]

9. Would anyone actually serve this?

Frankenfurter Spetacular
http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/spectacular.html

[eyesroll]

11. What is up with the obsession with gelatin and molds?

Everything's got gelatin in it, and everything's a funky shape.

Unless it's mackerel. And then it still might have gelatin in it.

Eeeew.

[LynneSin]

12. Let us shout it all together: FRANKFURTER SPECTACULAR

:eyes:

[MissMillie]

13. Fish balls?

poor fish!

[Bertha Venation]

14. ROFL -- jellied tomato refresher

Yes, let's have these in brandy snifters. Let's just tip our heads back and let the chunks slide in.

The time you spent eating these is time you'll want back at the very end of your life. That's why they're served with a clock.

[noonwitch]

15. My mom was on it around then-she had to make her own ketchup

I was on it in 1979, and you could eat most condiments. I remember eating a lot of tunafish when I was on it. I remember a recipe for hot tuna cassarole that my non-dieting sister always made me double so she could eat it, too.
I did have a couple of good baked fish recipes then. My lecturer gave me this recipe for pumpkin cookies that turned out to be one of the worst things I've ever tasted in my life.