Regarding this entry, James Lileks of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has uncovered an old ad listing the 57 types.
link doesn’t work
Several comments about the ad. It’s undated, which is too bad. It’s also a large cheat. Half a dozen of the numbers are really two items, sweet or sour, brown or yellow. All the preserves get one number as do all of the jams. Other foods, like beans or soups, get a separate number for each variety. It’s obvious that the list was carefully formed to have 57 entries rather than 57 being the number of items on the list.
Ad men are truly magic. They are never stopped by mere reality.
The typography of that list looks like it comes from the 1930s, forty years after the “57 varieties” slogan was born, and, I’m sure, after a number of product line changes.
That list is close but not identical. It starts diverging at #11. Shows that Heinz manipulated the lists for a long period, probably.
So it does. Looks like there are about five or six additions, subtractions, and substitutions, which pretty much underscores that it’s a marketing list tailored to fit the products available at the time, rather than a canonical historical varietal list.
I agree it’s a 1930s look, but it could be encountered up to the early 1960s in cookbooks and appliance manuals aimed at housewives. There’s always a tension between the desires to be “just like the one that Mother had” and to be “the latest, up-to-datest”.