for those that never have seen these they take old cookbooks,magaizene recipies company made recipies subscription cooking cards and the like from 100 years or so and attempt to make and eat them often with harlious results …
some only do certain periods like this http://www.midcenturymenu.com/
its one of the best and the chick looks like a wildcat in pearls heh
this one is funny but she goes off on weird tangents when cooking and substitutes things more than I like but she cooked a whoie card collection from 1972 https://dinnerisserved1972.com
theres tons more and they all know or affiliate with each other and are of varying qualities so you can click on links for days …
I wondered if anyone here had one of their own to recommend …
I used to follow some of them. I liked the one where the blogger made the recipes mentioned on Madmen. I can’t seem to find the right one now.
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/
No recipes if memory serves just pictures and commentary.
The only purpose of those is to help remind people how far food has come in the U.S. in even the last 20 years. I was born in the 70’s and there were still plenty of older ladies around that made monstrosities like those including my own grandmother. I loved my grandmother more than most anyone in the world but she could not cook unlike almost every other grandmother that people fondly remember. She had the basic cooking skills down but her recipes came from those god-awful mid-century cookbooks and there isn’t anyone that can make some of them attractive or palatable.
I am all for nostalgia in general but not when it comes to mid-century inspired food. Like other atrocities associated with the period, it is something that should be remembered but never repeated.
I have had food prepared from faithful recipes from much earlier periods as well ranging from the early 1900’s to the 1600’s. Some of it is fine (they knew how to BBQ and make Louisiana-French food quite well even centuries ago for example) but most of it was either bland or just plain bad too. Old New England food (outside of seafood) will bore you to death if it doesn’t kill you from molasses poisoning first. Old Midwestern recipes were even worse.
I think the lesson to learn from such demonstrations is that we should be really thankful for the quality and breadth of food available almost everywhere in the U.S. today. That wasn’t true for the vast majority of American history in most places.