Doll Heads, Doll Heads, Clink-y, Clink-y, Doll Heads In Your Cocktail

How To Make Ice Cubes Shaped Like Tiny Baby Heads is really more of a how to make a mold of small toys — molds you can opt to use to make toy-shaped ice cubes. Wouldn’t take much to turn them into popsicles or other frozen treats either. Individual Jell-O moulds. Or not.

Chef Hector Boiardi & The Old Chef Boyardee Plant

Scans from a vintage Chef Boyardee cook booklet titled Famous Italian Dishes, by Chef Hector Boiardi (Through Courtesy of Stop & Shop) with Recipes tested and approved by The Chef Boy-ar-dee Housewife, Lois Nichols.

Along with recipes & biographical info on Boiardi himself, there are illustrations for products which have perished, long ago… Even if you do still find items with this packaging in grandma’s pantry, they’ve perished. Do. Not. Eat.

Also in the booklet, photos of the manufacturing operations at the “modern plant” in Milton, PA.

No date; I believe it’s from the 30s. The whole book is printed in a sepia-toned brown on off-white paper, not black on white.

Cucumber Spread, She Said

A grandma was recently forced to clean out her pantry, and this is some of what lay within… Via Kottke.

Kitsch-Back: What is Kitsch to You?

If you look at your dictionary or Wikipedia, you may find kitsch defined as ‘gaudy, cheap, and tacky.’ This description does not to justice to the international phenomenon we fondly know as kitsch. A word borrowed from the German language, its orginal meaning has it associated with tackiness and trashiness. Yet it is also fresh, funky and fabulous. You can find it all over the world, emboying different media and styles. There is a quirky kind of magic to it, an irrestible charm if you get to know it. What does it mean to you?

Some admirers go for Mexican kitsch. The candy-filled pinatas, the Day of the Dead festivities, the overblown religion paraphernalia and the melodramatic telenovella starlets all scream kitsch, in technicolor! The Japanese are also big supporters of kitsch, with kawaii (cute) youth culture a real movement embodying everything from Hello Kitty to Tamagotchi, Pokemon to karaoke. In some circles kitsch is scorned for being tasteless and cheap, but for those in the know it is as popular as FoxyBingo and Angry Birds. Is there even such a thing as ‘too kitsch’ or ‘too much kitsch’? No! Of course not.

Modern Woman Mondays: Gelatin Edition

After WWII and continuing through the 1960s, an emphasis on kitschy culinary arts kept little women busy in their places: the kitchen. How else do you explain the Joys Of Jell-O?

Perhaps the best thing about the miracle of gelatin based foods was the fact that, other than boiling water, one didn’t ruin their makeup in the heat. No, I don’t think the best thing was food stuff themselves… So bright, yet so wrong. Vegetables? Waldorf Salad? Shrimp?! Even the photos of the desserts make my teeth hurt. …Although that Jell-O and ice cream gum-drop number might be worth it. For more on the miracle of gelatin foods, check out Retro Mimi (my interview with her here) and my Things Your Grandmother Knew blog.

Standard Kitchen Counter Tops In The Late 1960s

Or at least how Standard Brands wanted your counters to look. A photo of all the Standard Brands, Inc. brands, circa 1968, which included Royal “Shake-A Pudd’n (as well as other puddings, baking powder, & cheesecakes) Planter’s peanuts (including Mr. Peanut peanut butter), Fleischmann’s yeast and margarine, Blue Bonnet margarine, Siesta coffee — the oxymoron beverage of choice, Chase & Sanborn coffee, Tender Leaf teas, Hunt Club Burger Bits dog food…

Photo inside Fleischmann’s New Treasury of Yeast Baking: Introducing Rapidmix, The No-Dissolve Method.