Thrifty Acres: Now I've Seen It All!

Hello! While perusing a thrift store's magazine racks yesterday, I gladly bypassed the 21st Century copies of Woman's Day and Family Circle in favor of vintage versions of those publications. I bought four magazines, ranging in age from 1963-1972. I was sure they'd be far more enjoyable to read than the current issues, and I was right!

I was especially rewarded when I flipped through the August 1965 copy of Woman's Day, for there, in a two-page spread, was this:

I never would have thought of putting the words "circus" and "salads" together, but then again, I've never worked at Kraft Foods. 

Of course, being a circus theme, you gotta have clowns, right? So here you go:

"Happy little clowns-full of velvety Kraft Mayonnaise and other good things" - for example, unflavored gelatin, cream cheese, crabmeat and various chopped vegetables for the white clowns. For the red clowns, "Make...your favorite tomato aspic." Both get their shapes from being molded in paper cups. 

For decoration, "Use clown cocktail picks for heads, peas and bits of ripe olives for buttons."

A close-up:

I'd snatch up those clown cocktail picks if I encountered them at a thrift store, but if I ever saw these edible clowns at a dinner table - I'd run the other way! 

Not to be outdone by those gelatin-y clowns, the opposite page features these:

On the left, "Merry-Go-Round Salad has savory Miracle Whip molded in its top!" Hooray, right? "Two-tiered dazzler, worth every minute you spend on it." (I doubt that very much.) The lower level features lemon jello, celery and animal shapes cut from American cheese slices. The top level, as you've already been informed, has Miracle Whip in it - plus unflavored gelatin, lemon juice, horseradish and whipped cream. I think I'll pass on this one too!

Next to the Merry-Go-Round Salad is the "Clown O' Fruits Platter and your own Mix-Two Kraft Dressing blend". The clown's body is a peeled, cut fresh pineapple studded with cherries. The head is a paper cup. 

As for the "Mix-Two" dressing: "equal parts of Roka brand Blue Cheese Dressing and savory Kraft French" - the better to use more Kraft products, of course!

Just for fun, here's what the array of Kraft products featured in the ad looked like in August 1965:

Kind of comforting to see that the Kraft logo still looks the same today. 

If you're wondering about the inclusion of the Italian dressing bottle, I didn't show the recipe for which it was used: "Circus Caesar Salad starring the great Kraft Italian Dressing!" Really, it looked like an average bowl of salad greens, but that's not what the folks at Kraft would want you to believe: "Kraft Italian-the most tantalizing Italian of them all." So not surprisingly, the recipe ends with "...toss until the greens are glistening with exciting flavor." Yeah, right.

And there you have it - no need to go to a Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey show - all you really need is the Circus Salads recipes from Kraft!