Microwave Miracles from Sears
Sears, Roebuck and Company
1974
Submitter: The smell of this book makes me think someone tried some of those fish soup recipes back in 1974. Unless that is what the 70’s smelled like?
Holly: Oh good, fish in the microwave. Your coworkers will love you when you heat up your leftovers for lunch.
Yes, it’s dated… but I really want that fish soup tureen. It’s fabulous!
I have still not ever gotten an answer as to why the food colors in photographs looked so weird back then. It’s like they’d not yet invented primary colors, particularly bright green, or everything was imbued with flourescent orange. Anyway, that soup on the cover is frightening–“Blood Bath for Invertebrates.”
It might just be pigment degradation.
I was in high school in 1974. I don’t remember the craze for decorating the table with frozen blocks of veggies.
Not something to see when you have just cooked dinner!
That tureen is way older than the book — probably antique even then.
The 70’s did NOT smell like fish. Fish was a weird stinky foreign thing unless you lived on a coast. The 70’s smelled like polyester, musk for men, and Jean Nate.
If it’s something that gets overcooked quickly, the microwave (even the low-power ones of the 70s) is not a good idea. And people in the 70s had working noses and wouldn’t stink up their microwaves with fish. Not more than once, anyway.
I don’t get what the sweet sauces have to do with the bricks of frozen veggies pictured next to them.
The thing about microwave cookbooks is that microwaves are much more powerful now than they were in the 70s. If you cooked fish using a recipe tested for a 500-watt microwave using a modern 1200-watt microwave, you’d probably end up with fish jerky.
And don’t those frozen veggie bricks look delicious?
I’m willing to give fish jerky a try.
I have never seen frozen food set upright on pedestals before! But somehow, it does not make the recipes any more appealing.
Some sort of cult that worships Clarence Birdseye?
The photographer smoking those funny cigarettes?
I live in Nova Scotia, Canada. I can confirm that the 70s did indeed smell very fishy. I have never liked it, and microwaving fish is a crime against humanity unless it’s canned tuna.
As a lover of vintage – I WANT THAT TUREEN!
On another note, I’ve never understood why you’d make a soup with the clams and/or oysters still in the shell. Looks like the shrimp haven’t been peeled either. That would just make the whole thing super messy to eat.
I think leaving them in the shell is customary for dishes such as cioppino or bouillabaise. This looks to have a tomato-based broth, so it might be a version of cioppino.
Those bricks of peas, asparagus!, and broccoli are giving me dual vibes of the Soviet Union and interwar Germany’s bales of paper money.