The Middle-Class Soul Food of the ‘50s Returns

Forget chocolate truffles and Scotch salmon. When I am hungry and needy, I want my mother’s icebox cake.

Of course, it was not exactly my mother’s. You might say it was Nabisco’s.

To make it, she bought a package of dark-chocolate wafers. She stuck them together with whipped cream, spread more cream over the top and sprinkled on a lot of chocolate-wafer crumbs. When the cake had cooled in the icebox, she cut it on the diagonal into zebra-striped slices of black biscuit and white cream. Delicious.

I am not alone in my nostalgia for the unfashionable dishes made with processed foods that were popular in the 1950s. Many of my friends admit to similar passions: if not for icebox cake, then for California dip; if not for tuna noodle casserole, then for green beans and canned onion rings baked in Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.

“People desperately want to eat something familiar,” said Jane Stern, co-author with her husband Michael of “Square Meals” (Knopf). “Even though we’re now grand and sophisticated, it’s hard to feel cozy about Famous Young Chefs, ditsy portions and squid pasta. In an age of anxiety, the middle-class soul food we grew up with reminds us of safer times.”

‘Vernacular Cooking’

The style that the Sterns call “vernacular cooking” or “populist cooking” or “things made from other things” blossomed from the end of World War II until the 1960s.

A lot of ‘50s food was good, better than we are willing to admit in this decade of fresh goat cheese, baby vegetables and undercooked fowl (One of the hallmarks of a ‘50s casserole is that even though all the ingredients are precooked, it is still baked in a 350-degree oven for an hour).

As a style, populist cooking has been fiercely in and out of favor. At first, everyone loved it. Such culinary sophisticates as James Beard included brand names in cookbooks and invented new ways for food corporations to use their products. In the ‘50s, Beard worked for Pillsbury, Nestle and Green Giant, said his biographer Evan Jones, and was the one responsible for adding butter sauce to vegetables-in-a-pouch.

But when food fashion turned away from hamburger pies and cake-mix cakes, home cooks remained faithful. You have only to look at the hundreds of dishes made with Bisquick and Jell-O in spiral-bound charity cookbooks to see how faithful they are.

“Are people still cooking this way?” Stern asked. “You bet they are. It really tickles me that Michael and I are credited with bringing back a style, when in 99% of the country, it simply never went away.”

Now the fashionable food world is paying attention again. Fifties food is coming back, along with ‘50s harlequin glasses, pedal pushers, kidney-shaped coffee tables and linoleum.

A Time of Optimism

The ‘50s were certainly a time of optimism. The war, which introduced GIs to croissants and pizza, also convinced them that there was no place like home. The women who had been filling in for them at work covered their typewriters, put down their riveting guns and went back to the kitchen. The birthrate went up. The move to the suburbs began.

Nothing, it seems, could be less like our own decade of two-career families, workaholics and restaurant mania. But that is just why the nostalgia makes sense.

A recipe does more than tell us how to cook: It also communicates a set of values. The nostalgia we feel for English-muffin pizza and Ginger-Ale salad echoes our nostalgia for what seems a simpler time: for Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, Beaver, Dobie Gillis and the Honeymooners; for a time before technology got out of hand, when Mom was in the kitchen and all was right with the world.

Maybe we are not so different from the people of the ‘50s as we think. We are still in love with technology, although now our toys are microwave ovens instead of home freezers.

We still care about speed and convenience. How much difference is there between 1988’s frozen dinner and 1955’s canned sausage, corn, lima bean and cheese-soup casserole?

Catchword Is ‘Grazing’

We still like portable and snack foods. Much of ‘50s food was designed to be eaten on a patio or while watching Milton Berle on the new television set. Thirty years later, the catchword is grazing, and we are eating while walking on the street or sitting in front of the VCR.

And if predictions are right, we are also going to be spending more time at home. Kraft Inc. does a study of consumer trends every year. What it found this year, said Velveeta spokeswoman Kim Burson, is that we are not going to restaurants as much as we did. We are getting married, having babies and enjoying homebound activities such as watching the VCR.

We are moving to the suburbs. We are buying houses. If we have an old house, we are not trading up but renovating it ourselves. On our days off, we are looking for activities to do with the whole family, such as gardening, bike-riding and walking.

Sound familiar?