Cookin’ with Cans of Soup

~ Laura

I have a terrible sore throat today, so I’m amusing myself by uploading the stacks of used books to my Etsy shop. My favorite of the day has to be two 1969 cookbooks written by Campbell Soup. Check out the questionable food choices in the 1960s. 

Here’s a recipe for Layered Spaghetti With Meatballs. It involves frozen broccoli, a can of Franco-American spaghetti with meatball, garlic powder, and cheddar cheese. You don’t actually even need to boil the pasta. Wow!

I love the lurid red colors in the artwork.

And I know you want to try the molded cucumber and olive salad. Or the peachy bean bake. Or the creamed brunch beef.

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Published by Laura

28 thoughts on “Cookin’ with Cans of Soup”

  1. Given my age and where I was raised, I’ve always considered myself lucky not to have been fed anything in the casserole line as a kid. We’d go to pot lucks and there would be all this stuff there. And people would eat it.

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    1. Are you kidding me? You’re strongly implying that you saw all the hot dishes, *never tried them*, and rejected them outright. No chicken divan? No corn casserole, no tuna bake, enchilada hot dish? You, my friend, are missing out.

      Be aware that the truly great recipes from this era are in church cookbooks, not in the highly suspect cookbooks created by the manufacturers. I have dozens of these church cookbooks and they still do me proud, especially when it comes to Christmas cookies.

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      1. I have a jello cookbook published by a St Paul’s Lutheran church in the 1960s. One of my favorites is a “jambalaya” recipe using lemon jello. My mother has an extensive collection of Lutheran cookbooks spanning decades, and most of the food is pretty good, if a bit on the bland side. Cream of mushroom soup makes an appearance, but most of the stuff is made from scratch. She also has a “What would Luther eat” cookbook, and 90% of the recipes are for beer soup.

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  2. In excuse for the pictures, the colors are an artifact of film/color printing of the time. I don’t have any excuses for the food, though I kind of miss the casseroles, I think there’s absolutely no justification for the love of molded food (except for fruit in jello, and that’s purely for the visual appeal).

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    2. Cherry jello with strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries is infinitely improved. There may be better uses for berries, but fruit in jello isn’t just decorative.

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      1. It’s the jello that’s decorative. The fruit is good by itself, and I’ve never thought the jello added anything except visual appeal. But I do think it looks pretty, like stained glass.

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      2. Ah ok. I would agree with you there. Though probably fruit cocktail and jello evolved in a symbiotic relationship.

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      3. “Though probably fruit cocktail and jello evolved in a symbiotic relationship.”

        Funny!

        Any thoughts on that weird candied fruit that they use for cheap fruitcake? Why not just use gummy bears and be done with it?

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    3. And food photography style has changed significantly too to natural light and lots of moodiness. The stylized and almost illustration-ish look from the 60’s-80’s looks very fake now.

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  3. My mum owns/owned these. The green bean casserole in the second from the bottom is our traditional Thanksgiving casserole — I remade it one year with fresh green beans, homemade mushroom sauce, and homemade onion rings and her verdict was it wasn’t as good. Now I make it just for my mum and dad. My kids won’t eat it.

    We also ate the frozen broccoli casserole about twice a month, in part because you didn’t have to boil the spaghetti.

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  4. I think you all are missing the point. This food was consumed in an era of cocktails; you couldn’t taste any of it after you’d had 3 martinis or old-fashioneds, so taste was irrelevant, but appearance was everything.

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  5. I own the official jello cookbook, and what strikes me is how time consuming many of the recipes are. I feel like if I’m going to spend 10 hours making a cake (estimated time for a rainbow layer jello cake), I might as well make something really delicious. Somehow these recipes were trying to get women had and were willing to spend lots of time cooking to use packaged foods.

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  7. I’m more worried about the toxic chemicals that most of that “food” likely contained. We have two kids on the spectrum and part of me always wondered if it’s because we mostly ate crap when I was growing up — Hostess Ho Ho’s, Ding Dongs, spaghetti-o’s, marshmallow fluff, Tang, etc. You hear now that a lot of those foods contained carcinogens, petroleum by-products, red dye number 2, saccharin, etc. (America’s love affair with industrial food. Yes, we actually ate that cheese that you spray out of the can. Remember that?)

    I wonder if anybody’s actually looked at whether eating all that crap could have any long-range effects on your body, including reproductive stuff. Maybe it’s why we all struggle with obesity now.

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    1. My grandmother used to sprinkle Tang on our oatmeal, thinking that would make it more tasty/appealing. Really just made it taste like citrus-flavored sand had somehow gotten mixed in. Vomitous. I always think of that when I read articles that say, “Don’t eat food your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.”

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      1. Wow.

        My paternal grandmother likewise was a treasure trove of questionable food choices. She considered frosting a standard condiment and left it on the table permanently next to the salt/pepper/butter. This was to use on cinnamon rolls, available in abundance at any time of day.
        Thank god my nuclear family got all its food behaviors from my mother’s side!

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      2. Wouldn’t frosting go bad if you left it out on the table all the time? Was it canned frosting or homemade?

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    2. Back in the day a friend had an “American Cheese Party” where we had grilled cheese made with processed cheese slices and Wonder bread, cheese strings, cheese in a can, Velveeta, etc.

      We were a little quirky.

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  8. You should check out cooking.nytimes.com. It’s amazing. There’s also a free iPad app. I may not buy another cookbook. Although library book sales are always tempting.

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  9. The Betty Crocker cookbook (same red cover) I was given at the end of high school had a recipe that called for canned potatoes. My husband couldn’t believe it. We were on a kibbutz that grew potatoes. Tons of potatoes.

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