Coming in May 2006! NEW BOOK!





Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974

I found them while helping my parents clean out their basement a few years ago. They were neatly arranged in their own plastic file box. Plenty of the dishes seemed normal enough, but as I flipped through them, some of the recipes began to alarm me. And then I found the card for the " Rosy Perfection Salad ."

I fell over. Like I Iaughed so hard I started coughing and I fell back on the floor and I waved the card at my mom, who just rolled her eyes. "Can I please have these? Please?" I begged. "What do you want them for?" she asked. "To cook?" "No," I said. She let me have them. I think they might have been my grandma's, but she never copped to actually buying them. Nobody else did, either.

These cards mystify me. None of them have calorie or nutrition information of any kind, and in some instances it's hard to tell what's dietetic about the recipes at all, except that they're unspeakably grim. And yet also, completely insane. They appear to be from a much kookier era of Weight Watchers. There's a certain serve-it-at- your-next-key-party freakiness to a lot of these dishes.

Dehydrated onion flakes are in almost everything here. Apparently Weight Watchers dieticians depended heavily on dried onion flakes, and pimientos, too.

They also had a prop department that was clearly out of control. Oh, you'll see.

As far as I know, I was never served any of these dishes as a child. I probably would have repressed the memory, anyway.

This feature owes a great spiritual debt to sites like Cate's Garage Sale Finds and especially James Lilek's Gallery of Regrettable Food .