It is a dish hard to make sense of: a shimmering vermilion ring of canned tomato sauce, held motionless by gelatin, concealing a coeur caché of canned asparagus and artichoke hearts, the hole at its middle filled to bulging with mayonnaise and sour cream. Called ‘‘Tangy Tomato Aspic,’’ the dish dates from the atomic age, the decades after the bomb was dropped, the war won and a clean, bright American outlook born. It was the age of technocratic make-believe and the early days of the anthropocene. Gastronomically, it was an age that today — from a perspective admiring of the natural and authentic — looks shockingly artificial.

Nowhere is the era’s ethos and aesthetic better represented than in the 1971 Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library. On 648 cards, everything I’ve ever found intriguing about this segment of American culinary life is on display. There is a card for Fonduloha (pineapple, turkey, mayonnaise, curry, peanuts, coconut and canned mandarins, put back into a pineapple shell) and another for Cherry Pineapple Bologna (instant mashed potatoes, bologna glazed with crushed pineapple and maraschino cherry, dyed extra red with food coloring). There is Chicken Caruso, Round Steak ’n Ravioli, Crusty Salmon Shortcakes. There is the enigmatic Party Sandwich Loaf and the even more enigmatic Green Bean Bunwiches.

In their exuberant imagery — paid homage in these delirious tableaus, newly made by the Italian artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari — the cards’ styling and staging are half the experience, by turns (and sometimes all at once) lurid, exotic, carnival-like and vulgar. In a thousand ways, specific and general, this collection comes across as the precise opposite of what we like, or think we like, to eat today. The opposition is so clear that we are left to wonder: What on earth was going on?