“As soon as a homemaker would try one of these products, she would look on the back of the box to see how to do it,” Shapiro says. “If the recipe appealed to her, it went into her recipe folder and started showing up at potlucks and church suppers, and then it started showing up in community cookbooks or charitable cookbooks. It became American cooking.”Walking down the aisles of the new grocery store in my neighborhood, I checked the backs of products that have lined shelves for decades. Many of the recipes were still there, in some form. Bisquick had a photo of its Strawberry Shortcake (though the recipe wasn’t printed), and the instructions for Chex Party Mix were on the Wheat Chex Box. Libby’s still shares its pumpkin pie recipe (how could it not?), and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup featured a Green Bean Casserole recipe. And, of course, a package of Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels tells you how to make chocolate chip cookies."When [my great-grandmoter] passed away, family members were like, ‘What was her pumpkin pie recipe?’ For a while no one knew what it was because it wasn’t written on those index cards. I was like, ‘It’s not on the index cards, it’s on a can.’”
That famous chocolate chip cookie recipe peeks out from the underside of a package of Nestle chocolate chips. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
These dishes share the characteristics of being easy, quick, and appealing to the widest common denominator’s palette. Very sweet, very salty, not fussy. “That’s the other great claim on popularity that a lot of this stuff has,” Shapiro says. “They’ll call it a main course or salad, but it’s totally sweet and clearly just another version of dessert, which is the main thing Americans want to eat.”In the way Blue Apron can’t exactly be considered homemade, the idea of combining cheese and Bisquick and ground beef to make an Impossibly Easy Cheeseburger Pie isn’t really homemade, either. And yet these halfway homemade dishes have history, and they evoke personal memories for each of us.
Velveeta por vida. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images