Thanksgiving Feed - Arrow Creme de Menthe (1950)

Desert time and what's better than a desert with a little kick? One that has a little kick and ice cream!

Thanksgiving Feed - Sealtest Ice Cream

Here's another look from Sealtest. We've seen 'rip-roarin' cowboy Western Almond and now we're going for New York and Tiffany's. Today we would call this a "super premium" ice cream, but back in the 50's it was "Prestige". For me, Sealtest was a dinner table regular, it was a discount brand and showed up year-round, usually in Neapolitan. But, after Thanksgiving dinner, it wasn't unusual to have a scoop of it on top of a warm slice of pumpkin pie.

Thanksgiving Feed - Sealtest Ice Cream (1955)

Love the 50's imagery in this Sealtest two-page ad - cowboys, brands, and lassos make me long for family dinners at Bonanza or Ponderosa, I just need Dennis the Menace and the look's complete. Western Almond is a new flavor for me, though and apparently it was to everyone in '55. A close inspection of the carton gives no evidence of what the flavor is - aside from it's almond and, apparently, western.

Howard Johnson (1955)

Ah, HoJo's! I remember seeing the orange roof of Howard Johnson's from the backseat of my dad's Ford as we were bound for somewhere else. For some reason I always imagined that Howard Johnson's was a hotel, that there was a restaurant in the front and rooms somewhere in the back. Don't know why, nobody ever told me there were, it was just one of those things I assumed because we never went there. It wasn't until I started doing research for this blog post that I found I was right in my childhood assumption. Wikipedia describes HoJo as "a chain of hotels, motels, and restaurants located primarily throughout the United States and Canada..." Funny how instincts work sometimes.

Wollaston, Massachusetts resident Howard Johnson started the business back in 1925 with $2000 and an eye toward improving the profitability of the soda fountain he owned. He started by creating a new, high butter fat ice cream recipe which he parlayed into a line of 28 flavors, his trademark. Johnson started out selling ice cream, fries, and hot dogs from stands up and down the Massachusetts shoreline and eventually opened his first true restaurant in Quincy Square's Granite Trust Building in 1929. Apparently this establishment wasn't the highway-side, orange roof, that you might think of nowadays. A History of Howard Johnson's: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon describes it as "an elegantly appointed restaurant that served traditional New England fare throughout the day, with daily specials that attracted business people at lunchtime, diners in the evening as well as families." HoJo's might have stayed a Massachusetts thing if not for a famous playwright and a clique of prudish Bostonians with political pull.

The same year the Quincy HoJo opened, the mayor of Boston and the New England Ward and Watch Society banned Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude from being produced in Boston. The Theater Guild moved the production to the Quincy Theater directly opposite the restaurant. If O'Neill's play is known for anything, it is it's remarkable length of five hours, so long as to include a scheduled dinner break during which theatergoers walked over to Howard Johnson's for $1 dinner plate specials.

With the success of his Quincy venture and word of mouth being provided by influential Boston patrons, Johnson soon became one of the first businessmen to successfully franchise his name. Thus, Howard Johnson became daddy to the modern chain restaurant. Sometime after 1929 came the characteristic orange roof with its dormer and cupola.

The ad reminds me of some of the hotel postcards you see at antique stores from time to time. Fifties-era conformists finding their way inside or departing after tanking-up on fried clams, finned cars parked in the lot, an indeterminate landscape seemingly devoid of evidence of human habitation stretching off to the horizon. Yes, you're on the road and you've arrived at HoJo's, god knows what else is out there so you better enjoy hospitality while you can. In '55 when this ad ran in Life Magazine there were only 500 Howard Johnson's nationwide, by the mid-seventies there'd be over a thousand.

I like the "grilled-in-butter frankfurter", okay I actually just like the fact they call it a "frankfurter" instead of a hot dog. It makes me thing Howard had a thing about the term "hot dog". I also like the bullet bra ice cream scoop. Ice cream (among other things) shouldn't come in a shape that could put an eye out. It's just wrong.

The Funnies - The Marshmallow Nut Kind

Diced Cream!

Ah, the 50s brought us so many unnaturally colored and shaped foods. Since we're rapidly approaching the first holiday of the summer, what better food to focus on than ice cream? Wait, that's diced cream. The right angles make it 35% richer, if you doubt it just consult your rich-o-meter!

Diced Cream was a convenience food, what we call single-serve packages of ice cream. It was manufactured by Diced Cream of America Company and in 1955 the company was dragged into the 9th Circuit Court to face charges of price fixing. That's right, I said ice cream price fixing. According to the case records:

"Plaintiffs brought fifteen separate actions against defendants under § 4 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C.A. § 15, claiming violations of the federal anti-trust laws. The basic claim was that each plaintiff who is an independent ice cream manufacturer or distributor in the Los Angeles area sustained injury when Arden Farms Co., which operates in the manufacture and distribution of dairy products in the same area, lowered its prices upon ice cream in this area alone. Prices on all of its ice cream products were reduced with the exception of prices upon "diced" ice cream manufactured by Arden exclusively and just being introduced on the market. The gist of the complaint was that Arden operated in the northwest states and in Arizona and that discrimination was proved because the price level upon like products in these states was not made to conform to the Los Angeles price level."

The world of frozen novelties is a tough one and those who can't compete fall to the back of the Kelvinator, falling prey to freezer burn. Diced Cream has disappeared from the American grocery scene, leaving only stale court records and overly optimistic advertisements to prove it existed. So long, square ice-cream-flavored-food-product. We hardly knew ye.

The Full Strawberry Moon

June is the time of the Full Strawberry Moon, named by Native Americans for the ripening strawberries they collected during this time. In Europe, where strawberries were unknown, June’s full moon was given the monikers the Full Rose Moon and the Full Mead Moon. Funny thing that all the names of June’s full moon would make a wonderful romantic interlude, isn’t it? I’m imagining a little fresh strawberry ice cream with candied rose petals and a flute of mead under the full moon.