The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from the 1970s
Several years ago, while dutifully helping clean out her parents' basement, Wendy McClure struck comic gold when she discovered an intact and well-preserved collection of Weight Watchers Recipe Cards from 1974: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. I laughed 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.What McClure unearthed were astonishingly grim, unintentionally hilarious recipe cards (sample dishes: Aspic-Glazed Lamb Loaf and Snappy Mackerel Casserole) containing no nutritional information but illustrated with eerie photos clearly staged by a props department not averse to self-medicating. Compelled to share her discovery with the world, McClure posted the cards on a website, framing each with her own side-splitting and appropriately warped comments.The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan--a titled borrowed from one of the myriad improbably named recipes contained within--unleashes the entire god-awful collection. No review can quite capture the horrors of the recipe cards or the genius of McClure's riotous quips. Suffice to say these are milk-through-the-nose, tears-down-the-cheeks funny and a striking reminder of just how bent the 1970s were. Worth the price for the Molded Asparagus Salad and the Stuffed Apples Ganges cards alone.--Kim Hughes