The 1950’s Kitchen: Serve It Quick! 

Author: Peggy Epstein

1950’s housewives, wearing full-skirted pastel cotton dresses, showed up in magazine and television ads praising their beautiful, modern kitchens. Pink stoves replaced white ones, dishwashers had begun to make their way into many kitchens, and lots of new kitchen gadgets like electric skillets were introduced. (General Electric offered a 10” size in turquoise for only $14.95.) But as much as they may have loved those kitchens, housewives—while wanting to make sure their families were well fed—wanted to do prepare those meals with space-age speed.

When Betty Furness, the famous TV spokeswoman, opened that refrigerator door and said, “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse,” you can be sure that many women across America opened instead their freezer doors and found the perfect answer to feed a hungry, television-addicted family: the TV dinner. Who could resist a metal tray neatly divided into sections containing a main dish (fried chicken or Salisbury steak, for example), mashed potatoes or perhaps cornbread stuffing, and peas—all for under a dollar!

And all the modern housewife had to do was to place the dinner in the oven and wait.

The invention of the TV dinner is attributed to a man by the name of Gary Thomas. His 1954 invention of the Swanson TV dinner (as a response to a lot of leftover turkey) resulted in a sale of 10 million dinners in that year alone. Many of these dinners went directly from supermarket to stove as home freezers were not all that common.

And if you were serving your family TV dinners, no need to set the dining room table. Simply set up TV trays, collapsible metal legs with a tray that attached to the top. Sit down on the sofa with your individual table in front of you, peel the foil off the top of your TV dinner, tune in your favorite show, and that was that.

Lots of other markets rushed to join the meals-in-a-rush movement. Frozen foods of all sorts began to appear in supermarkets, and by the mid-1950’s, when more Americans had access to freezer space, it was reported that nearly 64% of all retail grocery stores had frozen food “cabinets” as they were called.

Other quick approaches to the evening meal included instant dinners in a box such as Chef Boy-ar-dee’s complete spaghetti dinners that included “all the fixings.” Their ad pitched “slow-simmered sauce blends ripe tomatoes, tender mushrooms, and savory spices according to an authentic Italian recipe.” All this for only “pennies a serving.”

Speedy side dishes included Minute Rice and Rice-a-Roni, both first introduced in the 1950’s. Lightening strikes a can of Niblets corn in a 1956 magazine ad: “Quick-cooked corn is here,” we learn. “It took a radically different canning method to do it. The corn now cooks in heat and pressure, under split-second automatic control. Zip. And it’s done.”

Dessert was a snap as well. In the 1950’s, Jell-o introduced its instant pudding, a labor-saving dessert that cut out all the time wasted on cooking and stirring. Or the modern housewife might have chosen to serve Betty Crocker’s “Answer Cake.” A white cake mix, fudge frosting, and even a little tin foil pan—all in one box—was advertised with the slogan “Just look at how much fun you can have!”

Special treats for any meal could be made from Bisquick, the baking mix whose name even includes the word “quick.” Betty Crocker says, “There’s time for the lovely caramel-y touches because you start so far ahead.”

Opportunities for breakfast and lunch shortcuts abounded in the 50’s as well. Breakfast cereals were marketed in ferocious competition to kids; cereal with milk was touted as both an easy and a complete breakfast. Kellogg came up with Corn Pops, Frosted Flakes, and Honey Smacks in the early part of the decade, adding Special K “the first high protein cereal fortified with seven vitamins and iron” in 1955.

And what better to go with that cereal than juice—well, not exactly juice. The breakfast drink, Tang, from General Foods was formulated in 1957 and first marketed in powdered form in 1959. Mixed with water, the ads told us Tang “tastes so good and cold. And it gives you more vitamin C than orange juice.”

And for the adults, “instant” coffee, an innovation of the 50’s, was just the ticket. Chase & Sanborn offers 1956 readers of Life a testimonial from Mrs. Henry L. Brown of Great Notch, New Jersey, who says, “To have this husband of mine O.K. my instant coffee is a minor miracle.” Another housewife says, “So quick and simple, too.”

For packing lunches, Moms could count on easy-to-fix sandwiches made from Kraft’s new De Luxe process cheese slices or the popular Cheese Whiz, both products introduced in the early fifties. Swift introduced three “convenient new spreads” in 1956: tasty sandwich spread, braunsweiger liver sausage, and ham salad spread.

Probably the invention that most helped housewives get out of the kitchen in the fifties, however, was something not even kept in that room. In 1951, George Stephen invented the original Weber Kettle Grill, and the tradition of supper on the patio with burgers cooked on the grill took off.
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Peggy Epstein is a retired English teacher and a free-lance writer. Her book "Great Ideas for Grandkids" was published last year by McGraw-Hill. Her articles have appeared in the Kansas City Star, College Bound, Footsteps, Grit, Teaching Tolerance, and others.