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(More customer reviews)Was vintage food advertising really this garish? Yes it was, according to Karel Ann Marling in her book `As Seen On TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s', advertisers deliberately made food garish and bright and forced a contrast between objects and backgrounds. For instance, a pink and white cake would be placed on a green satin tablecloth. There are plenty of examples like this in `Kitchen Kitsch', either paintings (a chance for commercial artist to use even brighter colors) or photographs.
The majority of the illustrations come from the forties and fifties. My favorites are the paintings of jello, turned out from a mould, streamlined with highlights and looking just like Emerald City from the movie, `The Wizard of Oz'. Not only pictures of food but recipe book covers, can and box labels, period ads and more. All the pictures are in color and as this is a Taschen `Icon' book there is no text or information about the pictures but editor Jim Heimann has created a fun book about yesteryears grub.
If you have the stomach for it have a look at `The Gallery of Regrettable Food' by James Lileks. His book has very similar pictures but he uses them to write some very funny and biting text about food fads of the fifties and the book is a treat to look at as well.
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What began as a simple idea--giving away free brouchures with illustrations and recipes to advertise food and food brands--became so popular by the mid-20th century that recipe brochures, replete with colorful images of ornate dishes, were fixtures in every housewife's kitchen across America. This book brings together the best--and most unbelievably kitschy--images from a broad selection of such brochures.
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