The first TV Dinners began appearing in the mid-1950s, and the Turkey Dinner may have been the first. The turkey had the consistency of papyrus; the mashed potatoes were bland, the dressing turned to goosh, but the peas made outstanding projectiles. We survived the privation younger kids would never know: Cranberry Sauce, added years later, kicked up Swanson’s game a notch. You could dunk the turkey in it to more or less give it some zip.The fried chicken dinners always disappeared from the freezer first. The batter was kidnip (instead of catnip) because it was faintly sweet; the peas this time came with buddies, which made them tolerable, but the mashed potatoes were still disappointing. They tasted like beach sand. The apple/peach combo was a nice notion but they had consistency of banana slugs, whose consistency I do not care to contemplate.I do not understand this cowpoke’s happiness. The one thing you’d think an American TV dinner could do well would be beef. Wrong. This looked like roadsplat and tasted like ketchup, which you could chug anytime out of Mom’s fridge. The fries were an abomination but you ate them first because they were fries. Sort of. The peas were, well, Swanson peas. Boring. Uninspired. Still, they were throwable or, even better, launchable–they traveled at great velocity from your spoon, a kind of dinner-table catapult. Another failed attempt in the World of Beef. The beef tasted like recycled shoe tongues or perhaps the “bully beef” salvaged from the vast British stockpiles left over from the Battle of the Somme (1916). No self-respecting penitentiary would serve a meal this bad. Not even a British one.
The closest thing to success with beef, due largely to the thin brown gravy, which was actually tasty and the only corrective in the Scientific Literature for the mashed potatoes–finally, if you drowned them, they tasted almost good. The gingerbread brownie? The work of a madman.
We never had this one, but any meal with pickled red cabbage gets my hearty approval. Sadly, the photographer who took this shot for the TV Dinner carton appears to have dropped his glass eye into the dessert.
More international genius. The enchilada wasn’t too bad. You could just about stand the refried beans, whose aroma brought to mind molten rubber at the Goodyear Tire Factory, but they improved if you mooshed them together with the rice. Nice chili gravy with Undetermined Meat Objects within. The real disappointments were the two “tamales,” essentially surplus Mexican Navy torpedoes and, as torpedoes sometimes do, they’d settle to the bottom and just stay there. For days.
Took FOREVER to cook, and by the time it was ready, your twelve-year-old self was so famished that its just-out-of-the-oven super-steamed heat burned away the top layers of skin cells on your palate and tongue, which meant that you couldn’t taste anything for several days. But if you had the patience to let it cool a bit, this little gem was Comfort Food Supreme. After a tough day at school, a nice snack to eat during Rocky and Bullwinkle or while watching dreamy girls dance the Frug or the Slauson on a music show called Where the Action Is. The natural order was restored.
A Work in Progress 