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The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from the 1970s | 
 enlarge | Author: Wendy Mcclure
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $1.90
You Save: $11.05 (85%)
New (20) Used (17) from $0.86
Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 45460
Media: Paperback
Pages: 128
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.9 x 0.4
ISBN: 159448208X
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.120973
EAN: 9781594482083
ASIN: 159448208X
Publication Date: May 2, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Paperback, minor shelf wear. Ships promptly w/notification emailed after shipping.
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
A collection of the notorious retro Weight Watchers recipe cards in all their foul, full-color glory.
In the words of Wendy McClure, author of I'm Not the New Me, blog trailblazer, internet favorite, and fearless discoverer:
I found them while helping my parents clean out their basement. 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 Rosy Perfection Salad.
I fell over. I mean I Iaughed 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...
And here they are: the disturbing dishes made famous on the Internet and many more. From Fish Balls to Celery Logs to Caucasian Shashlik to Frankfurter Spectacular in all their scary goodness. Mmmmm, Shashlik...
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Health Warning! December 18, 2008
Charles Desmarais (New York)
Made the mistake of reading this alone. Laughed so hard I couldn't catch my breath. I got a little panicked. I strongly suggest reading only when someone is nearby, listening for choking sounds.
Hilarious August 16, 2008
Lisa B. (PA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was on the clearance table at the book store so I bought it for fun and I laughed out loud reading it. The one about the frozen cheese log was hilarious. Thanks for making me laugh Wendy.
Too funny to read quietly. May 4, 2008
Papi Crabtree (Barrow, AK)
This book is hilarious. It's also hilarious that anyone really ate the meals in this book. People had sterner stomachs in the old days, I guess! I snorted and laughed out loud over several of the entries. It's a fun book, and very funny.
Mackerelease this March 5, 2008
Andrew Wiseman (NYC, USA)
this is some funny stuff and I have no idea how people ate anything back in the 70's if this is the food cook books were pushing on us
 Juvenile humour, if that's what you like February 26, 2008
Jenny
2 out of 10 found this review helpful
I didn't have high expectations of this book, but at $4.99, I figured it would make a fun addition to my library of vintage cookbooks and culinary history.
The pictures are fun, but any true student of cooking, eating and entertaining will be disappointed to find that only the fronts of the cards are reprinted, so there's no opportunity to review the actual recipes. They're also all from Weight Watchers - with no apparent reference to paying that organization for use of their copyrighted material - rather than a true exploration of the era and the genre.
But the worst thing is the writing. If you like that kind of humour, I guess you also like what's written on bathroom walls of high schools, because that's about as intelligent as it gets. I guess some people think that using the f-word and the s-word makes you funny, but like spices, if you don't know how to use them effectively, it just tastes bad. There are also numerous references to taking drugs - reminds me of the kids in college who thought talking about drugs made them cool.
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