I have recipe books from that era and most of them are either excellent and timeless learning resources, or dubious cookbooks with characters that look like they want to poison me. No in between.

Okay what the hell is "fw it"

fw it = fuck with it

aka he wouldn't even try it

That kinda looks good to me. I would try it.

Thank you, definitely showing my age there!

look closer and you will see The mold.

Ok now what the hell is a trad girl?

Trad - traditional

The neoconservative ideal of a girl that is "wife material": chaste, submissive, adhering to old-fashioned feminine canons, sexist... Summarised under the umbrella term of "trad[itional]".

Trad = traditional = usually code for conservative white Christian 50s gender roles, as sold to zoomers by social media influencers.

I bet Lemmy would love some snapshots!

That looks like Chinese prison food.

And why is she serving mold?

Good on OP. "Traditional Girl" is stupid. Most women in history were in tribes and ... well, I am not certain what they did. Camp fire cooking and berry picking. Some hunting. Not a lot of vacuuming or microwaving.

It's molded tuna, as in she used a mold to shape pureed tuna like the shape of a fish, which is what I assume was a popular dish in the 1950s when gelatin was a sign of wealth due to requiring refrigeration to set.

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying that for me

The best are the ones that have actual from scratch recipes, none of this "1 container (no actual measurement) of this premade thing" bullshit

Greatest Gen grandma would have cooked shit like that but she wasn't daring enough. Seriously.

"I put an extra 1/16th teaspoon of paprika to jazz it up!"

I'd be an inch taller if I could have stomached her cooking as a kid. Dad (grandad) was too polite to say anything. "What a great meal!"

Paprika...that was on Dad's side of the kitchen. Mom only had celery salt and thyme, and I think her 2 ounce bottle of thyme lasted my entire childhood. Everything tasted like Campbell's Cream of Mushroom.