12/16/11

Pillsbury Flour - A Quadruple X cooky!

Lots of art from the forties and fifties is viewed by us Future-dwellers with the rose colored glasses of nostalgia.  People drew differently back then, and everyone was naive back then, and nobody ever had sex until 1960. So, lots of what you find in old magazines is great. Then there's this monstrosity.
I'm sure Pillsbury intended us to be drawn right to the girls face when we turn the page. Well, mission accomplished. I nearly jumped out of my skin. This girl is unnerving. What's the secret filling in the cookies for chrissakes? Speed?

She's a terrible piece of art. She's amateurish and primitive, but not in that charming way that so much commercial art from the fifties is. She looks like she was drawn by a simply shitty artist. The sad part is, this person was a professional commercial artist who got paid perfectly good money to do it.  Somewhere there's a talented artist, flipping burgers for eight dollars an hour who would just dip his head in the fryer if he knew how much some hack got paid to paint this hideous troll-girl. Often, the people who make art decisions are, more or less, visually illiterate. Sad but true.

It's hard to tell what this ad is trying to sell. Flour? Mint wafers? Sugar? Sedatives? Well, it's flour they're selling. Trouble is, when you bite into a really good cookie, your first question is not "Wow! What kind of flour is this?" Here, the flour is trying to take credit for the cookie, and the cookie is basically a vehicle for another cookie baked inside of it. The recipe they're promoting  here is called a "Starlight Mint Surprise", which looks to be a chocolate mint cookie baked inside some dough-based cookie with a pecan or walnut on top. It's the Cyrano Debegerac of cookies, and it reminds me of a story about a friend of mine.

This guy I know once entered a robot into a science fair, back in grammar school. He took apart a toy robot, removing the torso, leaving only the motorized legs. He placed a coffee can over the top of it and called it a robot. The result was a pair of walking robot legs under a coffee can. You could summarize his invention this way: "Using  this robot and this coffee can, I can build a robot!" We find this endlessly funny to this day. I hope he doesn't mind that I told this story.

This is how the Pillsbury Starlight Mint Surprise seems to me. You've already got a perfectly good cookie. Sticking that inside a second cookie doesn't mean you invented a new cookie. Take away the chocolate mint wafer and what have you got? An empty coffee can.



And "cookie" is spelled with an I and E. What's a "cooky"? Pillsbury seems to get the plural spelling right. What's with these people?

There's a piece of trivia to discover. What do the Xs mean on the bag of flour? The answer is elusive (meaning it doesn't appear on the first page of Google search results). This one seems plausible. It pertains to confectioner's sugar, but could it also apply to flour? I bet it does...

"The Xs on the package of confectioners’ sugar indicates how finely it has been ground. Four X sugar is slightly finer than 3 x sugar, but the two different kinds can be sued interchangeably in the same recipe."


So, it's nothing to do with the sexiness of the flour... not that a finely ground flour can't be sexy. Maybe you're into that. That's fine. I don't know. Get off my back.




2 comments:

Fil said...

The blushing (?) cheeks remind me of when I was growing up, there were kids that used to have runaway chapped lips due to obsessive-compulsive licking. Outrageous.

PhilAreGo@gmail.com said...

Hopefully, the lips were self-licked. If not, I'd either be creeped out or a little jealous of your childhood. I'd need to see photos of the lip-lickers to be sure.

[-Mgmt.]

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