20 Party Foods That Were Everywhere In The 1950s

In 1952, Lipton introduced its dry onion soup mix. Two years later, a nameless homemaker in Los Angeles mixed it with sour cream, and the concoction was dubbed California Dip. One accidental party dip later, Lipton knew a good thing when it tasted one. In 1955, Lipton pushed it on TV. By 1958, the recipe was on soup boxes. Lipton popularized it, but it didn’t invent it.

A 1944 Minneapolis columnist named Virginia Safford, who had compiled a cookbook called Food of My Friends, credited the earliest printed recipe for a nut-crusted cream cheese ball to a Minnesota hostess named Mrs. Selmer E. Ellertson. Ellertson invented it; Safford published it. But it wasn’t until the ’50s that its popularity took off thanks to a neat trick. The ball could be rolled and refrigerated a few days ahead of time—one less thing to make while guests were already on their way.

Americans of the postwar era loved everything Scandinavian, including its food, and Swedish meatballs, kottbullar, became a hit on cocktail tables. Cooks mixed their ground beef and pork with nutmeg and allspice, then skewered them, smothered them in sour cream or brown gravy, and presented them on tabletop chafing dishes, small serving dishes designed to keep food warm. The iconic combination of grape jelly and chili sauce wasn’t introduced until 1967, when a cookbook finally included it. In the 1950s, there was no jelly in sight.

In the early 1950s, NBC’s drama series Kraft Television Theatre, which was sponsored by Kraft, had live cooking segments. In one episode, the show featured a dip using canned minced clams, cream cheese, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice. New York grocery stores reportedly sold out of canned clams within 24 hours of the broadcast. Talk about a successful product placement. While singer Perry Como—often wrongly credited with popularizing the dip on his own TV show—may be the name people associate with it, his own Kraft-sponsored variety program did not premiere until late 1959.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Swiss Cheese Union was peddling fondue, melted Emmental and Gruyère cheese in wine, served from a communal pot called a caquelon. The concept took off among Americans in the 1950s as an interactive chafing-dish fad. Most people think fondue arrived with the 1964 New York World’s Fair, but that event only sparked a bigger craze, not the first appearance.

Hormel put SPAM in grocery stores commercially on July 5, 1937, long before it was incorporated into World War II rations and home pantries. In the 1950s, housewives would grind the meat from the can, mix it with mayonnaise, relish, and mustard, and place it on crackers or bread squares. A quick few minutes under the broiler turned it into a hot canapé.

The first Chex Party Mix recipe was published in a June 1952 ad in Life magazine by Ralston Purina, producer of Wheat Chex and Rice Chex cereal. Home bakers mixed the cereal with butter, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic salt. Corn Chex was added to the mix when the company released it in 1958. There were no pre-packaged bags at this point; each batch of Chex Party Mix was baked from scratch in your own oven. Convenient, yes, but you still had to earn your bowl of Chex Mix!

Rumaki was created at the California tiki restaurants Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s during the late 1930s and 1940s. The recipe included chicken liver and canned water chestnuts wrapped in bacon. These were then marinated in soy sauce, ginger, and brown sugar, and broiled. A much simpler version appeared in the 1950s that omitted the chicken liver, but kept the bacon and water chestnuts. It was considered exotic, but it was definitely American.

Molded savory items were popular at parties because no cooking had to be done the night of the party. A host might have mixed up plain, unflavored Knox gelatin, or even a can of tomato soup, with lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce, and let it set with celery or olives, or maybe shrimp, and served it cold on lettuce. Yes, savory gelatin was very much invited to the party. Jell-O had not introduced its savory-flavored gelatin yet; that would happen in 1962. This was gelatin the old-fashioned way.

General Mills featured a recipe in its 1957 Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls for a party appetizer of cocktail wieners wrapped in canned refrigerated biscuit dough. (The Pillsbury Crescent Rolls we think of today weren’t introduced until 1965.) So 1950s party planners used regular biscuit dough or biscuit mix. And it worked well enough.

Previously, fresh shrimp went bad so quickly outside of coastal markets that it was considered a luxury largely limited to those areas. Postwar commercial flash-freezing made it possible for grocery stores farther inland to offer pre-cleaned and pre-cooked frozen shrimp in rings. All that was needed to make an elegant seafood platter was to set out a bottle of cocktail sauce, a mixture of horseradish and ketchup, and let guests serve themselves.

Before, you had to trim and slice bread by hand, one crust at a time. Then came the 1950s, when commercial bakeries began offering pre-sliced miniature loaves of party rye and party pumpernickel. These could be quickly topped with cream cheese, dried herbs, and slices of cucumber to create dozens of open-faced canapés. Trimming was no longer necessary. I consider that a small but meaningful victory for anyone hosting a crowd.

The Olive Surprise was exactly what it sounded like: a pimento-stuffed green olive wrapped in dough made of sharp cheddar, butter, and flour, then baked until golden. It was a 1950s hot finger food with no need for advance prep of a filling because there was only a jar of olives already at hand. The hot pastry crust cracked open to reveal a salty, tangy olive.

Hosts would crack open a can of cocktail wieners or slice a few franks, then add some bottled barbecue sauce, or a concoction of ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and brown sugar. It would all simmer away over an alcohol burner on a tabletop chafing dish. No Crock-Pots back then, as those wouldn’t be invented until 1971; just a can opener and a small flame.

Nabisco had been selling Ritz crackers since 1934 as an inexpensive Depression-era snack. But by the 1950s, their ads described them as an instant, ready-to-eat appetizer base, loaded with pimento cheese, sardines, or sliced olives. No cutting, trimming, or toasting of bread needed. A single Ritz was all it took where a full loaf of bread used to do the trick. Sometimes progress really does come in cracker form.

Cheez Whiz was created by a team led by Kraft food scientist Edwin Traisman in 1952. It was marketed as a shortcut for Welsh rarebit, a hot cheese sauce traditionally served over toast, and as a spread for parties. Party hosts would pipe Cheez Whiz, or pimento cream cheese, or peanut butter, into celery already cut into serving-sized pieces. A raw vegetable could now be filled in seconds and serve as a party bite.

Hosts might mix chilled ginger ale or 7Up with canned pineapple or orange juice and float scoops of raspberry or lime sherbet on top. In the 1950s, Sealtest Dairies had commercialized multi-flavor rainbow sherbet through a multi-nozzle process, and these rainbow scoops would melt slowly into a sweet, frothy topping. No ice, no garnish, no extra step. The punch was doing its own decorating.

If you leave natural cheese warm for too long, it separates into oil and clumps. But Velveeta, invented by Emil Frey in 1918 with the addition of emulsifiers, melted nicely, making it ideal for chafing-dish queso combined with canned chili, milk, or diced pimentos. For a party host trying to keep cheese warm for hours, refusing to turn into an oily mess was a useful talent. Local Texas ads were already recommending it with Ro-Tel tomatoes in 1949, decades before Kraft officially began advertising Velveeta with Ro-Tel on a national level in 1988.

For most of the nineteenth century, ambrosia consisted simply of orange slices and coconut, but by the 1950s, many households served canned mandarin oranges, canned pineapple tidbits, shredded coconut, sour cream, and miniature marshmallows, tossed together in a bowl and refrigerated. It could serve as a side dish or dessert. Canned fruit made a classic recipe easy to prepare.

Crab Rangoon is a crabby appetizer invented in Oakland, California. The original Crab Rangoon, which appeared on Victor Bergeron’s Trader Vic’s restaurant menu by 1950 or 1951 as Rangoon Crab, was made with canned crab meat, cream cheese, and garlic stuffed in a Chinese wonton wrapper and deep-fried. There’s no cream cheese in traditional Asian food, and this dish was constructed for mid-century American palates, not brought over from anywhere.

This content was created with the help of AI.