Thursday, April 05, 2007

Hostess with the Moistest


Here's something to chew on...Friday is a grand day in the history of modern eating, if not necessarily of eating food, and get your mind out of the gutter as I'm talking about the Twinkie (please notice that capital T), which celebrates its 77th birthday. A mere youngster in our effort to take all pleasure out of eating, the TV dinner celebrates its 53rd anniversary Friday, thank you Swanson & Sons (maybe Swanson needed his daughters to help in the kitchen instead). Of course, there are most likely some of the original batches of each around, that Twinkie just as spongily lovely, that turkey dinner encased in its protective ice crystal coating, a few peas misplaced and jammed into the cornbread (the brownie that at least lived up to its color if not its flavor didn't get its aluminum partition for years--we're talking Omaha, after all). It's surprising to learn that unlike the lines that seemed to link the TV dinner to the TV in Hal Hartley's Trust ("I had a bad day at work. I had to subvert my principles and kow-tow to an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible. Deadens the inner core of my being."), Swanson & Sons called it a TV dinner because they thought the rectangular tin looked like a rectangular TV. Thank god the convenience meal wasn't invented today, or we'd have 48" of salisbury steak to face, and I'm not trying to make a Milton Berle joke, I promise. As for the golden sponge cake with a creamy filling, it was created by a man named James Dewar, so I assume he drank too much of the other product named after him and then got to baking. Wikipedia does inform us: "In one small classroom experiment at George Stevens Academy, a single Twinkie, removed from all packaging, did not spoil for 30 years, although it became 'rather brittle.'" Then again, I'm pretty sure I saw the Brittle Twinkies back at the 930 Club in DC in the '80s when they opened for Hungry-Man.

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9 Comments:

Blogger Marty said...

APPLE commercial star (as IBM) and humorist John Hodgeman on transforming Twinkies and all things fry-able. Scroll down to March 23:

http://areasofmyexpertise.blogspot.com/

2:13 PM  
Blogger Mike said...

There always was a stray pea getting into something it didn't belong in, wasn't there?

And that pic is HAWT.

3:18 PM  
Blogger George said...

Not your usual Twinkie the Kid.

You should see Nancy Pelosi in that outfit.

(And now everyone who doesn't read Mike's comment threads is really confused.)

3:56 PM  
Blogger Patrick said...

I heard recently that the secret ingredient to Twinkies' longevity is, no kidding, plaster of Paris.

4:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

since when do twinkies need elbow pads?

wv#1: nogxodj

5:36 PM  
Blogger Mike said...

since when do twinkies need elbow pads?

Yeah! Knee pads I understand, but elbows? What kinda' kinkiness is this???

6:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As one of those who grew up on the east coast, with TV Dinners in front of the tube as our Friday night treat, a welcome respite from the LOndon Broil family-around-the-table-suppers, I recall gingerly removing the peas from the Apple Cobbler-esque thing...And we weren't a Twinkie family...we were Yodel kids. If you were any sort of cool, you made a ball with the foil Yodel Wrappers and kept it in your Twiggy lunchbox....

7:36 AM  
Blogger SantaBarbarian said...

It's not twinkie season.

It's all about the PEEPS, baby. ;-)

1:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

!!!



WV: try #1)aqeqre

12:13 PM  

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