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.