When I cleared out the stuff that had accumulated on top of Patrick's old refrigerator back in August, I found an old Betty Crocker cookbook among expired coupons and takeout menus. There were other dust-coated cookbooks as well (like a Technicolored "Candy-Making" and a dubious "Olive Oil Cookery"), most of them from the '60s and the '70s, but they got tossed out. (Or, I tossed them out.) For some reason, the Betty Crocker cookbook stayed on. It wasn't until a few days ago that I leafed through the '62 cookbook called "Betty Crocker's Good and Easy Cookbook." Soon, though, I wasn't just leafing through. I became engrossed.

"Her" recipes and meal ideas were fascinating in so many ways. Guacamole didn't call for cilantro (although it did ask that you get avocados--phew). She pretty much boils every imaginable vegetable, from the predictable potatoes and peas to the shocking eggplants to the almost criminal celery. To me, who didn't spend her childhood in Betty's country, the recipes and directions aren't nostalgic. Some of them are outright horrifying, but in that horror, I realized, lies the huge distance that the American food culture has covered over the past 40-plus years. The tuna chow mein bake, which combines cream of mushroom soup (out of a can), tuna (out of a can) and cooked chow mein to be baked in the oven, wouldn't make its weekly appearance on the dinner table very often these days (or so I hope), but there was a time when such an oddly "oriental" dish was an exotica that only a knowledgeable homemaker could put on the table.

I was talking to Patrick the other day, showing him the ghastly colored photographs in the cookbook, when he confessed a particular fondness for the "red cinnamon apple rings." He used to have them occasionally, when he was growing up. Amused and on a whim, I decided to try recreating the hyper-red, plasticky circles that didn't seem at all like apples on the yellowing pages.

The recipe called for red cinnamon candies, which, not too surprisingly, I didn't have at hand. So I made a quick trip to Target and picked up a bag of them for 99 cents. This is good, I thought. I didn't want to spend too much to obtain ingredients that I don't usually have at hand--which, in this case, quite a few--like canned soup and salted beef. I melted the candies in a little bit of hot water and threw in circles of a pared-and-cored apple. (I had an apple I grabbed from a motel's breakfast buffet on the day before, so there was no guilty feeling of ruining a perfectly good apple in this artificial concoction.) The bubbling red syrup was kind of pretty, I have to admit, and the apple pieces soon took on the same unearthly red hue. I couldn't imagine how intense the color would have been if I'd used the food dye as called for.

The red circles set the tone of the entire dinner. I fought off the temptation to use herbs and spices that I've become used to in the 21st century kitchen, and pretty much stuck to salt and pepper (except for the orange peel and sage I used for the mashed sweet potatoes). I sautéed pork chops (with salt and pepper, lightly dusted with flour) in butter, and mounted the apple pieces on top. For the sides, I made green beans and corn in (again) butter, and the heretic mashed potatoes. I was satisfied to see, on large blue plates, that the resulting dinner had the undeniable sense of '60s retro. The reddish pink syrup soon started to dribble down the side of the pork chops.

The apple rings tasted just as I expected--extremely sweet, with only a faint apple aroma, and similarly subtle cinnamon tang. With the cinnamon stronger, it could actually be pretty decent with the pork, I suspected (though I would be perfectly happy without all that color). Patrick, who thought the same thing, said that the cinnamon apple rings he used to have might have been store-bought, perhaps in a can. Most importantly, though, it was edible.

I'm tempted now to try other recipes in Betty's book. Many of them would be just a joke (like "sea dream salad" made with grated cucumbers and lime-flavored gelatin), but it's kind of fun. The obvious downside, though, would be the number of empty cans--soups, green beans, corn, fruit cocktails, etc.--that'll heap up in our trash bin. Or... would that be too dangerous for our health?