Bisquick Recipes for 1950s Game Day Snacks

Whether your game is football, Super Mario Brothers or Clue, game day snacks are always a good idea. Take a break from boring chips and onion dip and mix up retro 1950s game day snacks courtesy of Miss Betty Crocker and Bisquick.

Bisquick means convenience, and the 1950s loved convenience. The Bisquick origin story starts back in 1930 in a train dining car. A General Mills sales exec asked the chef for the secret of his delicious biscuits. The chef explained his shortcut, a pre-made mix of flour, baking soda, lard and salt that let him make and serve biscuits hot and fresh quickly. Back at headquarters, they subbed hydrogenated oil for lard so it was shelf stable, and so it came to be that home cooks were able to buy Bisquick in 1931.

The beauty of Bisquick is that it serves as the jumping off point for all kinds of sweet and savory recipes. If you prefer to make your own mix, Allrecipes.com has a well reviewed homemade Bisquick substitute recipe. But whether you use the boxed version or make your own, both can lead to some snacktastic foods using recipes from this 1956 promotional booklet.

We love making things from scratch, but sometimes it’s nice to cut a few corners. We also love promotional booklets because the recipes have been tested, tested and re-tested. They are not going to let us down. And if we promise the crowd 1950s game day snacks, we want to deliver something tasty.

Some of the recipes start with the biscuit and the fruit shortcake recipes below. Pay attention to the limited amount of stirring and kneading–work your dough too much and it will be tough.

Shown on the cover, the Batter Franks caught our eye immediately. You know that dough is crispy, you know the hotdog inside is juicy. Not quite corn dogs, no where near enough cornmeal, but anytime you wrap batter around a hot dog and stick it on a skewer, you’ve got yourself something good. We haven’t tried it, but we would bet it would also work with gluten-free Bisquick and maybe even tofu dogs. (Can you imagine trying to explain tofu pups to 1950s Betty?)

We’re also intrigued by the Velvet Fudge Cake. Because we are intrigued by all cakes. It’s who we are.

This Baked Meat Sandwich arched our eyebrows. Not the recipe, it sounds delicious. It’s the intro: Known in Italy as a cavatzone. We immediately assumed there must be a cavatzone-sized hole in our knowledge of Italian cooking, because we’d never heard of it. We asked Mother Google, and all the entries that followed involved were copies of this Bisquick recipe.

The finished product, shown circled below, is a layered dish and certainly not a pocket like a calzone. Also, a calzone would not be served cold, as is an option for the Baked Meat Sandwich. Was it something invented, a fictional reference? Only Betty and her inner circle of copy writers know for sure.

The red sauce on top, likely tomato sauce or ketchup, isn’t mentioned in the recipe. And to be honest, it looks more like a crime scene than a sauce as illustrated. Use your own judgement.

So many snacks to consider. Have we succeeded in getting your tastebuds ignited and firing on all cylinders at the idea trying out some 1950s game day snacks? If they don’t seem particularly innovative in light of what we can make now, remember that you couldn’t go to the grocery store freezer case and get a box of cavatzones then. And as we all know, cavatzones are worth the work.