In 1973, a housewife in Akron, Ohio fed 22 people at her Memorial Day cookout for under $9. Her secret was a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook her mother bought at the A&P for $3.95. That cookbook contained recipes that would make a modern food blogger physically recoil.
Number seven on this list was so popular at Memorial Day cookouts that Kraft sold over 40 million boxes a year. >> >> Number 18 was the dish your aunt would not stop talking about at every family gathering from 1968 to 1981. And number two contains an ingredient that food companies spent decades training us to be embarrassed about serving.
These 25 foods defined American Memorial Day cookouts for an entire decade. Then, we threw them away the moment Whole Foods opened. Before we start, hit that subscribe button. Let us count down the 25 forgotten Memorial Day cookout foods from the 1970s that have completely disappeared. Number 25, Lipton onion soup dip with Ruffles.
This was the appetizer that anchored every Memorial Day cookout from 1968 to 1979. One packet of Lipton onion soup mix stirred into a pint of sour cream, refrigerated for an hour to let the dehydrated onion flakes soften and the flavors marry. That was the entire recipe. It was the first thing your mom set out when guests arrived.
A turquoise Tupperware bowl filled with the gray flecked cream surrounded by a fanned ring of Ruffles potato chips. A packet of Lipton cost 29 cents at the A&P. A pint of sour cream was 49 cents. For under a dollar, you had an appetizer that fed 12 adults and kept them out of the cooler before dinner. The chips had to be Ruffles. The ridges held the dip.
Flat chips broke under the weight and any kid who showed up with Lays got corrected. The bowl was empty by the time the burgers came off the grill. Number 24, pickle pinwheels. Cream cheese was softened on the counter for an hour, then spread thick across slices of Karl Ehmer chipped ham. A whole baby dill pickle was laid down the center.
You rolled the whole thing up tight, wrapped it in waxed paper, and chilled it for 2 hours until the cream cheese set firm. Then your mom sliced the rolls crosswise into perfect coins. Each one a pinwheel of pink ham, white cream cheese, and bright green pickle at the center. Arranged on a green glass platter with a sprig of parsley in the middle.
It looked like something out of a magazine. A package of chipped ham cost 39 cents. A block of Philadelphia was 33 cents. A jar of pickles was already in the refrigerator. The whole platter cost less than a dollar and it was always the first appetizer to disappear. Every neighborhood block party had them.
Every church potluck had them. They have vanished from the American picnic table without a trace. Number 23, cocktail wieners and grape jelly and chili sauce. The recipe came off the back of a Heinz chili sauce bottle in 1965 and within 5 years it had taken over every Memorial Day cookout in the country.
One bottle of Heinz chili sauce, one jar of Welches grape jelly, and one package of Hebrew National cocktail franks. Everything went into a slow cooker on low for 3 hours until the jelly melted into a glossy maroon glaze that coated each tiny wiener in something sweet, tangy, and impossible to stop eating. They cost about a dollar fifty to make for a crowd of twenty.
Set out in a brown ceramic crock pot with a box of frilled toothpicks, they were the first thing every man at the cookout went for. The grape jelly sounds wrong on paper. In practice, it created a Maillard reaction with the meat sugars that no other glaze could touch. Food scientists have since confirmed this works.
Number twenty-two, deviled eggs with paprika. Every Memorial Day cookout in America between 1965 and 1985 had a deviled egg plate. Not a regular plate, a special one with twelve oval indentations made specifically for this purpose. Usually milk glass or hobnail green. A dozen hard-boiled eggs sliced lengthwise, yolks pressed through a sieve, mixed with Hellmann’s, yellow mustard, sweet pickle relish, and a pinch of salt.
Piped back into the whites with a pastry bag if your mom was fancy, or just spooned in if she was not. The final touch was always the same, a sprinkle of paprika >> >> across the top dusted from a tin shilling shaker that had been in the spice cabinet since 1971. The paprika was not for flavor, it was for color.
Eggs cost sixty-five cents a dozen. The whole platter cost under a dollar and disappeared within forty minutes. They still show up at funerals in the south. Nowhere else. Number twenty-one, Velveeta cheese ball rolled in walnuts. This was the centerpiece appetizer of every Memorial Day cookout in suburban America. Two pounds of Velveeta, softened on the counter, blended with a block of cream cheese, a packet of Hidden Valley Ranch dry mix, and a quarter cup of chopped green olives, shaped by hand into a perfect sphere on a sheet of waxed
paper, then rolled and pressed into a mountain of chopped walnuts until the entire surface was coated. It went into the refrigerator overnight to firm up, then onto a wooden cutting board surrounded by Triscuits and Wheat Thins. The cheese ball was structural. It had to hold its shape in 80° weather without sweating.
Velveeta was the only cheese that could do this. A real cheddar would have melted into a puddle by the second hour. The Velveeta sat firm and creamy through an entire afternoon. A 2-lb block cost $1.79 in 1974. Nothing in the modern grocery store performs this trick. Number 20. Watergate salad. Named after the 1972 hotel scandal, this dish appeared in church cookbooks across the country by 1975 and never left.
One box of Jell-O pistachio instant pudding mix, one can of crushed pineapple, drained, one cup of miniature marshmallows, one cup of chopped walnuts, and one tub of Cool Whip folded together in a glass trifle bowl. The pudding mix never got cooked. It was stirred directly into the Cool Whip, where the corn starch reacted with the moisture and turned the whole thing into a pale mint green cloud that held its shape for 2 days in the refrigerator.
Children loved it. Grandfathers tolerated it. Aunts argued about whether the official name was Watergate salad or pistachio delight. The Kraft test kitchen never officially confirmed where the name came from, which only made the dish more famous. A whole bowl cost about 90 cents to make and fed 12 people.
Today, even mentioning it makes younger Americans wrinkle their noses. Number 19, ambrosia salad, the dish that fought Watergate salad for prime dessert real estate at every cookout. It started with a can of mandarin oranges, drained, a can of pineapple tidbits, drained, one cup of shredded coconut, one cup of mini marshmallows, one cup of halved maraschino cherries, and a pint of sour cream folded together gently in a glass bowl.
Some moms used Cool Whip instead of sour cream. Some added pecans. Some added shredded coconut on top as a garnish. Every family had their version, and every family thought their version was the correct one. The dish came from the American South in the 1870s, but the canned fruit version that dominated the 1970s cookouts was a post-war invention built around the rise of cheap canned goods.
A whole bowl cost less than a dollar fifty. It sat on the dessert table next to the Watergate salad, and people took spoonfuls of both, comparing them like wine. First pattern break. Here is where things get interesting. The Memorial Day cookout in 1970s America was not just a meal. It was a ritual, the official start of summer marked by a specific menu that nobody wrote down because everybody already knew it.
Your dad lit the Weber kettle at noon. Your mom started the salads at 10:00 in the morning. The neighbors started showing up at 3:00. By 5:00 there were 12 adults in the backyard, six kids running through the sprinkler, a transistor radio playing the Indianapolis 500, and a folding table groaning under 20 lb of food. The whole thing cost less than $30 to put on.
Today, a Memorial Day cookout for the same number of people runs about $200 and feels worse. Something has been lost, and it is not just the recipes. It is the assumption that feeding people did not have to be expensive or complicated to be memorable. These dishes were proof. Number 18, seven-layer salad.
The dish that started the trend of layering everything in a glass bowl so guests could admire the cross-section before it got destroyed. Iceberg lettuce torn by hand on the bottom, then frozen peas straight from the bag, then chopped red onion, then crumbled bacon, then shredded cheddar, then a thick layer of Hellmann’s mixed with a tablespoon of sugar and a splash of buttermilk sealed across the top like cake frosting.
It went into the refrigerator overnight, which is what made it work. The mayonnaise sealed everything in. The peas thawed and stayed crisp. The bacon stayed crunchy. By the next day, every layer had developed its own distinct texture and flavor. Your mom would spoon it out vertically so each plate got all seven layers.
A whole bowl cost about $3 and fed 20 people. It was the dish your aunt would not stop talking about. She brought it to every cookout from 1973 to 1989. Then it was gone. Number 17, three-bean salad. A classic picnic staple. A can of green beans, a can of yellow wax beans, and a can of kidney beans all drained and rinsed, mixed with diced onion, diced green pepper, and a dressing made of white vinegar, vegetable oil, and a half cup of sugar.
It sat in the refrigerator overnight while the beans absorbed the dressing and the whole thing turned tangy and sweet. The kidney beans bled their color slightly into the dressing turning the whole bowl a pale pink. Every Memorial Day picnic table had this in a Pyrex bowl with a serving spoon stuck in it. It cost about 90 cents to make.
It fed 12 people. It tasted better on day two than day one. The recipe came off the back of a Del Monte can in 1959 and dominated American cookouts for the next 25 years. Then someone decided beans needed to be exotic or imported and the humble three-bean salad disappeared into church basement potluck obscurity.
Number 16, macaroni salad with Miracle Whip, not mayonnaise. Miracle Whip. This was non-negotiable in the 1970s in America. 1 lb of cooked elbow macaroni cooled under running water mixed with 2 cups of Miracle Whip, 1 cup of diced celery, half a cup of diced sweet pickles, two diced hard-boiled eggs, and 1 Tbsp of yellow mustard, salt, pepper, and a pinch of celery seed if your mom was a real cook.
It went into the refrigerator for 4 hours before serving which let the macaroni absorb the dressing and turn from individually coated noodles into something almost custardy >> >> and unified. Miracle Whip was the secret. The added sugar and spices in it gave the salad a sweetness that real mayonnaise could not deliver.
The whole bowl cost about $1.50. The bowl was always empty before the burgers came off the grill. Today, Hellmann’s has won the mayo wars and Miracle Whip is treated like a curiosity. The macaroni salad has never tasted the same since. Tomato aspic, the Jell-O salad that polite society used to take seriously.
A can of V8 juice, a packet of Knox unflavored gelatin, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, and a few drops of Tabasco. Sometimes diced celery and stuffed green olives suspended throughout. Poured into a bunt-shaped copper mold and refrigerated overnight until it sat firm enough to unmold onto a bed of iceberg lettuce.
The result was a quivering red ring of savory tomato gelatin that looked like a piece of architecture in the middle of the buffet table. A scoop of Hellmann’s mayonnaise in the center hole completed it. The whole thing cost about a dollar to make and fed 10 people as a side dish. Every fancy aunt brought one to Memorial Day. Every kid avoided it.
Every grandmother defended it. The tomato aspic was the dish that drew the generational line in America in the 1970s. The boomers killed it. Number 14, grilled bologna sandwich. Across the working-class neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, this was the cookout staple that the fancy magazines never wrote about.
A thick slice of Oscar Mayer bologna, a half-inch thick, with two small notches cut into the edges so it would not curl up on the grill. It went directly onto the hot grate and stayed there for 3 minutes a side until the surface charred and the center swelled into a small dome. Served on a soft white hamburger bun with yellow mustard and a slice of raw onion.
The grill flame caramelized the bologna in a way the skillet could not. The smoke worked into the cured pork. The whole thing tasted nothing like a cold bologna sandwich and everything like something invented for the occasion. A roll of baloney cost about 90 cents in 1972. It fed a family for two cookouts.
Today, the grilled baloney sandwich appears only in a handful of barbecue joints in the Ohio River Valley. >> >> Second pattern break. Here is something the modern food industry does not want you to think about. The 1970s Memorial Day cookout cost less than $30 and fed 20 people because almost everything came from a can, a jar, a box, or a package.
Velveeta, Miracle Whip, Cool Whip, Jell-O, Spam, Heinz, Hellmann’s, Lipton. The whole industrial food product economy of post-war America was designed to make a backyard cookout affordable for a single-income family. Then, somewhere between 1985 and 2005, those same companies repositioned themselves.
The processed food they had spent four decades selling to American mothers was suddenly dirty, embarrassing, and beneath us. Whole Foods opened. Food Network arrived. And the dishes that had built American summer for 30 years became the dishes nobody admitted to making. Notice who made money off both sides of that transition.
The same companies that sold you Velveeta in 1973 now sell you the artisanal cheese you replaced it with. The economics are not complicated. They are circular. Number 13. Spam burgers. Across military families in rural America, Spam was the cookout meat that defined Memorial Day. A can of Spam sliced into half-inch thick rounds, scored in a crosshatch pattern with a sharp knife, and laid directly on the grill until the scored sections caramelized into deep mahogany ridges.
Served on a hamburger bun with a slice of cheese, a pineapple ring, and a smear of yellow mustard. Spam cost about 59 cents a can in 1972 and fed three people. The grill marks gave it a texture that the can could not deliver. The fat rendered out and crisped the edges. The center stayed dense and salty and deeply flavored.
Every veteran’s family ate this on Memorial Day because the can had carried fathers and uncles through the Pacific in World War II. It was not just dinner, it was tribute. Today, Spam appears in trendy Hawaiian restaurants for $15 per serving. The Memorial Day version has been almost completely erased from American memory. Number 12, hot dog wrapped in bacon.
The dish nobody calls dinner, but everybody ate. An Oscar Mayer all-beef hot dog with a slice of bacon spiraled around it from end to end, secured with toothpicks at each end. It went onto the grill on indirect heat for 15 minutes, so the bacon could render and crisp without burning. Then it was moved over direct flame for the final char.
The bacon fat basted the hot dog the entire time it cooked, giving the cheap frank a richness and smoke that elevated it past anything you could buy at a ballpark. Served on a poppy seed bun with a strip of American cheese laid down first, so it melted from the residual heat. A package of eight hot dogs cost 79 cents.
A pound of bacon was $1.50. The whole platter cost under $3 and fed eight people. This is the kind of dish that built a generation of American cookouts and then disappeared into the gray space between recipes. Hawaiian meatballs, the dish that pretended to be exotic in an era when most Americans had never been on a plane.
A pound of ground beef mixed with bread crumbs, an egg, and onion soup mix, rolled into balls, browned in a skillet, then transferred to a slow cooker with a jar of Heinz sweet and sour sauce, a can of crushed pineapple, and a green pepper diced into chunks. 3 hours on low and the meatballs absorb the glaze until they turned glossy and deeply flavored.
Served from the same crock-pot they cooked in, set out on the buffet with a box of toothpicks. The pineapple turned soft and sweet. The green pepper stayed crunchy. The meatballs were tender from the slow heat. A whole batch cost about $3 and fed 15 people. Every cookbook from 1968 to 1978 contained some version of this. Today, the dish has been quietly retired, dismissed as too sweet, too processed, too embarrassing to claim.
Number 10, pineapple glazed Hawaiian chicken. The fancy main course at every Memorial Day cookout that wanted to feel like a tiki bar. Chicken thighs and drumsticks marinated overnight in a mixture of soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, ginger, and a can of crushed pineapple. The marinade caramelized on the grill as the chicken cooked, turning the skin into a sticky, almost lacquered glaze that smelled like nothing else in suburban America.
A whole pineapple ring was grilled alongside each piece and placed on top during the last 2 minutes of cooking, where it picked up grill marks and turned warm and sweet. The combination of smoke, char, sweet pineapple, and salty soy was a revelation in 1973. The whole platter cost about $4 and fed eight people.
Every dad with a Weber grill had this in rotation. The recipe appeared in Sunset magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, and on the back of every Dole pineapple can. Today, it has been replaced by generic teriyaki sauce from a bottle. Third pattern. Break. Here is something the cookbook authors of the 1970s understood that we have forgotten.
A Memorial Day cookout was not about showing off your cooking, it was about feeding everyone you loved with the food you could afford on a single Saturday afternoon without going broke. The dishes on this list worked because they were forgiving. You could make most of them the day before.
They held their shape in the heat. They survived being passed around outdoors for 4 hours. They were designed for the conditions of a backyard in late May when the weather could turn at any moment and the food had to keep being food regardless. Modern cookout recipes pretend to be casual, but they assume access to a smoker, a sous vide, and a Whole Foods within 10 minutes.
The 1970s housewife had none of these. She had a Weber, a refrigerator, and a copy of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, and she fed everyone better than we do now. Number nine, Schlitz beer can chicken. Before craft beer, before competition barbecue, there was a man in every American backyard putting a whole chicken on top of an open can of Schlitz and standing it up on the grill for 90 minutes.
The theory was simple. The beer evaporated as the chicken cooked, steaming the bird from the inside while the dry heat of the grill crisped the skin on the outside. The hops and yeast in the beer flavored the meat in ways no marinade could. The chicken stood upright like a small drunk soldier and turned slowly golden over the course of an afternoon.
A can of Schlitz cost 35 cents. A whole chicken was about $1.50. The whole production cost under $2 and produced the juiciest chicken anyone had ever tasted. Today the technique survives in a few barbecue circles, but Schlitz is gone and the ritual has been replaced by store-bought rotisserie. The dad in the Weller polo holding the beer can is a ghost now.
Number eight. Hot dog hobo packets. The kid favorite dish at every Memorial Day cookout. Hot dog sliced into coins, mixed with frozen corn, diced potatoes, diced onion, a knob of butter, salt and pepper, all wrapped in a double layer of heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap and twisted shut at the ends.
The packets went directly onto the coals at the edge of the grill and cooked for about 25 minutes while the dad poked them with a stick to make sure they were not burning. When you unwrapped one, the steam rose up smelling like every camping trip you had ever been on. The hot dogs had given up their flavor to the potatoes.
The potatoes had soaked in the butter. The corn was bright and sweet. Every kid got their own packet which made them feel important. The whole batch cost about $1.50 to feed six children. They have been replaced by store-bought everything and the joy of unwrapping your own foil packet >> >> has been lost. Number seven. Bisquick sausage balls.
The appetizer that Kraft sold over 40 million boxes of mix to support. 1 lb of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage, two cups of Bisquick, and two cups of shredded sharp cheddar mixed together by hand in a single bowl, rolled into 1-in balls, and baked at 375° F for 20 minutes until the outside turned golden and the inside stayed juicy from the sausage fat.
The cheddar melted into the Bisquick and created a savory, slightly crispy shell around each ball. Served warm from a Corningware platter with toothpicks stuck into a few of them as a suggestion. The recipe came off the back of the Bisquick box in 1971 and dominated American appetizer culture for the next 20 years.
A whole batch made 50 balls and cost about $3. Every Memorial Day cookout in the South had them. Today, they survive only in tailgate culture and church Christmas parties. Nobody serves them at a cookout anymore, and nobody can explain why. Number six, pickled eggs. The bar food that migrated to the backyard cookout. A dozen hard-boiled eggs, peeled and dropped into a jar filled with white vinegar, a sliced beet, a sliced onion, a tablespoon of sugar, and a pinch of mustard seed.
The beet turned the eggs a brilliant fuchsia within 24 hours, staining the whites a color that nature had never intended. By day three, the eggs were firm, tangy, and so pink they looked dyed for Easter. Served on a glass plate at the edge of the buffet table next to the deviled eggs, they were the polarizing dish that some uncles attacked with enthusiasm, and most children avoided entirely.
A jar of pickled eggs cost about $1 to make and lasted for 2 weeks in the refrigerator. They appeared on Memorial Day tables across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia throughout the 1970s. Today, they survive only in a handful of dive bars and at one Amish farm stand outside Lancaster. Number five, Salisbury steak burgers.
The grill technique that pretended a hamburger was a restaurant entree. 1 lb of ground beef mixed with a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, an egg, and 1/4 cup of crushed saltine crackers. Shaped into thick oval patties rather than round burger discs, they went on the grill at medium heat for 6 minutes a side, >> >> then were transferred to a foil pan with a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup poured over the top, covered, and returned to the indirect side of the grill for 10 more minutes. The mushroom soup melted
into a thick gravy that coated each patty. Served over a slice of white bread with a scoop of mashed potatoes on the side, this was the dish that made a Memorial Day cookout feel like a real dinner. A whole batch fed six adults for under $3. The convenience food company sold millions of cans of soup on this recipe alone.
Today, the dish has been almost entirely forgotten outside of nursing home menus. Fourth pattern break. Here is the part nobody talks about. The Memorial Day cookout of the 1970s was the last great expression of a kind of American hospitality that no longer exists. Strangers welcome, kids running wild, three generations at the same picnic table.
A platter of grilled bologna and a bowl of Watergate salad sitting between them. The dishes were not the point. They were the medium. The point was the gathering, and the food was the excuse. When we replaced these dishes with grocery store charcuterie boards and farm-to-table burgers, we did not just lose recipes, we lost a way of being together that did not require anybody to spend $200 or apologize for what was on the table.
Your grandmother knew this. She put out the Velveeta cheese ball and the seven-layer salad and the cocktail wieners and the deviled eggs because she was not trying to impress anyone. She was trying to feed them. That distinction mattered. Number four, Tang punch bowl. The cookout drink that powered American astronauts and American Memorial Days at the same time.
A glass punch bowl filled with two quarts of cold water, four cups of Tang orange drink mix, a can of frozen pineapple juice concentrate, a bottle of ginger ale, and a tray of orange juice ice cubes floating on top. Some moms added a fifth of vodka for the adult version, hidden in the kitchen and served only after the kids had been redirected to the Kool-Aid pitcher.
Tang was the official drink of NASA, which gave it a kind of patriotic glamour in the 1970s that no powdered drink mix has achieved since. A jar of Tang cost 89 cents and made 15 quarts of drink. The punch bowl glittered orange under the late afternoon sun with the ginger ale fizzing at the surface.
Children drank it by the cup. Today, Tang has retreated to convenience store shelves and nostalgia podcasts. The punch bowl has been replaced by individual cans of LaCroix. Number three, Cool Whip strawberry shortcake. This was the dessert that closed every Memorial Day cookout from 1968 to 1985. A A pound cake was sliced into half-inch thick rounds, topped with sliced fresh strawberries that had been macerated in sugar for an hour until they released their juices, and finished with a heaped scoop of Cool Whip straight from the
tub. The pound cake absorbed the strawberry juice. The Cool Whip melted slightly into the warm cake. The whole thing came together in 5 minutes and tasted like the official dessert of American summer. A Sara Lee pound cake cost 99 cents. A pint of strawberries was 49 cents in season. A tub of Cool Whip was 69 cents.
The whole dessert fed 12 people for under $3 and required no baking, no whisking, no candy thermometer. Today, food writers have replaced Cool Whip with freshly whipped cream and Sara Lee with homemade biscuits, and the dessert costs four times as much and tastes only marginally better. Number two. Schlitz beer chicken’s quieter cousin.
Beer-battered cookout corn. It was the contribution from Wisconsin and Minnesota that dominated regional cookouts for a decade. Whole ears of corn were dipped in a batter of Bisquick mixed with a can of Old Style or Schlitz, then wrapped in aluminum foil and grilled directly over the coals for 20 minutes.
The batter cooked into a thin crispy shell around the corn while the kernels steamed inside. When you unwrapped it, the corn smelled like beer, butter, and char. A stick of butter melted into a coffee mug was the dipping sauce. A dozen ears of corn cost $1. The beer was already in the cooler. The dish fed 12 people for the price of the corn alone.
It appeared in every Midwestern cookout from 1971 to 1984, and then was inexplicably replaced by Mexican street corn with cotija cheese. The beer-battered version was simpler, cheaper, and arguably better. Nobody makes it anymore. Number one, watermelon with salt. At the top of this list is the dish that requires no recipe, no preparation, and no defense.
Cold from the cooler, a whole watermelon was sliced into red triangles by your dad with a big serrated knife and handed out to whoever wanted one. The salt shaker sat on the picnic table next to the slices. You took a slice, you shook salt directly onto the red flesh, and you ate it standing up over the grass so the juice would not stain your clothes.
The salt did something to the watermelon that nobody understood at the time. It enhanced the sweetness, drew out the moisture, and made each bite taste more like watermelon than the unsalted version. Food scientists have since confirmed that sodium suppresses the bitter receptors on the tongue and amplifies the perception of sweetness.
Your grandmother knew this without knowing it. A whole watermelon cost $1 in 1973 and fed 20 people. Today, the salt shaker is gone and nobody under 35 knows why their grandparents ever did this. This was the taste of American summer. This was the last bite of Memorial Day eaten as the sun went down.
The citronella candles were lit and the kids were caught one by one and put to bed. Here is the challenge. Pick one of these and make it this Memorial Day. The grilled bologna, the Watergate salad, the cocktail wieners and grape jelly, or the watermelon with salt. Make something your grandparents made without thinking twice.
Then come back and tell me if it was as bad as you expected. I made the seven-layer salad last weekend and my neighbor asked for the recipe. Drop the one you are going to make in the comments. I want to know if the Velveeta cheese ball gets more love than the pineapple chicken. These were not just cookout dishes.
They were the last great expression of an American summer that we sold off without realizing what we were losing.
