Chelsea and Rachael were back at it again cooking up some more recipes from the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.

At the 1964 World’s Fair, 7UP had a pavilion where they had the 7UP International Sandwich Gardens. The 7UP Sandwich Garden was styled like a buffet with foods from 16 different countries presented in the form of sandwiches. Four sandwiches per plate with relishes, cheeses, candy and a 7UP cost $1.50 ($11.97 in 2018). A guest would go into a buffet-style line and pick from one of four different areas of the world. A recipe for this sandwich, the Festive Argentine Sandwich, was sent out to the employees of the Seven-Up Company in their internal publication, The Leader. We are lucky enough to have a copy of the recipe in our collection, so we decided to give this recipe a try. Many of the sandwiches from the Sandwich Garden look interesting to say the least but this one didn’t seem too weird – very salty but not weird. We always try to stick to the recipes as much as possible for our Cooking with Collections segments, but this recipe had an ingredient we just would not add – monosodium glutamate (MSG). MSG is naturally occurring in some foods and can be added to others. It creates the umami, or savory, flavor in your taste receptors and MSG is known to enhance certain flavors like meat. The FDA has classified MSG as an ingredient that is “generally recognized as safe”, but its use is controversial. Unfortunately, MSG can also cause some people to have adverse reactions, so we decided to stay clear of adding it to the recipe. Garlic also creates the umami flavor so we added just a little more of that to accommodate for our lack of MSG. The gravy recipe was super simple and it thickened quickly when we added the water and cornstarch mixture. The staff taste testers all really liked the sandwich and thought they would eat it again. We missed the mark a bit because we didn’t end up serving it with 7UP as the recipe suggests. That probably would have helped because that was one salty gravy! Although everyone liked the recipe as is, Chelsea and Rachael think everyone probably would have enjoyed it with a little less salt too. Normally you mix one bouillon cube with one cup of water, but this recipe called for three bouillon cubes in one cup of water! We think you could get away with just one or two cubes for this recipe. It would still be tasty, but it would be a lot less salty!

For our next recipe, we just had to try another recipe from the Heinz cookbook we used last time – Love Apple Pie! Yes, that’s right folks, we put ketchup in apple pie. Now that you’ve had a second to digest that, we can talk about our experience. Rachael brought in her apple slicer, corer, and peeler. It’s a delightful little contraption that had some of our staff mesmerized and seriously cut down on our prep time, plus it’s just plain fun to use. The recipe called for us to blend ketchup and lemon juice and then coat the apples in it – so that’s what we did. And let us tell you, it looked and smelled just as weird as it sounds. The recipe said that if the apples were tart, you could add one to two tablespoons of sugar to the mixture.

Although the apples were sweet Michigan Gala apples (shout out to the land of Vernors and Rachael’s home state), we thought the mixture could use a little, um, help so we threw a tablespoon of sugar in for good measure, and we are sure glad we did. The pie could have been baked with or without a top crust, but we decided on giving it a lattice top. It had been awhile since Chelsea had put her lattice skills to the test, so we decided on doing that. She also wanted to give this pie just a little something extra – she thought it could use all the help it could get! The pie ended up baking and smelling like a normal apple pie. However, when we took it out of the oven, we could see just a little bit of the glistening ketchup concoction on the apples. We somehow convinced the staff taste testers to taste the pie (mostly by not telling them what was in it) and they all really enjoyed it! Some people could taste the ketchup and didn’t mind the taste, while others couldn’t taste it at all. Some of the staff didn’t even believe us when we told them ketchup was in it! We are honestly surprised how well this pie turned out! If you believe ketchup belongs on everything, you should give this pie a try!

Check out the rest of the photos from our experiment below! You can also see the recipes if you are feeling brave and want to give Love Apple Pie a try!