I had completely forgotten about My Great Recipes and its ilk until it was mentioned recently in an Ask.Metafilter question. This was just one of many different subscription services, all of which only "worked" in a world where there was no instant, pervasive access to the entire world's information. A world in which, if you wanted to know something and did not have the reference book on hand, you had to go to the library to look it up.

 

In such a world, what happens when you want to make a new recipe? Why, you need to have that recipe. These days you can just Google "Chicken Diane Recipe" and get dozens of results. In the 1980s, you had to check your recipe books, or the file of recipes you had clipped from magazines. Or in desperation, to call your friends and family and ask if they had the recipe.

 

A terrible fate! 

 

One way to avoid it was to subscribe to a service that mailed you recipes every month. Nothing special; just a bunch of recipes. They came on cards with a photo on the front, and could be stored in the special carrying case with dividers (included in the cost of purchase).

 

This ad is notable not just for introducing us all to chicken Diane (whatever the heck that is), but for the oddity that comes at the end. Why the pause before the last word, "…mom"? Whether deliberate or not, this mysterious, unaccountable pause catches the attention.

 

You could get a lot of things by subscription in the pre-Wikipedia world of the 1980s. I had a friend who had a set of animal cards that I coveted. Each card had a few little facts about the animal on the back. Why would you want that? I don't know. I was eight. I spent a surprising amount of time arranging them into alphabetical order within each category. It was as satisfying a task as it was weird.

 

(And there were books, of course, too. My father had the Time Life series about the Old West. Each book had a vinyl cover crafted to look like hand-tooled saddle leather, if you were a credulous small child as I was.)

 

I found this site which documents a lot of the different sets which were available. Everything from types of cars to gardening to war planes and American history. Maybe I'm wrong about Wikipedia: looking through this list, now I kind of think the explosion of cable television channels has more to do with the death of these subscription cards than the internet did!