I should put that in my diary; Lobster Newburg and Gimlets should get a divorce, they’re not getting along very well.
– Betty Draper
Should get ‘em to put another egg in it... one egg is good, two eggs
are better
– Roger Sterling
When Mad Men aired for the first time, like many I was taken with the styling, but what fascinated me most were the food references: how they added nuance to the characters, related to the unfolding plot, and what they revealed about the status quo at the time.
In those early seasons a Caesar salad prepared table-side sets up Roger Sterling as a more-is-more kind of man, ‘One egg is good,’ he says of the dressing, ‘two eggs are better.’ While the highly ambitious, newly-married Pete Campbell takes great delight in instructing his wife, Trudy, to have ‘rib-eye in the pan with butter’ on the table when he gets home.
Betty Draper, the idealised image of domesticity, entertains with a Round-the-World dinner party that reinforces her husband Don Draper’s concept for the Heineken campaign. When Roger invites himself for supper, she sacrifices her steak and makes do with salad – ‘I’m a vegetarian sometimes,’ says Betty.
After that fateful night Betty prepares roast beef as a peace offering for Don, who then takes his revenge on Roger with oysters and martinis. Not forgetting Pete’s ceramic chip n’ dip – the wedding gift he exchanges for a rifle – intended for sour-cream dip that couldn’t be served with anything other than Utz potato chips.
It’s a Chip ’n Dip. You have your friends over, you put chips on the side and dip in the middle... we went to these people’s house and they had one. It had sour cream with these little brown onions in it. It was very good.
– Pete Campbell
Using the show’s dialogue as the starting point and collaborating with two colleagues whose work I admire, photographer Russell Smith and décor and fashion stylist Kate Boswell, we created a food shoot reminiscent of the the cooking and dining of the early Mr and Mrs Draper of Mad Men.
From recipe development through to post-production, our intention was to remain true to what Betty might have whipped up for Don from her beloved Betty Crocker’s Hostess Cookbook (spotted in season two), with ingredients that were in vogue at the time – celery, green pepper, paprika, and sprigs of curly parsley.
All the photographs were carefully lit by Russell, who worked with a retoucher on the processing to make sure the final images resembled those that might have appeared in the magazines of the day – alongside the advertising spreads of Sterling Cooper. Kate tracked down a Casa Pupo chip n’ dip and scouted a pristine location that hadn’t been redecorated since 1960.
There were egg-yolk yellow tiles and avocado-green formica tops in the kitchen, which led into a wood-panelled breakfast nook. And the owner confided she had invested in enough plush wall-to-wall carpeting and matching dusty-pink velvet drapes to maintain her preferred look for a lifetime. I could have moved in.