As a child of the '80's, it intrigues me that a cookbook from 1960 included a recipe for "Molded Avocado and Tuna". I don't recall avocados being popular until the late nineties or early aughts. At least not in southwestern Ohio.
This raises the question: was there a previous period of avocado popularity, or was this one of those recipes included in a cookbook with unobtanium ingredients that no regular home cook ever makes?
>was there a previous period of avocado popularity,
I suspect it was regional, and as you observed, Ohio (and the Midwest in general) was not one of the regions 40+ years ago.
At my (Midwestern) college radio station in the 1970s, we used to get PSAs (public service announcements) to read from the California Avocado Advisory Board[0,1] touting the fruit, sometimes they were mocked regarding what kind of advice we give to avocados.
I recall my first direct experience with an avocado wasn't until I moved to California some years later.
[1] at the above link, you can read about how a Sunset magazine cover featuring avocado dish played a role in popularizing avocado across the nation in the 1970s
I liked the recipe from an earlier time edition of Joy of Cooking that used turtle eggs that are now from a protected species. I never tried it, mind you.
People would have known about them at least as avocado was a popular interior decorating color in the late 60s and 70s.
In general the food of that era was sweet and bland, so often recipes like this were just to give the reader a sense of excitement, rather than something likely to actually be made.
I remember reading the book "The Man Who Saved Britain" [0] (a history of Bond novels & movies) and the author was describing some of the exotic foods, such as an avocado, being something the readers were unlikely to experience in a world of currency controls and import restrictions. One thing that pops up in that book is why the package tour industry was invented and how it applied to Goldfinger.
My suspicion is that some of those "exotics" appeared only in novels and the cookbook authors never expected their readers to ever be able to make the items.
When I was a kid in my rural Canadian town, many things taken for granted today were just not in grocery stores. Primarily I don't recall seeing cantaloupes ever, and I would be surprised if avocados were there. Heck I recall there only being one or two types of onion, typically, and lots of things were only available in season.
I imagine stores in the "big city" might have had some of these things, or maybe only specialty stores? Yet even today if I buy apples "out of season", they taste dry and tasteless. Makes sense considering how they arrived from South America or whatever.
As a test I've bought apples from the local farmer at perfect ripeness, stored them in a cold room, and they taste far better than apples, out of season, in the grocery store. So not stocking apples from South America historically made sense, especially in a rural area, where every family I knew bought a bushel or two of apples in season, and put them in a cold room.
It's so weird. People are quite concerned about environmental concerns, then don't buy and store things when in season. Then they buy those same things from 1/2 the planet away, and wonder why all the shipping happens.
And on top of all this, a bushel of apples is far cheaper at the farmer, than buying them piecemeal at the grocery store.
I recall a cookbook from the 1970's that lists such exotic delicacies as avocadoes, mangoes and chile peppers. From the presentation it was clear that these were possibly expensive, but one could find them, especially in large cities.
I was eating avocado, sprouts and Muenster cheese sandwiches since the early 70’s. This was in Florida. Could be produce shipping made them more viable up north by the 90’s.
This raises the question: was there a previous period of avocado popularity, or was this one of those recipes included in a cookbook with unobtanium ingredients that no regular home cook ever makes?