Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Sunshine Hydrox


[Serving suggestion. Life, May 5, 1961. Click for larger desserts.]

I went in search of a lost cookie. Readers of a certain age will remember Hydrox (far superior, I always thought, to the Oreo). An added bonus: Hydrox was made by Sunshine Bakers, delivering “light inside the body” with every delicious bite.

Milk, bleach, and azithromycin sold separately.

[Here, from Atlas Obscura, is some Hydrox history.]

comments: 5

Daughter Number Three said...

As a child, I associated Hydrox with my mother's parents' house, while Oreos were what we had at home (and which I preferred). Thinking about the name Hydrox now, it feels like such a 19th or maybe early 20th century name... not a tasty food name to a modern ear.

Michael Leddy said...

It’s weird. I never thought about it until current events (or strange claims) brought it to mind.

Geo-B said...

Sunshine Bakers was in part an inspiration for Sendak's picture book In the Night Kitchen.

Michael Leddy said...

There’s another Life ad with three bakers tasting — could that be part of it? Now I have to find our copy of the book.

Michael Leddy said...

The Philadelphia Inquirer has this account: “You learn here, looking at a vintage postcard, of the illustrator’s Proustian inspiration for In the Night Kitchen: his unforgettable encounter with the striking Sunshine Bakers exhibition at the New York World's Fair in 1939, when he was 11 years old. His older sister and her boyfriend had left him (they'd actually split and abandoned him) mesmerized by the aroma of biscuit and cake, flour and milk, waving at the little bakers on the balcony (they were midgets) and their poster-sized crackers in front of the gleaming white building — all ‘salient features,’ as Patrick Rodgers, one of the exhibition's curators, writes of Sendak's storybook kitchen 30 years later.”

The ad I had in mind has at least one illustration-worthy baker, but those in the book, as I’d forgotten, all look like Oliver Hardy.