There’s something wonderfully retro about a sloppy joe in a 1950′s Americana kind of way. You can imagine not Betty Draper (God Forbid she cook anything as plebeian as a sloppy joe) but her PTA peers
serving sloppy joes to their fresh scrubbed kids and withdrawn husbands. The entire time I was growing up (in the post-Julia Child, Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck era of California Cuisine), I only encountered a sloppy joe between the covers of books. The books were invariably slightly out of date, with lunch ladies (also a foreign concept) serving up steamy sloppy joes in the context of a school cafeteria to girls in bobby socks and boys with pompadours. I had some idea of what a sloppy joe was, thanks to my mother’s 1955 edition of the Better Homes and Garden Junior Cookbook, which blithely incorporated cans of condensed soup, “summer drink powder” and canned fruit cocktail into its recipes, but it didn’t frankly, sound like anything I would eat. The somewhat disturbing cans of “manwich” I glimpsed at the grocery store (we certainly never bought them) only confirmed my impression that sloppy joes were a thing of the past and should stay there.
