that period in the mid-20th century where the middle class suddenly had access to unprecedented food variety but no idea what to do with it and ended up inventing hundreds of doomed dishes like lime cheese jello salad or ham and banana hollandaise is thematically akin to the cambrian explosion

The end of this post punched me in the face but you’re not wrong

But that’s not really what happened!

Yes, there was sudden, unprecedented access to foodstuffs previously unavailable to all but the richest people. In fact it was a five-fold thing:

1) People had more disposable income than they’d had before. They could afford expensive food.

2) Refrigeration meant that people could keep foods longer - it was no longer “Oh, i will buy a chicken and I must cook it tonight” but rather “I will roast the chicken on Saturday, and that will also be good for dinner on Sunday, and chicken salad sandwiches on Monday and Tuesday.”

3) New kitchen appliances and conveniences meant more elaborate recipes were practical - thirty minutes of whisking by hand became five minutes with a hand mixer.

4) Refrigerated shipping made it practical to ship fruits and meats from farther away - this also marked a divorce from seasonal foods, as it became possible to ship fresh fruits and vegetables from warmer climates.

5) New processing techniques made certain foods cheaper. We tend to mostly think of this in terms of convenience foods: flash-frozen vegetables, mixes, and eventually the “TV dinner”, but gelatin is a pretty big deal. Gelatin used to be made by rendering keratin from animal sources, and making it clear and high quality was a very intensive process only available to the upper class - but it was one of the only ways to preserve certain foods before refrigeration - making many of these meat jelly foods the province of the well-to-do.

And that is what informed the middle class at this time. They weren’t just doing random food pairings. What they were doing was imitating upper-class foods of the prior decades. They were trying to pair meats and fruits, putting them in clear gelatin, and creating the kind of sauces which had previously been too labor-intensive to serve in the average household.

It took people a while to settle down and learn the unique characteristics of the newly available foodways, and create cuisine which was complementary to that, rather than aping foods which existed within different limitations. But it wasn’t random at all.