AKA Abraham Bacoln


79¢ tarragon
January 13, 2007, 11:52 pm
Filed under: tidbit

I found this in my parents’ spice rack. It’s absolutely fascinating to me, though I think they were embarrassed by its age and what that implies about their culinary endeavors. I love the colors, the fonts, the styling – everything about the visuals is fantastic and just retro enough to be cool.

I also love the use of the words “Sea Food” and “Prepared Mustard” on the back label. Those really drive home the temporal disparity we got going on here.

But wait – the best part is the 79¢ stamped on the bottom. Now, this is very crude calculation here, but according to Froogle the average price of a bottle of tarragon around this size is $4.00-ish. If I dump that information into an inflation calculator and work backwards, it turns out that $4.00 in 2005 dollars is $0.79 in 1970 dollars. I can’t believe that this bottle of Tarragon is from 1970 … or is it?!

Dunh dunh dunnnnnnn-n-n-n-n-h!

and of course, you can view the larger size for better detail


5 Comments so far
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That’s awesome.

You could probably sell that in my mom&dad’s shop…but you should not. The sticker itself is just so nifty…
The age of it makes the whole situation even cooler…who bought taragon back then, before foodnetwork? Julia Child…and your parents.

Comment by Rebecca

or even tarragon…

Comment by Rebecca

This reminds me of snooping through my grandmother’s cubbards. I love the different fonts especially “use in.”

Comment by Stacie

And Trey’s parents, Rebecca. I probably have a jar just like that in my cupboard. I’ve used those jars to refill since forever, but I think the new ones still look like that, don’t they? Of course, I haven’t bought herbs that way for years. It’s much less expensive to get them at Good Shepherd, and I think they’re fresher, too.

Comment by Kelly Piepmeier

You can find out exactly how old it is if there’s a date code on the bottom: http://www.mccormick.com/content.cfm?ID=11985

Comment by mango




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