I’ve never actually chomped down on a hunk of Luer Pure Lard but it sure comes in a pretty box. Not only is the box coated with enough wax to make you feel like you’re actually picking up a fistful of lard but many important lard ladden foods are illustrated in glorious color on it.
I especially love this graphic of the chocolate cake:
I’m not sure how much the lard had to do with it but the way the cherry pink frosting is positioned on that cake knife hovering in perfect symmetry above the crumbs of chocolate is picture perfect.
I’m also not sure how ‘Luer” is pronounced but I have a feeling it’s not a perfect rhyme with “sure” as they’ve implied.
It’s a good thing that whoever came up with that was writing slogans and not lyrics. Always better with a perfect rhyme in songs though I can’t tell you how many songwriters throw that one out the window.
I never understood the use of these kind of boxes to package lard. Not that I ever bought any to know for “sure” but wouldn’t the product goop out of the sides and top and be more appropriate in a tub? I’m just glad that none of it slopped on this box before I got to it.
Manufactured by Luer Bros. Packing Co. of Alton, Ill. sometime around 1950, I have a feeling that the boxes were actually more popular than the lard inside. A search on Google turns up enough of these 2-1/2″ x 3″ x5″ honeys to paper a path from Manhattan to LA.
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Thank you, aKitschionado Ginger Durgin, for your generous contribution of ten Luer Lard boxes to the permanent collection of The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch!
Jody Mitchell
I remember having a white solid butter replacement called oleo in the refrigerator as a child … and eating it right out of the package. What in the heck was that and why don’t we have it any more? Please don’t tell me it causes cancer in lab rats…
P.S. I just read that oleo is Spanish or Italian for oil. Can anyone confirm this?
Allee
I don’t know anything about this other than I remember the name Oleo. God knows what was in all of those foods that we thought was a miracle of science back in the day…
Howard
Years ago, margarine was called “oleomargarine”. It is hydrogenated oil and it really bad for you. As people didn’t want to spread hardened oil on toast, it often came with a small packet of yellow food coloring to make the “oleo” appear more like butter. And sometimes even butter came with yellow coloring added because at certain times of the year, depending on what the cows were eating, the butter wasn’t very yellow.
As for the cake pictures, some people made “buttercream” frosting out of lard (or Crisco) and to this day, I think that the best pie crust is one made with lard.
Allee
That’s right. I don’t think that I ever saw the little packets of yellow food coloring but I certainly knew about them.
Many of my pie making friends say that the trick to great pie crust is lard.
Chris W.
“Luer” looks like the anglicized spelling of what would be spelled “Lür” in German, which (in German) would definitely not rhyme with “sure”. However, since this company is based in Illinois, they’ve probably anglicized the pronunciation as well as the spelling, in which case it likely does rhyme with “sure”.
Anglicized pronunciations can be weird. There’s a French bread bakery in San Francisco called Boudin, which in French would be pronounced more or less “boo-DANH”, but their commercials all say to pronounce it “bo-DEEN”… 8-P