From the “57 Varieties [of Pickles]” slogan used by the H. J. Heinz Company.
Pronunciation
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1994, Bruce Palmer, How to Restore Your Harley-Davidson[1], →ISBN, page 13:
Is the stock 1939 Harley-Davidson you are looking at 100% 1939 or is it 50% 1939 and 50% Heinz 57, or does it only have a motor with 1939 crankcases sitting in a 1972 chassis?
2003, Jeffery Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards[2], →ISBN, page 78:
Then, too, designers and developers who’ve taken the time to learn the Heinz 57 varieties of proprietary scripting and authoring might see little reason to learn anything new…
2006, Richard S. Kitchen, Mathematics Education at Highly Effective Schools that Serve the Poor[3], →ISBN, page 84:
[quoting a teacher at a middle school] So the 7th grade math one [curriculum], is like Heinz 57, it's from everywhere and anywhere
(informal, of a person or animal, chiefly a dog) Having ancestry of many different origins; to be of mixed race or breed.
1995, Erika Bourguignon, “Identity and the Constant Self”, in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society[4], volume 19, page 183:
“[…] My mother is a bit more on the Heinz 57 side. She's got a strong Germanic background, a little bit of British, and my maternal grandmother is French-Canadian.”
1997, Richard Rhodes, Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer[5], →ISBN, page 282:
There just wasn’t any place on the farm for four more Heinz 57 dogs running around.
As one woman (Cathy Thomas) vividly and wittily put it, ‘To be a Heinz 57 American, a white, class-confused American, land of the Kleenex type American, is so formless in and of itself’