A lot of the old cookbooks in my collection are "community cookbooks" -- the ones put out by local organizations as fundraisers.  I think anybody who cooks enough probably ends up with a number of these, either because you contributed a recipe and feel obliged to buy a copy of the book, or because someone was traveling and bought one for you, ( Read more... )

"What were they thinking?" is a question that comes to mind fairly often when you spend a bit of time with old cookbooks.  I'm sure that fifty or a hundred years from now people will be looking back on early twenty-first century cookbooks with the same sense of wonder at the odd things we ate.   But somehow, I can't see anything today beating ( Read more... )

Most of the cookbooks from the early twentieth century don't really have all that many recipes for fish.  Fish, it would seem, fell out of favor sometime around 1920 -- because that's when a lot of the cookbooks I have suddenly stop mentioning much of anything fish-wise except canned tuna and salmon.  Shellfish do slightly better; it's easy to find ( Read more... )