"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... )

Among my cookbook stash are a number of those little cooking pamphlets put out by companies as marketing ploys to get women to buy and use their products.  One of them is Sealtest Kitchen Recipes -- World's Fair Edition.  This was the New York World's Fair of 1939, and the theme was science and how it would impact the life of the average man.

The ( Read more... )

I promise that I'll post recipes for something other than salad or salad dressings one of these days!  But the salad section of most old cookbooks seems to be the spot where so many interesting recipes are found.  And by "interesting"  I probably don't mean delicious, at least not in the case of this next dish.
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Yes, people in the 1920s apparently thought that marshmallows, mayonnaise and whipped cream made a dandy salad dressing.  Here's another Twenties salad, this one from an Ohio church cookbook dated 1923.

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I love old cookbooks, as I know a lot of people do.  The older the better, in fact -- I have a reproduction of Mrs. Beeton (1860s); two original editions of cookbooks by Marion Harland (1870s); a heavily-used and much-battered copy of A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband, with Bettina's Best Recipes (1917); and any number of church and community ( Read more... )