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So, What's Going On Here?
If you've just stumbled across this blog, let me introduce myself! I'm a librarian living in South Florida, and I collect books about all sorts of things. One of my collection areas happens to be cookbooks.
I love reading through old cookbooks, noting the marks that previous cooks left to indicate their favorite recipes (or those that didn't ( Read more... ) -
Kitchen Mysteries
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... ) -
A Dinner They'll Never Forget
"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... ) -
Just a Cup of Coffee, Please
Ah, the daily cup of coffee. I'm one of those disgusting people who wakes up readily and cheerfully without the intervention of caffeine, but having watched friends, college roommates, some family members and my spouse stumble around only semi-coherent before their morning cup, I know how important it is for most other people.
The caffeine- ( Read more... ) -
Sweets to the Sweaty
The Victorians were people who really knew their desserts. Cakes, pies, puddings, custards, trifles, jellies -- you name it and you can find a recipe for it somewhere in a cookbook published between 1860 and 1900. Usually an elaborate recipe, too. These folks truly never met a saturated fat gram, a carbohydrate, or a calorie they didn't ( Read more... ) -
Let's Get Cooking
One of the really fun things about old cookbooks is the way they tell you how to cook some things.
Baked goods haven't changed at all: breads and muffins and biscuits and pies will all burn themselves into inedibility if you leave them in the oven for too many minutes. Meats and fish are much the same: leave 'em in the oven or the roaster too ( Read more... ) -
Everything Old is New Again
In looking through my collection of old cookbooks and recipe pamphlets, I'm mostly struck by how many things are in them that nobody today would be likely to eat. But every now and again a recipe pops up that is just as completely relevant to today's world as it was to the time in which it was published -- but not necessarily for the same reasons.
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Something Fishy
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... ) -
Scientific Cookery -- Now with Cottage Cheese!
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... ) -
Somewhere, over the . . .
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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