Who Knew?

Every now and then I come across a book that I just know is rare.  The Fisherman’s Cook Book by Paul Lorck Eidem is one of those.

For one thing, the author is Norwegian and although it is an English edition, it was published by a Swedish publisher and printed in Norway.  Paul Lorck Eidem has some fame in Norway as a children’s author and he has also written non-fiction books about the Nazi occupation.  Go ahead, looking him up!

I know all of this because I was feverishly standing in the stacks trying to get enough of a cell signal to look the book up because, unfortunately, the Swedish publisher didn’t seem concerned at all with putting a date in the book.  You know something is rare when you have trouble finding a simple thing like publication date, even when you are driving the information superhighway.   Finally, I found an old entry from a vintage book dealer that listed it as 1975.  I had actually found a French edition with that same date listed so that is good enough for me.

I figure a guy who grew up on a Norwegian island had a good start on learning to fish and knowing how to cook what he catches.  The book is small, about 100 pages, but it is packed full of practical information about all kinds of fish, both saltwater and freshwater.  And it is a wonderful looking book as well.  The first thing that attracted me was the brown canvas along the binding, which seemed a quite fitting and rustic feature for a book about fishing and fishermen.  “Cool quality” I’d call it.  It is full of impressive color pictures …

… and the food photography is engaging.  I’m getting hungry just looking through the book while writing this.

The information is concise and informative.  Look at this little page on smoking fish.  The book is full of interesting and factual tidbits.  It does have recipes. but I would say it is more about techniques than recipes …

… but here is one … who can think of Norwegian fisherman without thinking of Pickled Herring?

Not commercial prepared pickled herring,  dear readers, you can actually pickle your own herring!   My stomach growled at the picture … and I’m not even sure I have ever even eaten pickled herring.

This one is going on the “good” shelf.  Well, one of them, anyway.

Is it a Magazine or a Book? 1000 Recipe Cook Book

This was a rare find.  I’ve been collecting for years and had never heard of the 1000 Recipe Cook Book before, but when I saw two of these on my recent trip to Virginia I knew they were something special.  The pictured version was published in 1953.  Information was scarce on these publications, but apparently they extended back to the mid-forties.  These were Dell publications and I assume they were likely sold at grocery stores, perhaps early examples of checkout line display publications.  Given the magazine format, it is not surprising that they are so rare — they were cheaply printed on low-quality paper.   However, I found that they were surprisingly comprehensive cookbooks.  I don’t know if they actually have 1000 recipes, but they certainly are pretty close to the mark.  They also have short articles on cooking and the recipes range from very interesting to pretty strange.  They were a perfect fit for me and my collection.

The 1953 version simply oozes fifties-style sensibilities.  Look at the June Cleaver-esque mother figure!

The person who had this magazine/book took good care of it.  Well, sort of.  They punched holes in it, I guess, so they could put them in a binder.  It is surprising that this particular one ended up in such good condition.

And there are a few wonderful ads, like this one from the back cover.  “Banana Scallops?”   Gotta love the fifties.

Here’s a zoom of the trademark “Chiquita” — I had no idea she dated back that far.  I remember her dancing across the TV screen in the sixties, but early fifties?  Interesting.

There are so many recipes it was hard to choose, so I just picked a couple to highlight some of the extremes and trends they tried to represent.  Like I said, there are hundreds and hundreds of recipes.  Hopefully a thousand!

These are on the offbeat end of the scale, yet, although offbeat they do actually sound pretty refreshing.  The apricot drink is more akin to a shake and the orange drink seems like the grandfather of your average smoothie.

I chose Cantonese Stew because it represented an entire class of recipes in this book … international recipes but in this case, more like foreign sounding recipes.  I think this is Cantonese simply because it has soy sauce, the way you can predict with 97 percent certainty if  a recipe has Hawaiian in the title, it contains pineapple.

Now we proceed into the bizarre.  I had to think, Baked Deviled Eggs?  I don’t have a set process for these blog entries.  Each one is an adventure.  I shot the picture for this based on the title alone.  “That’s interesting,” I thought to myself.  All I could say when I started to read this recipe so I could comment here was “Ewwwwwww.”  I read it again.  Then again to make sure I was reading it okay.  Now, I’ve never in fact tried to bake a hard cooked egg before, but … well, 20-25 minutes?

I have used recipes that actually tasted delicious that looked awful.  I’m not sure I want to even try this one.  But hey, it was the fifties.  Most of the people lived, right?

Still, the book is a fascinating read.  It is a perfect example of why I love publications from this era.  We think we live in an age of sophisticated cooking.  It had been primitive and uninteresting for years, decades, centuries.  Of so we think  But these people were at least trying.  They made the mistakes so Martha Stewart and Bobby Flay didn’t have to.  And there are good recipes from that era, believe me.

That Crazy Cookbook Guy Takes a Field Trip

I keep mentioning the twenty-five cent sale where I get a lot of my cookbooks.  This past weekend was a sale weekend so I took a few photos of the place to just show you what I am talking about.  As you can see from the sign, everything about the place is low budget. I guess you would call it a warehouse store.

It used to be in a storefront on 5th Street, so I guess they just kept the name when they moved.  Now it is on US Highway 70 between the small towns of Mebane and Haw River in NC.  If you’re speeding by you might just miss it.

I think the owner buys in such quantity he found himself warehousing his overstock and moving books took so much time it made more sense to warehouse and shelve the books in one place.

When I say “warehouse,” I mean it.  It is just a big dusty old warehouse (well it isn’t really dusty).  As you can see, there is nothing special out front – it is a budget operation.  That helps keep the prices low.

All the books are 99 cents, except on the sale weekends (I think small children’s books might have cheaper regular prices).  They sell all kinds of books and  have CDs and DVDs too, but, of course, we all  know what I shop for.

Inside, what you see is a bookstore.  Since it is a warehouse, it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  For some of the lighting, the store depends on skylights and if it is bright outside sometimes it is tough to see the top shelf.  They are ‘way-up-there’ top shelves.

Cookbooks are one of the biggest categories after general fiction.  They have tons of fiction, both hardbacks and paperbacks.  The three shelf units of cookbooks are where I spend most of my time:

The cookbooks are pretty much shelved where they find empty space.  That means, your humble crazy cookbook guy has to pretty much go through every unit every time he comes there.  Some of the books never sell — I see them time and time again.

There is one problem — although there is a general organization scheme, within categories there is almost no organization.  They are constantly shelving books and just don’t have time to break them down. In paperbacks, they try to alphabetize by author but it is impossible to keep it up.   In short, if you don’t like to browse, it is not the place for you.

For me, a trip to this bookstore is a commitment of several hours.  These are tall shelves.  In some of the photos, you can see people standing next to them.  I think they just use stock eight-foot sections of lumber.  .  They have two step-stools in this place and if you are lucky you can snag one for a while to give the high places more scrutiny.  Luckily they often put things like Southern Living annual editions on sections of the cookbook top shelves. That helps me at least — been there done that.  If I can, I flip through books one at a time.  That is how you find the really good ones.  It is not unusual to see me on my hands and knees looking at the bottom shelves.

In a few spots, they have huge bins of books.  I think the owner found that people like to dig.  The first thing you see when you come in is a section of children’s books in bins and there are always people digging in those.  The bins in the picture of in front of the counter … those are paperback shelves behind them.  Exclusively paperback shelves are made out of two-by-fours, and the other shelves are made from two-by-sixes.  That’s lumber talk.  They are sturdy.   Some have backs, but most are just open back-to-back shelves so sometimes books fall through to the other side.

The sales run Thursday to Saturday on weekends after the third Thursday of the month.  This was an early month because the first of October fell on a Thursday.  Whew, I almost forgot to check.  I think other people missed it too because it was not as busy as it usually is.

Beyond the counter space, is what I call their triage area, where they unload the huge packing crates of books.  Those are sometimes somewhat categorized but are often just marked paperbacks or trade books, something like that.  That’s Ron — he is usually in charge on the weekends.  He and the owner sometimes let me come back and go through the cookbooks before they are shelved.  Each one of those stacks of books are  waiting to be shelved.  In the background, you can see cartons of books stacked up that haven’t been processed yet.

Being a regular has perks.  Ron brought me a book he found he thought I’d like.  He was right.  It went right into my basket.

Like I said, the place is already a bargain.  Everything is 99 cents all the time — except on sale weekends.  These sales are truly incredible.  I think I got like 16 cookbooks this weekend.  Four bucks.  Find me ONE cookbook for four bucks.  I had the stack of books in my last short post.  In fact, I think I forgot one.

Pictures don’t do the place justice, but here are a few more:

Next sale weekend is November 17 — if you are looking for bargains, this is the place!  It is on the south side of US Highway 70, about midway between Mebane and Haw River in North Carolina.  I’ll apologize now, in case I shove you out of my way.

Roswell — The UFO Cookbook?

Sorry to have been so tardy with my next post.  I’ve been taking a few days off to work around the house.  Like I said before, sometimes life intervenes.  This isn’t even the post I had planned on doing next, but Facebook reminded me today of an anniversary of sorts.  Two years ago yesterday, I found today’s cookbook and I posted it on FB two years ago today.  I find myself simply compelled to  honor the anniversary.

At first glance, Cooking Around The World – And At Home, seems fairly ho-hum.  It does have a rather drab and uninteresting cover and the cover has only one redeeming feature: “$1.00” … cheap.  Of course I got it for a quarter, but in context, a buck for a cookbook immediately tells me it is OLD.  I knew it was going in the basket.  There was no way I was leaving it.  As I recall I had some pretty stiff competition that day.  As you can imagine, I am not the only collector who haunts these quarter sales.  There was one woman nearby who had muscled past me and was grabbing a lot of precious goodies.

  Still, I couldn’t help but glance inside before I totally claimed my find.  There it was, the magic word “Roswell” then I saw the dates … “1947-1948” … and well, for one thing, a 1940’s community fundraiser is a must-buy.  But as the date sank in, I returned to the “Roswell” bit and immediately everything clicked into place.

I have to tell you, I giggled like a little girl.  I knew this was an unusually rare find that had historical interest.

Obviously, this Junior Women’s Club had a lot of members who had some worldly associations — back then the Air Force base at Roswell was basically the home to the US nuclear strike force.  It was an important base so they must have had people from all over.  Why else would a tiny place like Roswell even try to publish a cookbook with culturally diverse recipes?  There is another irony at work here.  When they put this together, they had no idea of the unlikely fame fate would foist upon their desert community.  They strove, as a gimmick, to add some depth of purpose in their attempt to raise money for the Roswell community.

And they do, even if they sort of miss the mark on some of the spelling.

“Jambalayah” is a case in point.  Yet it seems a passable attempt and given that it was 1947, I give them a B+ for effort.
I’d make this.  It looks good! Perhaps not 100% authentic but, well, it was post-war and I assume adjustments had to be made, especially in tiny Roswell.

The same can be said for “Raviola.”

It’s a solid recipe, perhaps from a war bride straight from Italy.  That is hard to tell, but with the stature of the air base and the fact that the war had only been over less that two years, I’d say it is a good bet.

This one looks pretty authentic to me.

Now, given the proximity to Mexico and the close Hispanic cultural ties that have long existed in New Mexico, we can’t be surprised to see a good Mexican food section, can we?

Fresh Masa Dough, from scratch?

I repeat:  from scratch?  I’d have bought the book just for that.  Seriously.

These look good as well … and authentic.

We also have lots of ads … what is a good community cookbook without links to the community?  I miss this in most recent fundraisers.  Involve  your community, folks!  I always enjoy looking at the ads.  I saw a number of auto dealerships … two on this page alone.  Who knew?

This is a tiny cookbook, but it packs quite a punch.  Just the date alone made it a must-buy for me.  The Masa recipe?  Must-buy.  The ads?  Always welcome.  The quaint phonetic spelling of some cultural favorites?  Great stuff.

Any of those items would give this unassuming little book a place of honor on my shelf.

But … IT’S FROM FREAKING 1947 ROSWELL!!!!!  I mean OMG, OMG, OMG!!!!

I still can’t believe that snooty, grabby woman missed it.  And she DID miss it.

I could see the look on her face when I showed it to her. She knew what it was.  I still imagine she’s creeping like Gollum out in the bushes, conspiring ways to reclaim her precious.

I’ve

A Sandwich By Any Other Name

The little treasures I picked up at Smith Building Mercantile in Alta Vista, VA the other day just keep blowing my mind.   I got an array of old magazine-style cookbooks, the type of publication that entices you as you stand in line at the supermarket.  At the time I thought I’d probably do a combined post on all of them but as I have looked them over I realized there is no way that is going to work.  There is way too much material in these little gems.  They pack a lot of punch into a small package.

I mean, take a look at the Good Housekeeping Sandwich Manual, advertising “more than 400 different sandwich ideas” for our erstwhile baby-boomer post-war housewife.

It boasts two full page ads, one for Sunbeam Bread, complete with Miss Sunshine peeking over a heavily buttered slice of white bread.
She eats it, I want some!

The other is basically an advertisement from the American Bakers Association.  They’re all about bread.

Look at that ad, lobbying the harried housewife and mother of 1950 to buy bread, “your best food buy.”  Whew.

There is science in this thing!  The science of Sandwiches.  Man-sized, deckers, meals, snacks, savory, sweet … fancy cuts and exquisite finishes … parties, picnics … O, wow!

I get tired of just thinking about the possibilities, all “more than 400” of them.  Chicken liver and scrambled egg sandwiches? Who woulda thunk it?

Look at this … a flow-chart on filling a lunchbox.  I had a lunchbox like that!  It really takes me back.  And they break it all down … it’s marvelous.  Ya gots yer meat, ya gots yer veg, ya gots yer fruit, oh, and of course don’t forget the bread and top it off with a drink!  It’s so easy.  And nutritious!

And who can think of a sandwich in 1950 without thinking of everyone’s favorite Bumstead … Dagwood.  There it is, a blueprint for the famous Dagwood sandwich, along with a bunch of other “famous” bread-time treats.  My cats can’t wait to knock down a Pyramid!

There are menus suggestions, bread guides, even recipes so you can bake your own fancy breads … you remember that, don’t you?  There goes my theory about the baker’s association trying to win us over to their bread over our bread … they’re buttering both sides of the fence here.

My gosh, they even have a sandwich for consipiracy theorists!

What the heck is that, the Illuminati?

In reality it was supposed to be a fanciful kids sandwich … they had things like a clown, a chicken, and here, I guess, is your basic Picasso.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love this little book.  It is in pretty good shape even thought it is a bit worn, I mean, it is 65 years old and even has some minor repairs with 50’s era cellophane tape.  See?  Somebody else loved it too.   Here’s what gets me.  I picked it up as an afterthought.  I was thinking, “sandwich manual, okay.”  It looked old enough but it is  thin, only 31 pages and I couldn’t find a date.  I waffled on it … and no, there are no waffle sandwiches in it.

Anyway, it wasn’t until after I brought it home that I fell in love with it.  It wasn’t until I was taking pictures for this blog that I noticed the 1950 on the Baker’s Association logo.  Wow.  What a great addition to my collection.  Where are my protective plastic covers …

Top Selling Community Cookbook!

I got a little backed up today, so I am just posting a quick entry.

We can call this my Throwback Thursday post.

I just pulled this book off a handy shelf today.  If you browse used bookstores you’ll come across this one quite often because, well, because they printed and sold a heck of a lot of them.
River Road Recipes was first published by the Junior League of Baton Rouge Louisiana in 1959.  My copy is a reprint from 1966 … I pick them up every time I see them trying to find a first edition but  this ’66 edition is the earliest I’ve found.   Mint condition too and I feel fortunate to have it.  This book is, I think, STILL in print.  They almost need to add an extra copyright page on newer editions, they cram in so many different  printings.  I have been told that it is the best selling cookbook in Junior League history.  And that is saying something because there are a LOT of Junior League cookbooks out there. .

I like Junior League Cookbooks.  They are very professionally done, and they give a good cross-section of America, one region at a time. Each group tries to offer something special.  Many groups have put out a number of different cookbooks.

Given that this one is from the heart of Louisiana, I’ve included a blurb they wrote about gumbo along with two gumbo recipes. I love gumbo.  I think I’ve said that before.  I think I’ll say it again.  
I love gumbo! 

Just to fill out this quick post, I  pulled another recipe at random

This Treasure Cake seemed to fit the bill.  Not quite sure why they call it that — oh, I see, it has a layer of icing baked into the cake  Mmmmmm.

Not much else to say about River Road Recipes since I would not be inclined to make fun of it.
If you see it, buy it. It is a good cookbook.

If you find a 1959 edition, send it to me.

Road Trip!

Sure, I took a day off yesterday.   My daughter got engaged recently and we drove 100 miles to get an in-person glimpse of her ring.  We often meet a little more than half-way (for us) for lunch.  It was fun!  And on the way back we decided to drive through a little town we had never visited before.  You may know the kind of town I’m talking about.   If  you make a fairly regular long trip, you might pass by the exit signs for such a town on the highway time and time again. It is just a generic landmark on your long trip.  Alta Vista VA was one of those for us. About ten years ago I used to drive that road every week; I did that for four years.   Even now, we still make the trip several times a year.  This trip, on a whim, we decided to make the side trip … and actually TAKE the Alta Vista exit for once.

It’s a small town with a quaint downtown section.   We didn’t really explore the town too much after we saw the Smith Building Mercantile window display.  We saw old stuff and we stopped.

It is a bit of a combination antique store/flea market/thrift store.  Portions of the store are divided like booths.  The basement is devoted to books and that is where I ended up fairly quickly.   The section devoted to cookbooks was quite an eclectic mix … well, it was mostly cookbooks.  They seem a bit overwhelmed in their attempts at organization.  It took some doing to rescue some of the treasures from stacks of books and from the small shelf buried behind the stacks of books.  We will be going back –I think I missed some.  I’ll be highlighting a few of those finds over the next several posts.

One of the last books I found was The Working Wives Cookbook, a 1969 edition of a book originally published in 1963.  Authors Theodora Zavin and Freda Stuart promise  a system of preparing meals to relieve the pressures of the busy working housewife.

Well, at least they took a shot at it.  Somebody thought enough of the book to reprint it, right?  I mentioned another book a few days ago that seemed to be an anti-feminist throwback even in the early 70s.  This one is in the same mold, but it at least acknowledges that a wife and mother can aspire to work. Well, as long as dinner is on the table every night, right?

The theory they present is that most of the recipes are fairly easy, but unfortunately the busy wife and mother must head into the kitchen after dinner and do most of the prep for tomorrow’s meal so it can be wrapped up, all ready to throw in the oven for the finishing touches the next evening.  Whew.  That really doesn’t seem to save her much time or pressure, does it?   I didn’t read all the fine print, so I don’t know what they thought about hungry teenagers, but that was one flaw that came to mind.  When I had hungry teenagers in the house, tomorrow’s delicious dinner would likely have been today’s after school snack and I’d be off buying pizza or KFC.

It does have a sixties-era idea of pseudo-gourmet food too.  I’ve picked a couple of recipes at random to illustrate.

This recipe, Mushroom Biscuits, has a certain amount of “what?….” appeal.  At least it did for me.  I am still a bit confused about what it is supposed to be.  A gourmet take on biscuits and gravy perhaps?

I also wonder about trying to “cut a well” into the top of the frozen biscuits.  Maybe the trip to the emergency room for stitches is supposed to allow the working wife/mother to get a few moments rest and some pain killers?

Now this Crabmeat Casserole seems a little better. Well, I guess the crabmeat will keep 23 hours okay in the fridge.  Or maybe this is a setup for a preplanned sick day.  Don’t get me wrong, I think the recipe is fine.  I just wonder about using it as a make-ahead recipe.  Seriously.  You’re adding the crabmeat to a warm mixture and immediately refrigerating it?
I’d just go ahead and make it.

All the recipes are like this.  It’s a gimmick cookbook, trying to address a perceived problem with a trick.  It doesn’t really save the working mother any time or work, it just gets dinner on the table faster so the hubster and kids don’t get on her nerves about dinner before she’s had time to slap down a few martinis.  Then she’s off to the kitchen again, basically cooking tomorrow’s dinner.  It’s a good thing Dick Van Dyke and The Munsters will be on endless reruns to allow her to catch up.

Given the context and the attempt to address the perceived problem of a working wife, I thought this was a good cookbook, at least from a historical perspective.  I’ll have to think about what sort of category this fits into.

Let’s Celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday!

Welcome to the 20th post of That Crazy Cookbook Guy. It’s been a wild ride.
I know this, blogging is addictive. I have serious writing to do and here I am, blogging about yet another cookbook. Thank you for reading.

Today I pulled another book out of my recent acquisitions. The Garden Club Holiday Cookbook is a 1971 publication of The Montgomery Federation of Garden Clubs. It is a compilation of submissions from garden club members around the country. The large format (approximately 10×7)allows for an average of four recipes per page. Very professionally done. When they say “holiday” they really mean it. The book is organized through the calendar year from New Year’s Eve through Christmas. Well, technically, New Year’s Eve should be at the end of the year, right?
Of course, Christmas and Thanksgiving are very well represented, but it has special sections with recipes for things like Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, and the Fourth of July. That’s not all, it has Memorial Day and Labor Day as well and in a bit of poor planning, it has recipes for both Lincoln’s Birthday AND Washington’s Birthday. I guess they missed the news that these would be combined as President’s Day the same year the cookbook was published. Oh, there is a good section on Halloween too although one of my pet peeves is calling it a “holiday” … it is a special day and is great fun and a lot of laughs, but holiday? Okay, that’s just me. It is a party day. One could say the same thing about St. Patrick’s Day if you are not Irish, but it is at least an ethnic holiday since it is a holiday in Ireland. Okay, the Wiccans, right.  Let’s just go on, okay?

Are you ready to Party Down?  Don’t you wish you were one of these people?  Ah, but  the book has no mention of Mother’s Day or Veteran’s Day or even Columbus Day ,,, I guess they didn’t rate, but Christmas Eve did. A single section also covers Weddings, Anniversaries, and Birthdays. The book ends with a section on “Festive Events” … oh, I see, this is where Mother’s Day and Father’s Day get covered. Also a Derby Day Brunch and Election Night Supper. As you can see, these mini-sections have suggested menus too, so if you need to have an After the Game Pancake Supper, or a Graduation Swim Supper, you are covered. You’re also covered for a Poker Party Snack. They end the book with what must be the most important menu of the all for the garden club members … the cherished Bridge Buffet.
So if you want to salute the memory of St. Patrick with a Leprechaun Pudding Cake, or honor Abraham Lincoln with a wonderful Barley Casserole, you are covered. Almost every Washington’s Birthday favorite has cherries, except for two bizarre inclusions, Coconut-Raspberry Bavarian, and Strawberry Marshmallow Whip. I guess they wanted other red fruits to be represented. Sad that they missed the whole President’s Day transition, but, well, anachronistic trends help make old cookbooks even more interesting. Most other represented holidays have good recipes for the holidays they represent. As expected, recipes for Memorial Day and Labor Day are a bit of a stretch. The former concentrates on camp food and the latter concentrates on barbeque favorites.

There are pictures throughout the cookbook and although many are in black and white, it does have quite a few color plates. The pictures are irritating because they aren’t captioned. This absolutely hideous cake picture is in the Easter introduction. Each section has an introduction narrative which is pretty useless because they ramble on and on and even throw in an extra recipe or two. Note: if you don’t put it in the recipe section, it isn’t going to make it into the index. I think the cake in the picture is what they called a Spring Bonnet Cake in this awful narrative. This recipe did not make it into the index.
I think if If there was a UFO Day, this would be the perfect cake.

With so many recipes to choose from it was difficult to pick one, but since it is October (and they totally ignored Columbus Day, I decided to go with a Halloween recipe.

There is even a color picture that shows these cookies. Okay, my lovely bride really likes owls so that’s why I picked this one. I have to admit, the cookies are pretty cute.

So, there are good things cooking at the Garden Club, but it isn’t all tea and crumpets. Still, it was an interesting find.

Quaint or Disgusting?

It’s a lazy rainy weekend.  In fact, it has been a lazy rainy weekend for about the last two weeks.  I’m ready for some sunshine again.  All my “solar” landscape lights last about ten minutes every night now due to lack of a recharge.

Today I finally got back to working on my latest novel and ran short of time, so I just pulled a book off the shelf.  I bought this a couple of years ago at, yes, you guessed it, some long forgotten quarter book sale.  On the surface, it looks really interesting but there may be a darker layer underneath.

In 1971 women’s liberation was in full swing, but not every woman had quite gotten on the bandwagon.  Take Beatrice Vaughn.  She put together The Lady’s Aid Cookbook that year and from the look of it, she thought it was still 1950.

It claims to be honoring the women of Lady’s Aid … as if that is an organization.  I think that was a term used in the Civil War.  By 1971, there were any number of women’s groups, and a lot of them put out their own cookbooks.  So, it appears dear Beatrice is honoring the generic concept of women getting together to help their community.  That’s fine, but this is a commercial cookbook, what we would call when I worked in publishing a TRADE cookbook.  It just pretends to be a little, sorta, kinda,  like a community cookbook.

It is dedicated to ” … every woman who has ever peeled a bushel of potatoes for a public supper, baked half a dozen pies for  a food sale, then stood on tired feet through a hot August afternoon to sell them …”

See what I mean?  What contrite hogwash … even for 1971.  I was there, things were moving slowly, but even then I thought things were progressing beyond this level.  She took her fifties mentality and found a publisher with fifties mentality and got this cookbook published.  Granted, she was maybe behind the times in New England, and she had apparently written a weekly food column in some unspecified publication for a long time, so maybe she was just a little out of touch.  Do you think?  And although I think the cover is actually pretty cool, the picture exudes the very thing I am talking about.  And that “300” overlay on top of the wordy blurb at the bottom, well that’s just irritating.

Okay, I’m probably being contextually hard on her.  There are some interesting recipes in the book, and the book does have a certain charm with anecdotes taken, I assume, from reader reports.

Still, she claims to be honoring women by collecting their many recipes she’s encountered over the years going to these many “ladies aid” events, yet she gives few, if any, credit for the recipes.  And there is really strange artwork too …

For instance, above some pork recipes … I mean, what is that supposed to mean?    Is that pig in heaven? Is that Arnold? … or is it Babe’s great-great-great-great grandfather?   Really strange stuff like that is peppered throughout the book.  1970s publisher clip art I guess.

For a sample recipe, I’ve chosen a “French Pork Pie” … not sure what makes it French. Couldn’t be the catsup, … the Tabasco sauce maybe?  Ah, Louisiana French …   N‘est-ce pas?

We’ll give old Beatrice a B+ for effort and a C- for cultural awareness.  It would be a failing grade in today’s world but in 1971 I make it a C-.

I’ve been writing these for a little over two weeks now, every day.  Because of the impact on my “other” writing, namely the sequel to my recently published novel, The Fever, I am thinking of dropping to three days a week.  What do you think?  Is that okay?  I’m having fun and my readership, small as it is, is steadily growing.  Leave a comment and let me know.

Unexpected Treasure!

Sometimes when I am in quarter-a-book-mode I make a split-second decision, yay or nay, because believe it or not there are some other people in the aisles just waiting to snatch up my pretties.

At first glance, Recipes From Madison’s Kitchens is a fairly nondescript fundraiser cookbook.  No date, no location immediately evident, just that it is the product of the fine women of the First Congregational Church.  Luckily, they managed to sell one ad.  If you are going to sell an ad, this is the kind of ad I want.

I remember seeing the ad, and the phone number.  On this ad, I saw “Madison 717” and that prompted me to drop the book in the basket.  Old-style phone numbers can mean any time period from the 30s to the 60s.  For me, that just screams vintage, an automatic buy.

It wasn’t until I started looking at the book to write this piece that I noticed the final piece of the puzzle.  The ad proudly announces the 1948 Oldsmobiles.  The ad also has the location … Madison Connecticut.  Thank you, East River Sales and Service!

A 1940s cookbook is a rare find.  There were fundraiser cookbooks in the 40s, but they are few and far between.  This one is in excellent condition, just a little wear around the edges.  It is also a very nicely printed book.  There is no indication of who printed it but for a church cookbook it is very nicely typeset and has a very professional look.  Credit is mentioned in the introduction for a particular editor, expressing thanks, so I am wondering if someone in the publishing industry provided a free service to the church.  The professional printing itself is not unusual for cookbooks in the forties.  The cookbook is very nicely organized, has a great index.

Here is one page of recipes … as one would expect from a town right on the coast of Long Island Sound, there are a lot of seafood recipes.  Here are some recipes for clams.  I couldn’t decide between all of these so I just included the entire page.

As I said, this was an unexpected treasure.  I always plan on taking a deeper look at the books I pick up, but that examination often gets delayed.  I pulled this book out at random and after finding that ad, I am so glad I did.

1948, wow.