BRIDES IN THE KITCHEN

Apparently, back in the day, some cookbooks started with the premise that brides didn’t know how to cook (remember this was long before the Food Network came along). And I do know that some cookbooks (“Joy of Cooking”, “The Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook”) were considered eminently suitable for a new bride. I know; my first Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook was a wedding present when I married in 1958. But what could be more suitable or perfect than a cookbook with “Bride” in the title?

One such cookbook was “THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK” by Poppy Cannon, and published by Henry Holt and Company in 1954—but an identical title was used also by Myra Waldo, copyrighted in 1958 by Myra – paperback copies went through a number of printings. Well, you could have knocked me over with a basting brush when I entered “Bride’s cookbooks” to do a search on Amazon! I was so enchanted, I ordered several of the titles (like I needed another cookbook with “Bride” in the title.)

Let’s go over some of these titles together – maybe you know someone about to get married who doesn’t know how to cook? Could there really be such a person? I have no doubt it was far more common in the 1950s when I was graduating from high school and engaged in a wild dash to the altar, along with many girlfriends—girlfriends whose mothers never let them near the kitchen stove would call me up to ask how to do some of the most basic things – I had been blessed with a mother who turned me loose in the kitchen when I was ten or eleven years old. Not even my best friends had the latitude in the kitchen that I enjoyed – we did much of our cooking/experimenting in MY mother’s kitchen. I quickly discovered – if you could READ you could follow directions in a recipe. My mother’s Ida Bailey Allen Service cookbook became my kitchen bible. But maybe I give today’s mothers and exposure to cooking shows on TV too much credit – why else would there STILL be such a wealth of cookbooks aimed at Brides?

Consider the following listings (mostly from Amazon.com—I did find some but not as many, on Alibris.com:

THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK, A GIFT FROM THE MERCHANT OF OAKLAND, 1918, unavailable

COOKBOOK FOR BEGINNERS WITH COOKING FOR TWO (AKA COOKBOOK FOR BRIDES) by Dorothy Malone, 1953, mass market paperback 45.00.

HAVE COOKBOOK, WILL MARRY, A BASIC COOKBOOK FOR TODAY’S BRIDE by Ruth Chier Rosen, January, 1957 (no copies listed)

BRIDE’S COOKBOOK by Myra Waldo, 1958 (paperback copies available starting at $1.25. Collier Books published this and my paperback copy has a pink cover).

1001 WAYS TO PLEASE A HUSBAND – THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK, Myra Waldo,llustrations by Grames Miller, 1961 (Are 1001 Ways to Please a Husband and the Bride’s Cookbook by Myra Waldo one and the same book? I don’t know.)

A BRIDE’S COOKBOOK: A KITCHEN PRIMER BY Peggy Harvey, 1962 new & used copies $12.00.
BRIDE IN THE KITCHEN by cookbook author Betty Wason, published in 1964. (Not listed in Amazon or Alibris).

THE TAKE GOOD CARE OF MY SON COOKBOOK FOR BRIDES BY June Roth, 1969, hardcover $0.23.

HENRY CHARPENTIER COOKBOOK (BRIDE’S BIBLE) – Henry Carpentier, 1970 (one listing $25.00)

A BRIDE’S VERY FIRST COOKBOOK by James Croom, 1996 paperback $0.01 (*this is a booklet; I recognize the title as one from my own cookbook collection).

THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK by the editors of Bride Magazine, (1969) (used copies starting at $1.00) I bought a copy of this paperback cookbooklet – that sold originally for $1.45! It promises over 200 can’t fail recipes and more than 250 step-by-step illustrations. You know what? I like this little cookbook.

THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK by Ernie Couch & Teri Mitchell, 1990

THE BRIDE AND GROOM’S FIRST COOKBOOK by Abigail Kirsch and Susan M. Greenberg, January 1996 (new $0.72, used starting at one cent, collectible copy at $3.99)

THE BRIDE & GROOM’S MENU COOKBOOK BY Abigail Kirsch & Susan Greenberg, January 2002, (new $4.74 and used starting at one cent.

THE BRIDE AND GROOM FIRST AND FOREVER COOKBOOK< Mary Corpening Barber, Sara Corpening Whiteford, 2003, $15.00

BETTY CROCKER COOKBOOK (BRIDAL EDITION) by Betty Crocker, 2005 (new copies $18.14, used starting at $6.16)

THE NEWLYWEDS COOKBOOK, Ryland Pilers & Small, January 2006

WILLIAMS-SONOMA BRIDE & GROOM COOKBOOK: RECIPES FOR COOKING TOGETHER by Gayle Pirie and John Clark, March, 2006 (new, $23.19 – used copies starting at $1.06)

BRIDE AND GROOM COOKBOOK: RECIPES FOR COOKING TOGETHER, Gayle Pirie, January 2007 (used $1.23)
THE I DO COOKBOOK FOR THE BRIDE AND GROOM, April, 2007, Celia Jolley et al ($27.00 new, $22.23 used)

QUICK & KOSHER RECIPES FROM THE BRIDE WHO KNEW NOTHING, Jamie Geller, 2007, $24.00.

THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK BY Edgar William Briggs, published August, 2008, (paperback copies $12.95)

MY DAUGHTER, THE BRIDE COOKBOOK, CREATING MEMORIES IN THE WAY OF FOOD by Lisa Estabrook, July 2008 (paperback starting at $11.23, hardcover editions $15.99 used, or $22.09 new)

THE FOOLPROOF COOKBOOK FOR BRIDES, B ACHELORS & THOSE WHO HATE COOKING by Rohini Sikngh, Dec. 2011 (various prices – $49.75 new, also $30.66 new—hardcover used copy available from $3.50).

I CAN’T BOIL WATER…THE NEW BRIDE’S COOKBOOK, Katherine Jacobs, 2011, ($45.00)
Actually, this list is incomplete. There are probably a few dozen additional titles. And for those of you confused by the abundance of the same titles – it should be noted that “titles” cannot be copyrighted. So if you want to write a cookbook and call it the Bride’s Cookbook, – have at it.

I wanted to mention a couple of other things and maybe charm you with a recipe or two from something of Myra Waldo’s and Betty Wason’s respective cookbooks because they are two of my favorite cookbook authors and I have written about both on this blog. (See January, 2011 of my blog for posts about both of these prolific and interesting cookbook authors. I have also written on the blog about Henry Charpentier.

I have only a paperback copy of The Bride’s Cookbook by Myra Waldo but it’s in pretty good condition as paperback copies go. I have a hardcover copy of THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK by Poppy Cannon (sans a dust jacket but sometimes you can’t have everything ) – but I hit the jack pot with BRIDE IN THE KITCHEN by Betty Wason with a pristine copy that has a fine dust jacket. And – I didn’t go looking for it; it came to me. A reader of my blog, a retired nurse named Jane, had a copy in her possession – she doesn’t collect cookbooks – and it was my good fortune that Jane wrote to me offering her copy of this cookbook. (It also provided the inspiration for this blog post).

So, thank you, Jane. And just so you know, if you are looking for some other cookbooks to add to your growing collection, these are a few authors you won’t go wrong with…but I noted there are dozens of new cookbooks for brides on the market so feel free to check out some of those, as well. But I want to point out something that (for me, at least) makes those cookbook authors of the 50s and 60s so attractive – it’s just this – you won’t find frozen/prepackaged/streamlined recipes in these cookbooks. They were written at time when whoever was doing the cooking followed directions from A to Z; Myra Waldo’s baking powder biscuits won’t come in a can, refrigerated at your supermarket – her basic recipe for baking powder biscuits can be found on page 187 of her cookbook.

Myra’s recipe for Coq Au Vin (chicken in red wine) has mostly ingredients you will find on your pantry shelves, except maybe for small white onions, fresh mushrooms and some red wine (although I always have red wine on hand. I buy Burgundy wine in a jug and use it strictly for cooking. How else would I be able to make Beef Burgundy on short notice?

Betty Wason’s recipe for Arroz Con Pollo is made with chicken pieces such as legs, thighs, wings & backs (parts of the chicken you can often purchase for not very much money) and most of the other ingredients you will probably have on your pantry shelves This another one of those recipes that you can make a lot, for company, for very little – or even make it often if you are on a tight budget (most young brides I know are struggling to make ends meet—and it generally takes two incomes to do it).

If you would like to try Betty Wason’s recipe (which is popular amongst Californians), here it is:]

TO MAKE ARROZ CON POLLO you will need:

2 cups chicken broth, made with neck, wing tip & giblets (or 2 cups of Swanson chicken broth—or dissolve 2 chicken bouillon cubes in 2 cups of hot water—sls).
4 or 5 chicken pieces, such as a drumstick, 2 thighs, wing, back (or just buy a package of drumsticks or thighs—all thighs would be good for this recipe-sls).

¾ cup long-grain rice
1 TBSP butter
2 TBSP cooking oil (such as canola oil)
1 small onion, chopped
1 canned pimiento diced (or use a 4-oz can of diced pimiento)
1 small tomato chopped, or 1 TBSP chili sauce
Salt

Make a broth with wing tips, neck & giblets of the chicken by placing into a saucepan with 2 ½ cups water and 1 tsp salt. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer, covered, until needed for the rice. Meantime, sprinkle salt over the chicken pieces. Heat butter and oil in skillet (the Corning Ware skillet would be perfect for this)…until it just starts to sizzle (don’t let butter get brown), add the chicken pieces and cook over high heat, quickly, until crispy brown. Remove chicken pieces to plate, turn heat to moderate, add onion, pimiento, and tomato or chili sauce. Cook until onion is soft. Add rice, stir to glaze. Stir the chicken broth, measuring 2 cups. (If much has cooked away, you may have to add water to make 2 cups liquid); add this to the rice. Replace the chicken pieces over the rice, cover the pan. Turn heat as low as possible, set timer for 20 minutes. Dish should be ready to serve by that time. If, however, you are not ready—or your spouse has not yet returned home—place the Corning Ware skillet, sans handle but covered, in oven set for 300 degrees until time to serve.

Sandy’s cooknote: I still have some of my Corning Ware – as does my best friend Mary Jaynne..but this might not be the most available type of top-of-the-stove baking dish available now. (sometimes you can find some Corning Ware dishes at yard sales.) Betty’s cookbook was published in 1964. However, I know there are various types of cookware (such as Pyrex) that can be used both on top of the stove and in the oven. This recipe can also be made in an electric skillet if you have one of those. I think Betty’s recipe for Caesar salad* would be a perfect accompaniment to Arroz Con Pollo but a bag of mixed salad greens—and a bottle of your favorite commercial salad dressing—and you have dinner.

*Betty’s recipe Caesar salad also contains raw egg—we didn’t have the danger of salmonella poisoning back in 1964. For this reason, I am not including that recipe in this post.

In Myra Waldo’s THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK there is a wealth of recipes and you don’t have to be a newlywed to enjoy them. I like her recipe for Marinated Roast Beef which is made with dry red wine—which I love to cook with (although I don’t drink red wines). Anytime you have a roast beef and there are any leftovers, you have the perfect makings for an easy beef stew. To make Myra’s MARINATED ROAST BEEF (for 6 to 8), you will need:

2 cups dry red wine
2 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
½ tsp thyme
1 rolled roast beef (3 pounds)
½ tsp powdered ginger
1 bay leaf
1 clove garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
1 tomato, chopped

Begin marinating the beef the night before it is to be served.

Combine the wine, salt, pepper, thyme, ginger, bay leaf, and garlic in a bowl. Place the beef in it and let marinate overnight in the refrigerator [sandy’s cooknote: I would cover it with plastic wrap] Turn the meat and baste frequently. Remove from refrigerator 2 hours before roasting time.

Place the meat, marinade, onion, and tomato in a shallow roasting pan. Insert a meat thermometer. Roast in a 325 degree (moderate) oven to the desired degree of rareness, about 55 minutes for rare. Baste occasionally. Discard bay leaf. Force the gravy through a sieve (strainer) or puree in an electric blender.

Sandy’s cooknote: You really want any kind of roast beef to have some standing time, about 15-20 minutes before you serve it, so the juices have time to redistribute. Personally, I like a roast to be more “medium” than rare – just a nice pink. My daughter in law likes meat to be a hockey puck, so we slice a well-done end piece for her. Something great for a roast like this would be oven roasted potatoes and carrots, or even baked potatoes.

I used to whip up an easy chocolate dessert that we called Blender Mouse—but Myra Waldo’s Quick Chocolate Mousse is similar and just as easy. To make Myra’s chocolate mousse, all you need is

2 ounces of sweet chocolate
2 TBSP water
½ tsp vanilla extract
½ cup heavy cream

Break the chocolate into small pieces and combine with the water in a small saucepan* Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until chocolate melts. Cool 15 minutes. Stir in the vanilla. Whip the cream (using an electric mixer) and fold it into the chocolate mixture. Spoon into a glass bowl chill 2 hours.

*Sandy’s cooknote: if you are like me and tend to get distracted and burn things, melt the chocolate in the top half of a double boiler. Have water in the lower half at a low simmer.
Recipe is from Myra Waldo’s THE BRIDE’S COOKBOOK.

Happy Cooking!
Sandy

CASTLE FARE – VISITING HEARST CASTLE

My penpal, Betsy, who lives in Michigan, began downsizing her own cookbook collection a few years ago; some of the books went to her adult children—some she began sending to me. She also goes to book sales that are far more prolific in Michigan than they are in California and finds amazing treasures. Recently, she sent me three boxes of cookbooks which included several Gooseberry Patch cookbooks in like-new condition, and a few Quail Ridge “Best of the Best” cookbook collection. The latter contains cookbooks featuring all 50 states and in a few cases, a second volume on states such as Texas. Amongst the books she sent to me was a Volume II of Best of the Best from Virginia—which, surprisingly, I didn’t have. (It’s always amazing to me how many books she has sent that I didn’t have—and I have a pretty large collection).

When it’s a cookbook that I already have, I give the duplicate to a friend or one of my nieces.

Well, in one of the boxes that found its way to my doorstep this month is a booklet titled “CASTLE FARE” with a subtitle “Featuring AUTHENTIC RECIPES served in HEARST CASTLE, and next to it a price of $1.00. CASTLE FARE was compiled by Marjorie Collord and Ann Roranzi and it was published in 1965.

One Thanksgiving weekend in the late 1990s, Bob & I stayed at a motel on Route 1 in San Luis Obispo, and scheduled a tour of Hearst Castle for ourselves. Then, again, in 2008 when my penpal Sharon was visiting me and we went on a California Adventure road tour which included one of the Hearst Castle tours (There are 4, I think, from which to choose). It’s a spectacular Tour—one that average people like ourselves can’t begin to imagine.

When Sharon and I were there in 2008, we bought some books about Hearst Castle and I am quite sure we didn’t see a little cookbooklet such as the one Betsy sent to me.

Let me begin by telling you some of the history of the mansion created by famous newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who died in 1951.

It was designed by architect Julia Morgan between 1919 and 1947. In 1957, the Hearst Corporation donated the property to the state of California. Since that time it has been maintained as a state historic park where the estate, and its considerable collection of art and antiques, is open for public tours. Despite its location far from any urban center, the site attracts about one million visitors per year.

According to Wikipedia on Google.com, Hearst Castle is a National Historic Landmark mansion located on the Central Coast of California, United States. Hearst formally named the estate “La Cuesta Encantada” (“The Enchanted Hill”), but usually called it “the ranch”. Hearst Castle and grounds are also sometimes referred to as “San Simeon” without distinguishing between the Hearst property and the adjacent unincorporated area of the same name.

Hearst Castle is located near the unincorporated community of San Simeon, California, approximately 250 miles (400 km) from both Los Angeles and San Francisco, and 43 miles (69 km) from San Luis Obispo at the northern end of San Luis Obispo County. The estate itself is five miles (eight kilometers) inland atop a hill of the Santa Lucia Range at an altitude of 1,600 feet (490 m). The region is sparsely populated because the Santa Lucia Range abuts the Pacific Ocean, which provides dramatic seaside vistas but few opportunities for development and hampered transportation. The surrounding countryside visible from the mansion remains largely undeveloped. Its entrance is adjacent to San Simeon State Park.

Hearst Castle was built on Rancho Piedra Blanca that William Randolph Hearst’s father, George Hearst, originally purchased in 1865. The younger Hearst grew fond of this site over many childhood family camping trips. He inherited the ranch, which had grown to 250,000 acres (1,012 km and fourteen miles (21 km) of coastline, from his mother Phoebe Hearst in 1919. Although the large ranch already had a Victorian mansion, the location selected for Hearst Castle was undeveloped, atop a steep hill whose ascent was a dirt path accessible only by foot or on horseback over five miles (8 km) of cutbacks.

Hearst first approached American architect Julia Morgan with ideas for a new project in April 1915, shortly after he took ownership. Hearst’s original idea was to build a bungalow, according to a draftsman who worked in Morgan’s office who recounted Hearst’s words from the initial meeting:

“I would like to build something upon the hill at San Simeon. I get tired of going up there and camping in tents. I’m getting a little too old for that. I’d like to get something that would be a little more comfortable…”

After approximately one month of discussion, Hearst’s original idea for a modest dwelling swelled to grand proportions. Discussion for the exterior style switched from an initial suggestion of Japanese and Korean themes to the Spanish Revival that was gaining popularity and which Morgan had helped to initiate with her work on the Los Angeles Herald Examiner headquarters in 1915. Hearst was fond of Spanish Revival, but dissatisfied with the crudeness of the colonial structures in California. Mexican colonial architecture had more sophistication but he objected to its profusion of ornamentation. Turning to the Iberian Peninsulafor inspiration, he found Renaissance and Baroque examples in southern Spain more to his tastes. Hearst particularly admired a church in Ronda and asked Morgan to pattern the Main Building towers after it. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915 in San Diego held the closest approaches in California to the look Hearst desired. He decided to substitute a stucco exterior in place of masonry in deference to Californian traditions.

By late summer 1919 Morgan had surveyed the site, analyzed its geology, and drawn initial plans for the Main Building. Construction began in 1919 and continued through 1947 when Hearst stopped living at the estate due to ill health. Morgan persuaded Hearst to begin with the guest cottages because the smaller structures could be completed more quickly.

The estate is a pastiche of historic architectural styles that its owner admired in his travels around Europe. Hearst was an omnivorous buyer who did not so much purchase art and antiques to furnish his home as built his home to get his bulging collection out of warehouses. This led to incongruous elements such as the private cinema whose walls were lined with shelves of rare books. The floor plan of the Main Building is chaotic due to his habit of buying centuries-old ceilings, which dictated the proportions and decor of various rooms.

Hearst Castle featured 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 127 acres (0.5 km) of gardens, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, a movie theater, an airfield, and the world’s largest private zoo. Zebras and other exotic animals still roam the grounds. Morgan, an accomplished civil engineer, devised a gravity-based water delivery system which transports water from artesian wells on the slopes of Pine Mountain, a 3,500-foot (1,100 m) high peak 7 miles (11 km) east of Hearst Castle, to a reservoir on Rocky Butte, a 2,000-foot (610 m) knoll less than a mile southeast from Hearst Castle.

One highlight of the estate is the outdoor Neptune Pool, located near the edge of the hilltop, which offers an expansive vista of the mountains, ocean and the main house. The Neptune Pool patio features an ancient Roman temple front, transported wholesale from Europe and reconstructed at the site. Hearst was an inveterate tinkerer, and would tear down structures and rebuild them at a whim. For example, the Neptune Pool was rebuilt three times before Hearst was satisfied. As a consequence of Hearst’s persistent design changes, the estate was never completed in his lifetime.

Invitations to Hearst Castle were highly coveted during its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s. The Hollywood and political elite often visited, usually flying into the estate’s airfield or taking a private Hearst-owned train car from Los Angeles. Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, James Stewart, Bob Hope, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Dolores Del Rio, and Winston Churchill were among Hearst’s A-list guests. While guests were expected to attend the formal dinners each evening, they were normally left to their own devices during the day while Hearst directed his business affairs. Since “the Ranch” had so many facilities, guests were rarely at a loss for things to do. The estate’s theater usually screened films from Hearst’s own movie studio, Cosmopolitan Productions…” (from Wikipedia)

A closer look at guests arriving at Hearst Castle is related in “CASTLE FARE”; the foreword to the 1965 cookbooklet was written by William Randolph Hearst Jr., who writes, “I first started sampling the food as a kid at San Simeon along about 1919…practically all of the perishable food – beef and venison, all sorts of poultry, eggs, most of the fish, vegetables and fruits were raised, shot, caught or grown and eaten right there on the place, which, of course, contributes a great deal to the savory result.

The cooking was, with exception of a very few dishes, just plain American home cooking. By this I don’t mean Grandma Hearst or Mom did it themselves, but I do mean that there was a minimum of dishes done in a fancy French or Italian style.

There were some, of course, as Pop was a great fancier of fowl and raised literally dozens of varieties of pheasant, guinea hen and partridges, ducks, geese, and what not, right there on the ranch…”

William Randolph Hearst Jr goes on to write that while…the food was plainly cooked, his father was not…a steak and potato man. His taste ran more to fowl and birds, lamb chops, cornbeef (sic) and cabbage, ham and hominy grits, and on occasion rare roast beef, kidneys, tripe, etc. rather than T-bone.

The senior Mr. Hearst was also a nibbler, rarely passing a bowl of nuts or candy or fruit without sampling it. He never touched scotch or gin but enjoyed a glass of wine or beer with most of his meals. While the younger Hearst never saw his father drinking brandy, he did have a sweet tooth for liqueurs like Cointreau, Benedictine and crème de menthe.

William Randolph Hearst was also a late sleeper…and if he had breakfast at all it might be a bit of fresh fruit and a cup of coffee with at least half hot milk.

Lunch would be about 1:30 pm, dinner around 8:30 or 9:00 pm, followed by a movie. At luncheon, it was expected that guests be prompt since this meal was served buffet style. Often there were still roaming around the grounds when the luncheon hour arrive, so the butler would pick up the brass cow bell located conveniently on the top of an antique anvil…step out the front door and ring the bell vigorously.

At seven in the evening, guests would start to gather in the Assembly Hall or Living room for cocktails, which were mixed and served by the butlers. Mr. Hearst usually did not appear until 8 pm. He would relax for an hour before dinner, with his little dachshund, Helena, close by. Guests would wander in singly or in small groups to greet and have a few words with their host. At 9 pm, the butler would announce dinner and invite guests to enter one of the most harmonious and beautiful rooms in the castle. This dining room is now referred to as the Refectory and if you have ever toured Hearst Castle, you would be impressed, first and foremost, by the size of the room (67’ long, 27 ft wide) and has a 16th century ceiling from a monastery in Northern Italy. The ceiling displays Christian saints carved from cedar and linden wood. The dining tables are Monastic Refectory tables that are long and narrow because 300 years ago, when Monks dined at these tables, discipline dictated meditation rather than conversation during meals; consequently, the religious only sat at one side of the table.

In contrast to the tables, the chairs are modern reproductions of a 16th Century Dante chair. These copies were, however, made from antique walnut furniture that could not be salvaged so that in a sense are antique themselves. Each chair will fold similar to a camp stool. When Sharon and I toured Hearst Castle in August of 2008, it was almost impossible to take it all in. Tour guides do explain things as you are walking along, but the opulence and sheer magnitude of everything you are seeing makes it almost impossible to take it all in.
If you are interested in visiting Hearst Castle at San Simeon, (and a million visitors a year do so) I suggest booking a motel room in San Luis Obispo, a fantastic college town only about 50 miles south of Hearst Castle, or book at one of the motels along Pismo Beach. It doesn’t take that long to get there. You can pack a picnic lunch, if you like, and enjoy it across the road from the entrance, at a park with a pier.

Whenever I have been there, the park has been doing a bustling business; it might be a good idea to reserve tickets for one of the tours. This is what I have done the last two times I visited Hearst Castle.

I can only imagine how magnificent it must have been when William Randolph Hearst was in residence, living in this impossibly beautiful place – most certainly and surely La Cuesta Encantada. For recipes and more information about Hearst Castle back in the day, you might want to find a copy of CASTLE FARE. I noticed some copies are available on Amazon.com.

–Sandra Lee Smith

THOSE FABULOUS FIFTIES

THOSE FABULOUS FIFTIES

Some time ago, one of my Sandychatter subscribers suggested I provide some of the favorite fifties recipes. I said I would, but other matters took up most of my time the second half of 2011.

Recently, I was moving some cookbooks around (finding shelf space for all of them is a constant problem) and I came across some of my “fifties” cookbooks. I am also including in this category some cookbooks dedicated to “lost” or “forgotten” favorites.

If you lived through the 1950s, you may wonder what the fuss is all about – we didn’t think the foods we were eating at the time were anything special. Many households, like my mother’s, had certain dishes for certain days of the week. For instance, we almost always had salmon patties on Fridays, with either macaroni and cheese or macaroni and tomatoes, cottage cheese and some spinach—canned spinach, at that, with a little hardboiled egg on top. I am quite sure I never tasted fresh spinach until I was an adult and living in California. Occasionally, fish sticks substituted for the salmon patties (that some people refer to as salmon cakes) – now, salmon patties are still a favorite of mine but it boggles my mind that my mother fed 7 people with one can of salmon. I used one can of salmon to feed just Bob & myself for years. It was one of his favorite comfort foods. Mine too.

Perhaps once a week we would have beef stew – or it may have alternated with kidney stew that was served with noodles. If we had pork chops, there was sure to be a jar of homemade apple sauce to go with it. During World War II the Schmidt family—with my Grandma Schmidt leading the way—would make a vat full of apple sauce that was canned without sugar, which—you may or may not remember—was rationed during the war. For years after the war, we were allowed to sprinkle a little sugar on our very tart applesauce, made from sour cooking apples.

On Sundays we usually had a stewed chicken dinner with my mother’s library paste rice. My brother Bill insists to this day that he LIKED mom’s library past rice. No, it didn’t really contain library paste. It just tasted like it. I was an adult living in California before I was introduced to Rice Pilaf, wild rice, even Rice-A-Roni (the San Francisco treat) – and concluded that I didn’t hate rice. What I hated the way my mother cooked it.

The chicken—a stewing hen that was cheaper than a fryer—was cooked with onion, carrots and celery until the meat fell off the bones. Then we ate it with library paste rice and homemade bread.

Occasionally, my mother cooked something like brains which, I think, I was the only one in the family who balked at eating. Or, my father would go hunting once a year and bring home wild rabbits he had shot and killed. He would clean the rabbit at the kitchen sink—it made a deep impression on my mind. Then my mother soaked the rabbit in a sweet and sour marinade for three days before it was cooked. When it was cooking, the smell of sweet-sour marinade filled the house. I gagged at the prospect of eating that rabbit. Years passed before I could reconcile myself to the thought that it wasn’t the rabbit I loathed so much; it was the way my mother cooked it. (I still don’t eat rabbit).

Sometimes we had chili – cooked Cincinnati style and served on a bed of cooked spaghetti and topped off with oyster crackers, chopped onion and grated cheese. That was a family favorite then and it is now.

Another meal I loved was green (string) beans cooked with a cut of ham called cottage ham (that you can still find in Cincinnati) and red potatoes and carrots. I think we all loved this one pot meal and I think I improved on it by making it with fresh green beans – my mother’s were always canned. Alongside of it would be a helping of cottage cheese. Actually, I don’t think we had a lot of salads, growing up. Occasionally, mom would make a small green salad with a vinaigrette dressing. Or we might have some Cole slaw.

And I think all of us, loved sauerkraut dinners. It might be cooked with some pork or sausages and it was a must on New Year’s Eve, to eat at midnight in the hopes of bringing good luck. We’d have it with mashed potatoes and creamed peas. (I cringe to think of eating anything that heavy at midnight anymore!)

My brother Bill reminded me of mom’s hamburgers – a pound of ground beef mixed with a loaf of bread—which were pretty tasteless but she did mix them with a brown gravy after the hamburgers had been cooked, and that could be served over noodles. He thought her meatloaf was pretty good – I think it might have been the recipe on the box of Quaker Oats. He also reminded me of mom’s liver and onions, which we all liked, and her sour cottage cheese. It almost always tasted bad and I was an adult before I discovered I like cottage cheese.

Occasionally, my mother would make a pot of soup with marrow bones. The broth would contain some carrots and potatoes and perhaps a small piece of meat. We would eat the broth first, with some noodles, and then have the carrots and potatoes on our plate. My father and brothers would eat the marrow on crackers. Many years later, I discovered this method of making soup and serving it was well known many years ago. I imagine my mother learned this method of making soup from her mother. I think I came across this method of making soup in a presidential cookbook. Recently, a cousin gave me our maternal grandmother’s cookbook as a birthday present; I’ll have to check it for familiar sounding recipes.

We had a lot of one-pot meals growing up. Who could have imagined that years later this type of meal would be touted as healthier? I don’t think my mother ever stopped to consider what was healthier to feed five children. I think she was mostly concerned with getting the most for her money and keeping us filled up. She made two large loaves of bread twice a week – bread baked in a big roasting pan—and we always had bread on the table.

My older sister and brother were born before WW2 – my sister in 1936 and my brother in 1937. I was born in 1940, and two more brothers were born in 1943 and 1946—so we did indeed “grow up” in the 1950s. There was one cookbook in my mother’s kitchen, kept in a drawer. It was Ida Bailey Allen’s Service cookbook and that was also the cookbook I learned to cook from. I don’t remember my mother having a recipe box when I was a child, but she did acquire one years later that I now have.

So, that is my background for the 1950s. I would have turned ten years old late in 1950 and was beginning to be interested in cooking – mainly cookies and muffins. The first meal I ever cooked was the salmon patties, with macaroni and cheese, and some creamed peas. My parents were going out to a dinner and I made the meal for my then-three brothers. I think I was twelve. I didn’t have any cookbooks per se, but I had begun to send away for many free manufacturers pamphlets and booklets that I sent away for with penny postcards. By the time I married in 1958, I had a big box of these booklets. The Betty Crocker Picture cookbook was a wedding present.

Join me, won’t you, down memory lane? I will share with you some of my 50s cookbooks and perhaps dig into my bookshelves for cookbooks actually published in the 1950s as well.

What made me think along these lines was the acquisition of a Favorite Brand Name cookbook titled “FABULOUS ‘50s RECIPE COLLECTION” published in 2004. This cookbook reflects and provides recipes for many different 50s dishes starting with the most famous of all 1950s recipes, the Lipton California Dip recipe that changed cocktail parties forever after—and what could be simpler? A container of sour cream and a packet of Lipton Onion Soup Mix! To tell the truth, I don’t remember when I, personally, began mixing together sour cream and onion soup mix. Fabulous ‘50s provides as well recipes for spinach dip, California seafood dip, bacon dip and blue cheese dip, all starting out with sour cream and a packet of onion soup mix (and to tell the truth, you will generally find about half a dozen boxes of onion soup mix in my pantry shelves. I’m ready for anything!

Another onion soup mix recipe was Mini Cocktail Meatballs that began showing up at cocktail parties or as hors d’ oeuvres at dinner parties. Also making an appearance at those cocktail parties was Party Mix, made with various mixtures of cereal, pretzel sticks and Worcestershire sauce. I was never a big fan of this party mix but I know people who absolutely swear by it. Elsewhere I found a recipe for Holiday Shrimp Dip that is made with unflavored gelatin and canned condensed tomato soup—oddly enough, I didn’t “discover” this recipe until the 1970s when I met my friend Mary Jaynne and she shared her recipe with me. Another favorite that caught my eye was Original Ranch Snack Mix that is made with a combination of Crispix cereal, pretzels, cheddar cheese crackers and Hidden Valley Ranch dressing mix. I have been making a variation of this original 50s recipe for the past year – but it’s just small twist pretzels, peanut oil, Hidden Valley Ranch original dressing mix and a bit of cayenne pepper for a little kick. A girlfriend brought it to a party about two years ago and we have been making batch after batch ever since. For sure, everything old is new again!

Also in FABULOUS 50s is a recipe (much to my surprise) for Swanson Rosemary Chicken & Vegetables—I have been making something similar but perhaps with fewer ingredients—for about 5 or 6 years. It’s JUST a whole chicken, rosemary, lemon slices and lemon pepper—and sometimes I toss in some carrots and onions. The real success to this recipe is having fresh rosemary sprigs to stuff into the cavity, along with some lemons slices. I am fortunate to have a girlfriend who keeps me supplied regularly with lots of Rosemary. Aha, elsewhere in the cookbook I found a recipe for lemon rosemary roast chicken—the only difference between theirs and mine is fresh rosemary versus dried. (I’m sure you all know that almost all herbs are available in your supermarket nowadays, if you don’t have a girlfriend with a Rosemary bush). Also in the cookbook are recipes for such favorites as Steaks with Mushroom Onion Sauce, Pepper Steak, and Campbell’s Autumn Pork Chops made with cream of celery soup. Who hasn’t raised a family on pork chops with mushroom soup gravy? Other recipes include Rosemary Garlic Rub that you can make up when you have some free time and have it ready when you are ready to cook a steak or two. However, that being said, I have to concede that there is very little similarity between Fabulous 50s Recipe Collection and my mother’s cooking.

Let’s turn to a couple of Jane and Michael Stern’s cookbooks. “AMERICAN GOURMET/Classic Recipes, Deluxe Delights, Flamboyant Favorites, and Swank ‘Company’ Food from the ‘50s and ‘60s” was published in 1991 and “SQUARE MEALS/America’s Favorite Comfort Food Cookbook” was published in 2001. There are numerous cookbooks with “comfort” in the title; for me and many of my generation, “comfort” foods translate to many dishes of the 1950s.

From the introduction to AMERICAN GOURMET, we learn “In addition to a witty and astute look at the social history of the ’50s and ‘60s, American Gourmet presents 100 of the most memorable recipes of the time. Baked Alaska, Beef Wellington, Duck a l’Orange, Venerable Sukiyaki, Madison Avenue Chocolate Fondue, Aphrodisiacal Artichokes are not merely period pieces, and they are delicious, workable recipes and remain tasty causes for celebration…” (Sorry to say, none of those recipes were in my mother’s cookery repertoire—not even close) – However, what I – and my siblings and cousins WERE exposed to was a variety of German and Hungarian cuisine, thanks to our paternal grandmother who was German and married a Hungarian. We took for granted lovely paper thin pancakes we simply called “German” pancakes but were actually Hungarian Palacsinta that we spread with jam and rolled up to eat. (Palacsintas are similar to the French crepes). We had many kinds of fruit and cheese strudels and Dobos Torte and Hungarian Goulash. It was hardly the fare of most 1950s cooks but we simply took it for granted. Meanwhile, at home, “fruit” was usually a can of fruit cocktail or—we did have applesauce. This was because grandma had some sour apple trees and got all the women of the family involved in a yearly applesauce making binge. During WW2, when sugar was rationed, grandma canned the applesauce without sugar; for years afterwards, whenever we ate some applesauce, we’d sprinkle on a bit of sugar.

Occasionally, my mother would make oatmeal-raisin cookies and I thought I remembered them being made with bacon grease. I thought this highly unlikely until my Oklahoma penpal found a recipe for oatmeal-raisin cookies made with bacon grease. (I tried making them once with bacon grease – ew, ew. You cannot go home).

By the time I was ten years old, I was making cookies and muffins using my mother’s IDA BAILEY ALLEN Service Cookbook. I didn’t make any using bacon grease.

Jane and Michael Stern’s cookbook “SQUARE MEALS/AMERICA’S FAVORITE COMFORT FOOD COOKBOOK” has the distinction of a Foreword by M.F.K. Fisher in which she writes, “Almost any American of more than a few months citizenship knows what a square meal is, whether he teaches computer programming or picks crops. A few days ago a man said to me ‘All I really need right now is somewhere to sleep and three squares a day.’ And I knew what he meant: warmth and then food, decent food, something to stick to his ribs and keep him upright and strong…he meant a SQUARE MEAL which perforce meals tools and a place to use them, a knife and a spoon and perhaps even a plate, and a protected place of the enjoyment of all or almost all he could eat…

The Sterns are right; they have written with love and respect about the square meals of our country, the kind our grandmothers and the ladies of the Church Society and the cookies out in the cattle country have always managed to serve now and then, to keep us reassured as well as on our feet…”

Much is being discussed, in books and magazines as well as on TV about people not cooking SQUARE MEALS anymore, that we are eating all fast food on the run–Frozen things you stick in the microwave for a few minutes and even wrap in a paper napkin to eat on the way to work or where ever else you need to be. I have to disagree although I don’t have any statistics to back up what I say – I cooked dinner almost every night for the past fifty years – twenty five of those years when I was married and raising my family, another twenty five when I was sharing my life with my partner, Bob. I raised sons who expect some kind of square meal on the table when they get home from work (even when their wives are also employed) and I don’t think we were an isolated statistic. I know too many people who enjoy cooking and look forward to experimenting with new recipes. Throughout the 40s and the 50s, into the 60s and the 70s, my mother cooked dinner regularly. We children who grew up n the 40s and 50s learned to prepare dinner for our spouses and children—are we the last of the Mohicans? I hope not.

You will love Jane & Michael Stern’s SQUARE MEALS whether you cook meals regularly or not. They offer Dinner Classics such as Cream of tomato Soup and Diner Meatloaf (which I will have to try), Mashed Potatoes with Crater Gravy, choices of Sunday dinners which include roast pork with sinner stuffing, Mom’s Best Pot Roast and Roast Chicken with Peacemaker Herb, old 50s favorite desserts such as butterscotch pie and Boston Cream Pie which isn’t actually a pie, and oh, dozens of other favorites – many gone but not forgotten.

One of my favorite cookbooks for years has been Mimi Sheraton’s “FROM MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN/RECIPES & REMINISCENCES” which was published in 1979 so it’s safe to assume that many of her mother’s recipes were being cooked in the 1950s. The author says that, although this is not a kosher cookbook, many of the recipes are traditional Jewish dishes, others are entirely American.

Another more recently published cookbook (2003) that follows the theme of recipes too good to be forgotten is Lari Robling’s “ENDANGERED RECIPES”. Along with wonderful fifty-ish illustrations there are recipes for Parker House Rolls, Gingersnap Crumb Crust and Cream Pumpkin Pie, Smothered Pork Chops and Crockpot Apple Butter (which I have made several times), Boston Brown Bread (that my friend Mary’s mother used to make and would bake it in empty soup cans), Stuffed Peppers and Oven-fried Chicken and Genuine Boston Baked Beans.

I am also partial to Marion Cunningham’s “LOST RECIPES” in which she does not restrict herself to 50s recipes but to all of those treasured recipes she feels we are in danger of losing. In the Introduction Ms. Cunningham writes, “recently, I read the results of two different surveys on home cooking—one reporting that about 40 percent of the population cooks at home, the other that 30 percent does. She says no matt what the exact percentage is, one thing we know for sure is that fewer and fewer people are cooking, either because they don’t know how or because they just don’t want to bother. She goes on to say this is a greater loss than we realize because, among various reasons, home cooking is a catalyst that brings people together. “We are losing,” she writes, “the daily ritual of sitting down around the table (without the intrusion of television) of having the opportunity to interact, to share our experiences and concerns, to listen to others…”

I take exception to this remark—I suppose it puts me and my family in the remaining 60 or 70 percent, depending on which statistic you choose to believe, because I have cooked dinner virtually every day for more than fifty years—first 25 years with a husband and four growing sons, and another 26 years with a life partner who became “grandpa” to my grandchildren. I have at least one daughter in law who cooks virtually every night and another daughter in law who shares cooking dinner with her husband, the son who enjoys cooking and has become very adept at it. I believe my sons expect a daily dinner because that’s what they grew up with; I cooked a daily dinner because it’s what I grew up with. And I suspect that my grandchildren will become the same way.

“Lost Recipes” is packed with recipes in danger of being forgotten, such treasures as Truman’s Ozark Pudding and Blue Ribbon Gingerbread. There is a recipe for Beet Marmalade and Red Pepper Jelly but what I love most about this particular cookbook is the design and illustrations, a step out of the past that makes for interesting reading for those who read cookbooks like novels—you know who you are. “Lost Recipes” was published in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf. If the name Marion Cunningham sounds familiar, it should. She wrote the latest Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

There is a cookbook titled SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER PRUDENCE PENNY COOKBOOK, edited and revised by Ruth Berotzheimer who was at that time director of the Culinary Arts Institute. This cookbook was published in 1955—it’s a thick well indexed and enormously detailed cookbook and – since it was published smack in the middle of the 1950s – I feel it only fair to mention some of the recipes. This cookbook has literally hundreds of recipes so I will have to be a little selective—there are poultry recipes for Roast Chicken, Maryland Style, as well as recipes for fried, smothered, simmered, steamed and pressed chicken. You can choose from recipes for making chicken and dumplings. Fricassee of Chicken, Chicken Pie, Curry of Chicken, Savory chicken, scalloped or creamed chicken. If turkey was on your menu, there are directions for roasting braising, broiling or even French frying the bird. There are also recipes for preparing goose, duck, as well as pheasant, partridge, quail and grouse..not to mention recipes for squab, pigeon, roast leg of venison and roast hare or rabbit. (which we never had. My mother ONLY made Hasenpfeffer with the rabbit my father brought home from his hunting trip.

I like the chapter dedicated to sauces –Béchamel, Poulette, drawn butter sauce, caper sauce (which I happen to like) as well as Hollandaise, Béarnaise and imitation caper sauce (ew, ew, it’s made with chopped pickles). Actually, I probably shouldn’t mention this, but Prudent Penny’s cookbook reminds me somewhat of Maida Given’s cookbook. They’re the kind of cookbooks every home should have had (but my parents’ home didn’t). The only cookbooks I became familiar with, in the 1950s, were the recipe booklets advertised on the back of items such as baking powder or Hershey’s cocoa – you could send for them with a penny postcard and I acquired a collection of those).

Prudence Penny offered a wealth of recipes for cakes, cookies, frostings, cake fillings, all sorts of puddings, ice creams and sauces for desserts. Even today, novice cooks would find this cookbook worthy of attention.

Hopefully, if you haven’t done much cooking for a while, this may inspire you. And if you are like me and already doing a fair amount of cooking, here are some cookbook titles to think about. I’ll try to provide you with some fifties recipes in my next post—but feel free to write if there is a favorite dish in particular that you would like to see in print.

–HAPPY COOKING AND HAPPY COOKBOOK COLLECTING!

Sandra Lee Smith

WHO WAS COOKBOOK AUTHOR/RECIPE COLUMNIST MARY MARTENSEN?

Sometimes it simply starts with an old recipe card or a clipping with a name on it and you aren’t always sure where on earth you found it, especially if the clipping is very old and yellowed. Well, I do collect old recipe boxes, preferably with old recipe collections intact and this is sometimes where interesting clippings, or clippings pasted onto 3×5” cards turn up. Such is the case with the first recipe I found of Mary Martensen’s. It was a clipping pasted on a 3×5” card with directions for making pea soup.

From the introduction in one of her cookbooks, we learn that Mrs. Martensen was a graduate in Home Economics and Dietetics, having studied at the Boston School of Domestic Science, Simmons College and the Teachers College of Columbia University. Her first experience was as Director of Home Economics for the schools of Concord, New Hampshire. While there she also conducted courses in dietetics at the Concord City Hospital each week, and in Home Economics at Mount St. Mary’s Academy at Hookset, New Hampshire.

Following this, Mrs. Martensen became dietitian at Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois, leaving this position for the Home Economics Department of “a great packing company” (presumably Armour founded in 1867 by the Armour brothers following the Civil War). Here, in four seasons Mrs. Martensen conducted newspaper cooking schools in thirty-five states, lectured to women’s clubs in Chicago and its suburbs, and contributed to the household page edited in her department. She also prepared many recipe booklets, among them “Sixty Ways to Serve Ham” which I believe was compiled for Armour around 1935. During the last 2 years of this period Mrs. Martensen was the directing head of the department. Then followed five years as head of a Home Economics Department which she established for one of the largest baking powder companies in America. (No indication is given for the name of the baking company. Royal, Clabber Girl, and Rumford were three popular baking powder companies getting a strong foothold in the food industry in the late 1800s, early 1900s, however.)

In January, 1927, Mrs. Martensen established a Home Economics Department for “a large western newspaper” where she remained until she was selected by the Chicago Evening American for the position she was holding at the time her first cookbook was published–not counting pamphlets or booklets she may have authored prior to this. [I’m thinking that Mrs. Mary Martensen would have given Ida Bailey Allen a run for her money, as a contemporary in the 1920s writing for food manufacturers, conducting radio recipe programs and then branching out to compile cookbooks.]

Within a few months, the auditorium originally fitted for the newspaper Home Ec department of the Chicago Evening American had to be enlarged to double its size and capacity. Three courses of lessons were given in the first year of the department’s operation, with a total attendance of 6,600.

Editorially, Mrs. Martensen conducted a daily column in the Chicago Evening American, which was amplified to four columns on Mondays and Fridays, and a full page every Saturday in the American Home Journal. Her material was illustrated on Mondays and Saturdays with photographs and sketches made in her department of special dishes and table settings created in the department (The recipe page that a Sandychatter subscriber sent to me was published on a Thursday in the Chicago Herald American and along with recipes for strawberry chiffon pie and pineapple cheese pie, featured lovely illustrations – even in black and white—of a coconut wreath circling the pineapple cheese pie and another illustration of an ice cream pie.) And, apparently, at some point in time, Mrs. Martensen’s recipe columns were picked up by King Syndicate for release to other newspapers throughout the USA.

In the department’s first year, over 21,000 letters were received from readers and over 4,200 telephone calls responded to. Twenty five lectures before women’s clubs, farmers’ institutes, parent-teacher associations and high school classes were conducted. In addition to all this, Mrs. Martensen conducted weekly radio talks.

Mary Martensen was writing a column for the Herald American newspaper in 1950. I believe she was writing newspaper columns in the 1930s and 1940s as well. She also wrote “Mrs. Mary Martensen’s Recipes Cookbook/Chicago American” which I would SWEAR that I have, but to date have been unable to find. This was a newspaper-sponsored cookbook for the Chicago American.

Prior to this, the author worked for the meatpacker Armour Company* where she authored the popular, “Sixty ways to Serve Ham”

*Sandy cooknote: The information I discovered online about the Armour Company and the many different products they manufactured nearly sent me into a tailspin, wanting to read and learn more about Armour—I had to force myself to stay on track with Mary Martensen.

In 1933, Mrs. Martensen wrote “Century of Progress Cookbook*” – so far I have not been able to lay my hands on any of Mary’s cookbooks. However, any number of her newspaper columns have survived over the decades. In fact, a Sandychatter subscriber bought some perfume bottles and found a 1950 sheet of newspaper with Mary Martensen’s Strawberry Chiffon Pie and Pineapple Cheese Pie featured on that date, June 22, 1950 – and sent a copy of it to me.

In addition to its widely syndicated Sunday magazine “The American Weekly”, the Journal-American had a Saturday supplement called Home Magazine, as well. Mary’s columns appeared in this newspaper supplement as well.

Zirta Green, who balanced a career with motherhood and home long before it became fashionable was a test kitchen chef for the Chicago Herald American and Chicago Tribune newspapers for their cooking and recipe columns from 1953-1966, and later for the Mary Martensen TV cooking show, broadcasted on WBKB Chicago, ABC-TV, around 1954. (*This short paragraph about Mrs. Green was the only indication I discovered about Mary Martensen having a TV cooking s how –back in the day, long before TV cooking shows were so popular!

An illustration/portrait of Mary Martensen was published in her first cookbook; it shows a very pretty blonde haired woman, nicely dressed, with a sweet smile.

Not much more is known about Mary Martensen – although if anyone reading this knows more, I would love to hear from you. However, some of her recipes crop up if you take the time to surf Google patiently. The first one I am offering is the recipe I originally found on a recipe card.

To make MARY’S SPLIT PEA SOUP you will need:

1 cup dried split peas
2 ½ quarts cold water
1 pint milk
½ onion
2” cube fat salt pork
3 TBSP butter or margarine
2 TBSP flour
1 ½ tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper

Pick over peas and soak several hours in cold water to cover. Drain, add cold water, pork and onion. Simmer 3 or 4 hours or until soft. Put through a sieve*. Add butter and flour and seasonings blended together. Dilute with the milk, adding more milk if necessary. Note the water in which a ham has been cooked may be used. Omit the salt.

Sandy’s cooknote: If you don’t have a sieve, you can blend the peas in your blender but I would suggest cooling it down somewhat, first, and only do half a blender-full at a time so it doesn’t splash. When I make pea soup I like to cook the peas and whatever other ingredients (carrots, onion) -except meat – and blend it in my blender to make it smooth. Then add some leftover ham if you want it in your soup. We like very thick soups, more like chowders. What I usually do is cook a hambone and then set it aside. Use the stock from the hambone then to cook the peas. (And if you take the time to chill the stock, you can easily remove the fat that rises to the top and solidifies). While the peas are cooking, cool the hambone and remove all the bits of meat to put back into the pot later. Ok, it’s a little more work this way–but you will have a fine pot of soup. (Some things do take longer – but I guarantee, if you cook a hambone and use those scraps of meat – you will have a delicious stock AND most flavorful meat. It will beat a package of pre-diced ham bits from the supermarket hands down!)

Here is Mary’s recipe for SUNSHINE CAKE, 1946

1 cup sifted cake flour
½ teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks, beaten
7 egg whites, beaten
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 ¼ cups sugar
1 teaspoon any desired flavoring (I recommend lemon extract)
Preparation Instructions

Sift the flour once, measure and resift twice with the salt. Beat the egg yolks until thick and lemon colored. Beat the egg whites until foamy, add the cream of tartar and beat until stiff, but not dry. Add the sugar gradually and beat until the mixture holds in soft peaks. Fold in the beaten egg yolks and flavoring. Fold in the flour gently but thoroughly to avoid breaking air cells in the egg mixture. Pour batter into an ungreased ten-inch tube pan and bake in a moderate oven, 350 degrees, for about 50 minutes, or until done. Remove from oven and invert for one hour, or until cool. When cool, frost with a thin coating of confectioners’ sugar, or sprinkle with sifted confectioners’ sugar.

MARY MARTENSEN’S POPCORN BALLS, 1946

1 cup molasses
1 tablespoon vinegar
3 tablespoons butter
1 cup dark corn syrup
3 quarts salted popped corn

Combine molasses, corn syrup and vinegar in a saucepan. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until a small amount of syrup will form a hard ball when dropped into cold water. This is about 270 degrees if tested with a candy thermometer. Remove from the heat, add the butter and pour over the popped corn, stirring only enough to mix. Form into balls with the hands, using as little pressure as possible. Makes 16 to 18 balls.

(Sandy’s Cooknote *I can’t wait to make this. I buy a big bottle of molasses from a warehouse-type of supermarket in Palmdale, called Smart & Final because I love to make molasses cookies—and I like adding a small amount to the white Karo syrup when I am making caramel corn).

From a Sandychatter reader: “I have my grandmother’s collection of recipes and cookbook. In there I found 2 pages of dumpling recipes from the Chicago Herald American, Home Economics Department, Mary Martensen, Director. They are hand typed and the photo copied from some sort of note book then mailed to my grandmother. I was interested so I did a little research. The Newspaper was the Chicago Evening American from 1914-1939 then it became the Chicago Herald-American 1939-1953 then the Chicago American from 1953-1969.” Tina Aiello Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

(*Sandy’s Cooknote: Tina, if you happen to read this, would you share some of your grandmother’s recipes with me?. When Mary’s first cookbook was published some pages were deliberately left blank just so someone could add their own recipes or clippings.)

MARY MARTENSEN’S CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES

½ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 squares unsweetened chocolate
2 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk or soured milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Preparation Instructions

Cream the shortening, add sugar and cream together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the chocolate which has been melted and cooled, and blend well.

Sift the flour once, measure and resift twice with the soda and salt. Add to the batter alternately with the buttermilk, beating until smooth after each addition. Add vanilla. Fill twelve cupcake pans which have been greased, two thirds full with the batter. Bake in a 350 degree oven, for about 20 minutes or until done.

When cupcakes are cool, with a small sharp pointed knife cut a cone-shape from the top of each. Remove and fill hollowed out portion with slightly sweetened whipped cream. If desired, a larger hollow can be made in the cupcake. Also, ice cream can be used in place of whipped cream to fill the hollow centers. Place top (which was removed from cupcake) on top of whipped cream and pour chocolate sauce over the top.

To make the chocolate sauce: Combine in a saucepan, one square unsweetened chocolate, cut in pieces, one cup sugar, two tablespoons corn syrup, one tablespoon butter and one-third cup hot water. Blend well and cook over low heat, stirring constantly until mixture comes to boiling point, then cook for five minutes. Cool slightly and add a few grains of salt and one half teaspoon vanilla. Serve warm or cold. Contributed by MARY MARTENSEN, 1946

From another Sandychatter reader, Rebecca Christian “I was interested in the Mary Martensen recipe. I worked as a test kitchen home economist in the test kitchen of Chicago’s American newspaper from 1967-1970. Mary Martensen was the nom de plume of the food editor who at that time was Dorothy Thompson. We had about 35,000 recipes in our files and they are still some of my best ones. Wish I had those files now!

Rebecca also wrote “Chicago’s American was eliminated as the afternoon paper of the Chicago Tribune around 1970 or 71. Don’t know if the Tribune kept the recipes or not. There are Chicago Tribune cookbooks but I don’t think they had any American recipes. Each paper owned by the Tribune as well as the Chicago Daily News had test kitchens at the time. We tested every recipe that went in the American. Those days are long gone! Becky.

(*Sandy’s cooknote – Oh, Rebecca – what wouldn’t we all give to have Mary’s recipes today! I’m pea-green with envy that you had the opportunity to work in the test kitchen of Chicago’s American newspaper from 1967-1970—I was busy giving birth during most of those years. Lol).

*Sandy’s cooknote – there are a lot of gaps in my story about Mary Martensen. I don’t know where she grew up or where she spent most of her life. I don’t know how long she lived even though we DO know that Zirta Green was a test kitchen chef of Mrs. Martensen’s who lived to the age of 97! On previous occasions when I mentioned Mary Martensen, readers responded with comments I have included in this post.

The best I can hope to achieve is more details becoming available to us – I am reminded of writing about Myra Waldo, first years ago (around 1990) when I was unable to learn ANYthing about Myra’s later life – and then years later, when I was rewriting my manuscript about Myra, I found obituary details on Google, not previously available to me. I like the idea “if you build it, they will come”

Cookbooks by Mary Martensen:

Home Canning and Freezing Book- or The Canning, Freezing, Curing & Smoking of Meat fish game – date unknown, possibly 1935

CENTURY OF PROGRESS COOKBOOK 1932

Mrs. Mary Martensen’s Recipes Cookbook Chicago American”

SIXTY WAYS TO SERVE HAM, Armour Ham, 1935

RECIPES FOR WILD GAME 1935?

(Sandy’s final cooknote: If anyone knows more about Mary’s cookbooks, such as dates of publication, or any other food editors writing under Mary Martensen’s name—or her other book titles please write!)

Happy Cooking & Happy Cookbook collecting!
Sandy

THREE QUITE UNRELATED COOKBOOKS AND SEVENTY YEARS – PART ONE

Quite unintentionally, three cookbooks ended up in a short stack together as I was engaged in my perpetual endeavor to find places for all the cookbooks on my bookshelves. Yes, there are a good many nice solid oak bookshelves throughout the house – many of them hold my collection of cookie jars and recipe boxes (you can’t imagine how much space cookie jars take up when you have a lot of them) – periodically I go on rampages with the cookbooks, thinning out their ranks a little—to make room for more. Anyway, I was sitting on the floor reflecting on how much of my life is spent trying to find space for books, when my line of vision fell on these three particular books. The oldest was first published in 1939, reprinted in 1940. The newest was published in 2009and the one in the middle, in 1996—a span of seventy years from the oldest to the youngest.

Not by any means are these three cookbooks representative of cookbooks in general—and we could spend days discussing all the different types of cookbooks. But I think they do provide some indication of the evolution of cookbooks in the past 70 years.

First then, is a book titled “WORLD FAMOUS CHEFS’ COOKBOOK/RARE OLD RECIPES, ARRANGE FOR THE HOMEMAKER.” This book opens with recipes from Grand Hotel, Stockholm. You may know that our word “smorgasbord” comes from the Swedish, famous for hors d’oeuvres and buffet foods. In the introduction to Smorgasbord, the author writes…While the American buffet table may sometimes be set with one side close to the wall, Swedish smorgasbord is always set so that guests may walk all around it. At one end is placed an assortment of sliced bread, including rye and slabs of Swedish bread; butter molded in fancy shapes and arranged on a bed of ice is found nearby, with suitable service utensil. As the fundamental meaning of the word “smorgas” is sandwich (I didn’t know that!) so the foundation idea of the “smorgasbord” is a “sandwich table”, therefore all kinds of pickled, smoked, dried and salted fish, as well as platters of cold meat cuts and cheese, always appear near the bread and butter supply. The guest helps himself to bread, butter, and an assortment of delicacies from which he may make his own “sandwiches”; however, neither sandwiches nor canapés, as such, ever appear on the authentic smorgasbord.

Then, around the table, are arranged an amazing array of colorful salads of which the Swedish herring salad is a ‘must’. Many clear aspic salads are included too. If the smorgasbord is to serve as a main meal, such as dinner or supper, and there are too many guests to seat at the tale, several hot dishes are also included as part of the menu.

The mistake that most American diners make, when they first see a smorgasbord, is over-emphasis on the appetizer angle. The epicure, however, soon learns that these delicacies are not meant to satisfy his appetite but to stimulate it, and he therefore deftly and delicately serves himself what might perhaps seem but tidbits to the gourmand—for he realizes that the smorgasbord either offers and entire meal or precedes a full-course one…”

What follows in this chapter is a tantalizing assortment of cold sauce recipes, chilled or jellied fish dishes—recipes for herring, crawfish, boiled crabs in Remoulade Sauce, Salmon Mousse with eggs and many others.

I am partial to recipes for relishes and “World Famous Chefs” offers a great selection—from Grape Catchup (which I’d love to try) to a standard tomato catchup, recipes for chutneys and pickled fruits and vegetables. I found a recipe for Spiced Grapes which made me chuckle – I thought I had discovered something new a year or so ago with an Internet recipe for pickled grapes – and here they are, in a 1939 cookbook!

“World Famous Chefs” offers recipes from the Netherland Plaza—I gasped to see it; this was a famous restaurant in downtown Cincinnati when I was growing up. Included in the book are many of the meat entrees served at the Netherland Plaza back in the day—including – be still my heart – a quite authentic recipe for Hungarian Goulash! (see recipe below). This section is followed by recipes from the Pennsylvania Hotel, New York—you must bear in mind, these were the top notch restaurants 70 years ago. If I were to choose one from the Pennsylvania Hotel, I think it would be the Chopped Cowboy Tenderloin Steak.*

Next is Hotel Adolphus, in Dallas, which opened its doors in 1912 and was still going strong in 1939. Chicken legs can often be purchased inexpensively, so I will include the Adolphus recipe for Deviled Chicken Legs.*

There are also recipes and chapters dedicated to Canadian Hotels as well as many others – but this is a book well conceived and curiously compiled. It was compiled by Ford Naylor and arranged and edited by Irene Hume Taylor, a home economics lecturer and writer/consultant. “Every recipe in this book,” writes Ford Naylor, with few exceptions, is a secret recipe which has been jealously guarded…” Well, the secret’s out. FYI, you know I generally try to find out through Google if a book I am writing about is available. Amazon.com has one used copy of “World Famous Chefs” listed at $29.95.

TO MAKE SPICED GRAPES YOU WILL NEED

4 LBS grapes
2 lbs sugar
1 tsp mixed spices
¼ up cider vinegar

Crush grapes in a preserving kettle; cook over gentle heat until seeds separate. Rub through fine colander. Add sugar, spice sand vinegar to pulp; cook 30 minutes or until slightly thickened. Pour into scalded jelly jars and seal.

TO MAKE THE HOTEL ADOLPHUS DEVILED CHICKEN LEGS YOU WILL NEED

12 cooked chicken legs
6 TBSP butter
1 tsp prepared mustard
¼ tsp pepper
½ tsp salt
½ tsp paprika
1 tsp vinegar
1 egg, beaten
¾ cup bread crumbs
3 cups hot seasoned mashed potatoes
1 ½ cups Bearnaise suace**

Put chicken legs under broiler for 10 minutes. Cream the butter, mustard, pepper, salt, paprika and vinegar together. Remove legs from heat, dip in beaten egg, then rub each with the butter mixture. Place in baking pan, cover with the bread crumbs and bake in a moderate oven until browned. Serve 2 deviled legs with a scoop of mashed potatoes and 4 TBSP Bearnaise sauce.

To make a simple Bearnaise Sauce you will need
1 shallot
½ tsp ground white pepper
Little chopped tarragon
Chervil
2 soupspoons white wine
5 egg yolks
1 lb sweet butter, melted
1 little chopped tarragon chervil
Cook shallot, cook with ground white pepper, tarragon chervil and w hite wine until no liquid is left. Cool it then add the egg yolks stirring well. Cook in double boiler until it starts to thicken, add the melted sweet butter very slowly. Strain, season, add the second chopped chervil. Serve with broiled meat or chicken. Serves 5.

Sandy’s cooknote: I know, I almost fainted over a pound of butter going into the recipe. But I THINK the leftover Bearnaise would keep a long time in the frig and would be available to go on other recipes for steaks or chicken.

From the Pennsylvania, here is their recipe for Chopped Cowboy Tenderloin Steak:

1 lb chopped steak
½ tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1 tsp minced onion

Mix ingredients, then shape into small flat 4-oz cakes. Fry or pan broil in clear fat. Serves 6. Easy, yes?

And from the Netherlands Plaza, here is their recipe for Hungarian Goulash:

4 lbs beef from the neck or shoulder
2 onions minced,
Garlic, chopped
Salt, pepper, paprika,
2 tbsp flour
1 qt stock
2 TBSP tomato puree or paste
2 fresh tomatoes
2 carrots, diced
2 large potatoes, diced
1 tsp chopped parsley

Cut the meat into 2” cubes. Place in a frying pan with 1 TBSP of lard (or cooking oil) and brown for a few minutes. Remove the meat and place a stew pan. Add the onions, little garlic, salt, pepper, paprika and flour. Mix this well together. Add stock, tomato puree, chopped fresh tomatoes and bring to a boil. Then add carrots and cook for about 1 hour. Next add the potatoes and cook until tender. Place the stew in a serving dish and sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve, Serves 6.

(Sandy’s cooknote: Judy, if you are reading this, this one’s for you.)

Well, it wasn’t my intention to make this a two or three part post but I really got carried away with World Famous Chefs and OMG, I could spend another week rhapsodizing about it. I am trying to think where my copy came from – I THINK the book may have originally been one of my sister Becky’s.

End of Part One

Happy Cooking and Happy Cookbook Collecting!

Sandy

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION – WHAT I KNOW ABOUT HELEN EVANS BROWN

Some years ago, a little used bookstore specializing in cookbooks opened up in Burbank, not far from the mall on San Fernando blvd, in a section of town that boasted of perhaps half a dozen used bookstores. It was one of my favorite places to shop—and eat There are many great restaurants in the area, as well.

I became a frequent customer when the cookbook shop, owned by Janet Jarvits, opened its doors. Janet was a young woman who managed to acquire thousands of cookbooks from the personal library of Helen Evans Brown. (In 2001, Janet Jarvits moved her bookstore to Pasadena, while in 2008 I moved to the Antelope Valley, where I find most of my cookbooks these days at the Lancaster Friends of the Library annual book sale).

So, how did a young woman who was not even a cookbook collector—manage to buy the personal cookbook collection of California cook book author Helen Evans Brown? According to a story that ran in the L.A. Times in 1994, Janet graduated from college in 1988, then worked at a publishing house, but when the company moved out of the area, she found a job at Bond Street Books. Here, she discovered her passion and also realized she enjoyed talking with customers about older books. The turning point came to her when a colleague made her an offer she couldn’t refuse – 40 boxes of books from a recent auction, for only $200. In the collection there were enough cookbooks for her to start a library in her bedroom. That was in 1990 and thousands of books ago.

In 1993, a colleague in the book world referred Janet to Philip S. Brown, husband of the now deceased cookbook author/food writer Helen Evans Brown. Janet visited Philip in his Pasadena home where he had lived with Helen, and where the books were housed. Janet obtained the collection which was in a state of disrepair. Philip had abandoned the house, remarried and gone on to live a life without Helen. During the time the books sat in the house, some of them were damaged by a fire, smoke & the water used to put out the fire. All of this left a portion of the library unusable. The practical solution was to catalogue the books and offer them for sale. Janet Jarvits offered a catalog of the best of the non-charitable cookbooks for sale in 1994.

I obtained my first Helen Evans Brown cookbook in the 1960s when I had not been collecting very long—and the “West Coast Cook Book” that I found was a reprint published by the Cookbook Collectors Library. Another early find was “Helen Brown’s Holiday Cookbook” published in 1952 – a first edition – boasting of an introduction by M.F.K. Fisher. My copy has a little water damage—but in my early days of collecting I wasn’t particular. And, back then, I didn’t know who M.F.K. Fisher was—what I did know and recognize is that I liked Helen’s style of cookbook writing.

Helen and Philip S Brown lived in Pasadena from 1937 until her death in 1964.

Before Helen met Philip, she had a career running a successful catering business called The Epiurean, with a friend, and was running a restaurant in New England. Philip courted her and talked her into moving to the west coast with him.

There Helen started work as a consultant to a Hollywood Bakery and Philip began working on an antiquarian bookstore. After working as a consultant to the Hollywood bakery, Helen began writing articles for popular magazines such as Sunset and McCalls.

In 1940, Helen began writing a monthly mailing piece “Baltzer’s Bulletin” for an upscale grocery store, and the following year, a food column for a new fashion magazine “The Californian”. She published a small cookbook “Some Shrimp Recipes” in 1946 and a full length cookbook, “Chafing Dish Book” in 1950. She was well known enough to be approached by a major publisher, Little, Brown for her next book “West Coast Cook Book” published in 1952.

Also, in 1952, “Helen Brown’s Holiday Cook Book”, was published by Little, Brown & Company in Boston; it was published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Limited.

In 1953, Helen & Philip co-Authored “Virginia City Cook Book”, which I do not have, and in 1955, she co-authored The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery with James Beard.

Then, in 1958, Helen co-authored two cookbooks with Philip, “Book of Appetizers” and “Cocktail Hour”. A year later, Helen and Philip produced “The Boys Cook Book”.

Then, in 1961 Helen and Philip co-authored “Breakfasts and Brunches for Every Occasion” and “The Cookout Book”, which features prize winning recipes from cookout championships. The Ward Ritchie Press published a soft cover edition of “The Cookout Book” – which I happened to find somewhere and only paid a dollar for it.

In 1963, Helen co-authored The Book of Curries and Chutneys with William Veach, while in 1964, she wrote “Adventures in Food” with the staff of Sunset Magazine.

During her marriage to Philip, he built Helen’s cookbook collection and also served as taster, research assistant and typist for their book projects. They coauthored “The Boys Cook Book”, published in 1959 and then several others after that.

Helen and James Beard co-authored “The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery” first published in 1955 by Doubleday. This cookbook would be reprinted in a lovely softcover edition when the copyright was renewed in 1983. I know this because I bought a copy of the softcover edition, before I had any idea a) how many of Helen Evans Brown’s books I owned, or b) how many James Beard cookbooks I had. (the problem with a large cookbook collection, I’ve learned, is that unless you have them in some kind of pristine library-ish order, you won’t know what all you actually have in your home library.

Now James Beard has been written about extensively – Helen Evans Brown not so much. This might be because she passed away much too soon—and I’ll bet that neither Helen nor James ever envisioned how much cookbook collecting would take off—and that’s a whole other topic to explore some other time. I think I managed to just squeeze in on the ground floor, starting a collection, specializing in church & club cookbooks in 1965.

Helen Evans Brown & James Beard were good friends—in 1994, “Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles”, containing more than 300 of Beard’s letters to Helen over a period of 12 years was edited and published by his friend & editor John Ferrone. “In the 1950s and ‘60s” we learn from the inside just jacket of “Love and Kisses…” “Helen Brown was the culinary authority of the West Coast—Beard revered her, placing her on a par with M.F.K. Fisher. Brown and Beard wrote to each other at least twice a week until Helen Brown’s untimely death in 1964, sharing their gastronomic musings and the results of their daily inspirations—many of which would later appear in their books. Both traveled extensively, and in their warm epistolary dialogues they expounded on their philosophy of eating, the art of cooking, and their often exotic forays into foreign cuisines.

Beard loved food—good food—and his exuberance and enthusiasm are both overwhelming and infectious. He was also demanding and exacting, and never minced words when served a meal he considered less than perfect. Thus his correspondence is spiced with his utterly charming yet often caustic views on food, wine, and the art of eating. This lively correspondence between two food giants, thoughtfully culled and put into context by Beard’s close friend and editor John Ferrone, is also a testament to a beautiful and moving friendship…”

In Ferrone’s introduction we learn how the two food giants met – and how the correspondence between them began with fan letters – his to her and hers back to him…but I am bowled over by Ferrone’s explanation of how he acquired the correspondence, left in bulging filing cabinets destined for the dumpster after James Beard had passed away! You will really want to read “Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles” – the book that almost didn’t happen.

Helen and her husband Philip lived in Pasadena, California; James Beard was based in New York. He paid the Browns a first visit in the spring of 1953, escalating friendship into love. Thereafter he could always be sure of an affectionate welcome and an extra-long extra-wide mattress. The Browns were as close to family as anything Beard would have in the years ahead. He was crazy about both of them—a number of these letters are addressed to Philip or to “Dear Browns” – but it was Helen he adored. I hope I have whetted your appetite and that you will go buy a copy of “Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles”. I didn’t mean to digress this much—but Helen Evans Brown & James Beard managed to co-author “The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery” despite living on opposite sides of the USA. Helen co-authored a number of books with her husband, and a couple of others with William Templeton Veach.

I wish I could have known Helen Evans Brown and her husband Philip. I wish I could have seen their house in Pasadena. I wish I could have met James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher. I wish I could have met the other Browns – Cora, Rose and Bob Brown, co-authors of about a dozen cookbooks that I treasure. The next best thing is to collect as many of their books as I can find. And read them. And then re-read them. Then go wander into the kitchen, my finger holding my place in a book…and see if I have the right ingredients to make something that has whet my appetite.

And when I am finished reading the cookbooks of my favorite cookbook authors–then, I will write about them and encourage as many people as possible to discover these books for themselves—if you haven’t already.

Various books and internet sources mention only briefly that Helen Evans Brown died an untimely death in 1964. I found the piece of the puzzle I was searching for, in John Ferrone’s introduction in “Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles”. Ferrone writes: “It must have been shattering to Jim when his friend, Helen, died in December, 1964. She was sixty. The rare kidney disease that first surfaced in 1961 had developed into cancer. She was too ill to work through most of her final year and Philip took over her writing assignments. Jim Beard’s last surviving letter to her was written in August, from Provence. He was able to pay her a visit in November, two weeks before she died.

And now you may be wondering – what’s with the “six degrees of separation”—it’s just this: In late 1994, L.A. Times Staff Writer Kathie Jenkins called me up one evening and asked me if I would answer some questions about my cookbook collection. I was too non-plussed to ask Ms. Jenkins where she got my name or how she learned about my collection. The story appeared in the Thursday, December 15, 1994 issue of the L.A. Times –along with a photograph of Janet Jarvits, a background of her cookbooks and a cat. It turned out I was the lead-in to a story about Janet Jarvits’ cookbook store—a cookbook store I was well acquainted with. I knew Janet Jarvits. Janet Jarvits had purchased about 5000 volumes from the personal collection that had belonged to Helen Evans Brown. Six degrees of separation. Or maybe that’s only three degrees.

Happy Cookbook Collecting!
Sandy

A PEEK INTO THE PAST–ANTIQUE COOKBOOKS

Say “antiquarian cookbooks” and most people imagine that anything they consider old—cookbooks over 30 years old, for instance–to be “antiques”. Strictly speaking, a thirty year old cookbook isn’t an antique; however, many cookbooks published in fairly recent decades may be extremely valuable to a collector. If, for instance, you have a first edition copy of “Joy of Cooking” – the very first copies, the true first editions, were self published by the author in 1931, making one of those 80 years old. It has been in print continuously since 1936 with more than 18 million copies sold. In 1936, Bobs-Merrill began publishing “Joy”. A first edition of “Joy” was listed recently by ABE books for $3,000.00.

Many cookbook dealers call themselves antiquarian book dealers while most of the cookbooks they are offering for sale are not truly antiquarian…but may be merely out of print or scarce. And remember the #1 golden rule of cookbook collecting or trying to sell some of your books—a cookbook is only worth $3,000.00 (or even $100.00) if someone will PAY that price. As a collector you have to decide for yourself whether the asking price of a book is worth that much. (Heck, I would love to complete my collection of The Browns cookbooks but am missing their Vegetable cookbook—I have seen it listed by antiquarian dealers for $90.00 – and to MY mind, $90.00 is too steep. I think even $50.00 would be too much –Tag it at $25.00 and I would probably start writing a check.

Personally, I think most dealer prices are too pricey; I find most of my treasures in thrift stores and other out-of-the-way places where the prices are often more reasonable. On the other hand, I HAVE paid rather high prices for cookbooks I have coveted too much not to own them. And in recent years, I have been doing a lot of my searching on Amazon.com.

So, you ask, what IS an antiquarian cookbook? To be truly an antique, it should be over one hundred years old.

We are fortunate that cookbooks, over the centuries, have enjoyed a high enough status to have been collected and preserved.

The earliest cookbooks were handwritten manuscripts, prior to the invention of the printing press in 1455. All books were handwritten manuscripts. The Gutenberg Bible, as we know, was the first book printed on the printing press, but cookbooks also played an important role in the development of printed books.

Per Esther Aresty in her 1964 “The Delectable Past” (Simon & Schuster), the first cookbook printed on the printing press originated in Italy. It was written by a Vatican librarian named Bartolomeo de’ Sacchi and was titled “DE HONESTA VOLUPTATE” which loosely translates to mean “Permissible Pleasures.”

England’s first printed cookbook, “The Boke of Cokery” (sic) was published in 1500; “The Good House-Wive Treasure” (sic) was printed in 1588; “The English House-wife” (sic) by Gervase Markham was printed in 1615, and along with other cookbooks being published during those periods of time, were all written by men – women were not thought to be competent enough to write cookbooks!

Also, these books were owned only by the wealthy or royalty—bearing in mind, it really was a man’s world; most women in medieval times did not have the luxury of an education.

From Betty Confidential I learned that the very first female cookbook writer is believed to be Sabina Welserin of Augsburg, Germany. Her Kochbuch of 1553, however, remained in manuscript form until modern times.

Also from Betty Confidential, “Anna Weckerin’s Ein Köstlich new Kochbuch (A Delicious New Cookbook) of 1598 is the first cookbook published by a woman. It went through many editions up through the 17th century. She was the wife of a prominent professor of medicine, Johann Jacob Wecker, and not surprisingly, was health conscious. Her recipes include a roast salmon with a sour sauce, an eel pie, as well as more familiar German dishes like Bratwurst and Lebkuchen.” Betty Confidential also refers to “One of the most delightful and least known of antique cookbooks is ‘Rare and Excellent Receipts’ by Mary Tillinghast published in 1690. (This is the first I have ever heard of Mary Tillinghast’s cookbook).

In my original article for the Cookbook Collectors Exchange in 1993, I noted that “Possibly the first English cookbook with a woman’s by-line appeared in London in 1681 and was titled “The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet” by Hannah Wooley. While searching on Google to re-verify my 1993 notes, I came across the earlier references to Sabina Welserin and Anna Weckerin.

Another of the earliest female cookbook authors was Mary Kettilby who, in 1714, published “A Collection of Above Three Hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and Surgery; For the Use of All Good Wives, Tender Mothers and Careful Nurses.” But one woman writer who was to greatly influence English cookbooks and to prove that women were just as capable as men when it came to compiling cookbooks was Hannah Glasse, whose book “The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy” was published in 1747.

These early cookbooks were scarcely JUST cookbooks—they contained everything from household hints to directions for making up one’s own medicines, instructions for managing the household servants and proper etiquette, to directions for concocting perfumes, wines, cordials, soap, yeast – just about everything.

Early cookbooks began with the premise that first you had to KILL the animal that was to be eaten, and provide gory details for dismembering and preparing meat. I remember one old cookbook’s directions for cooking calf’s head—first you had to hold it by an ear and dip the head in boiling water! Still think it was so great back in the good old days? Calf’s head jelly was a forerunner of Jello gelatin—but Calf’s head was also cooked to make “mock turtle soup” – when you didn’t have a turtle but did have a calf’s head laying around. Ew, ew. Directions for killing a turtle to make authentic turtle soup are so gruesome that I, for one, am grateful for mock turtle soup. More recent versions of mock turtle soup are made with…ground beef.

Many seventeenth and eighteenth century cookbooks found their way across the ocean—ALL cookbooks first available in this country came from Europe. Not that it mattered very much; pioneer Americans were learning to adapt to a wide variety of new foods and one can suppose that even if the lady of the house COULD read and write, much of the discourse on managing servants would have been useless to early pioneer women.

The first American cookbook was printed in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1742, and reprinted there in 1752. According to “The Delectable Past”, however, this book was American by imprint only for it was actually Eliza Smith’s “The Compleat Housewife” (sic) which, at the time, was the most popular cookbook in England. The same book was reprinted in New York in 1764. (There was a lot of plagiarism ‘back in the day’ and apparently, it was done with impunity.)

In 1772, a cookbook was published in Boston, Susannah Carter’s “The Frugal Housewife,” followed in 1792 by Richard Briggs’ cookbook “The New Art of Cookery”. However, these first “American” cookbooks were actually English cookbooks; none contained recipes using Native American foods. Cookbooks were not in great demand in this country. In the south (and in the homes of some of the well-to-do) hostesses kept manuscript recipe journals and guarded their treasured recipes carefully, while in pioneer households across the land, young girls learned to cook by watching and helping their mothers in the kitchen.

The first cookbook written by an American woman was Amelia Simmon’s “American Cookery” which appeared in print in 1796. Amelia, according to cooklore, was an orphan and is credited with also being the first American cookbook writer to use American recipes with American ingredients. Her book was enormously successful—so much so that many of her recipes turned up later in Susannah Carter’s book “The Frugal Housewife” which in turn was plagiarized later in a reprint edition of Hannah Glasse’s book for American readers! But as noted earlier, these aren’t the first instances of plagiarism—stealing other cookbook authors’ works was a common practice that goes back hundreds of years. Even Alexander Dumas, famous for having written “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers” was guilty of plagiarizing when he was compiling his “Le Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine”.

This was such a common practice, one can only assume that in the absence of laws protecting writers, authors had no compunctions against lifting material from other writers’ works.

The publishing market was replete, throughout the 1800s, with cookbooks written by women (bearing in mind, it was one of the few things a respectable “lady” could pursue as a source of income).
One written by a man was “The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined: comprising ample directions for preparing every article requisite for furnishing the tables of the nobleman, gentleman and tradesman, by John Mollard. (Presumably, in Mr. Mollard’s world there were no women in the kitchen).

From the previously mentioned Susannah Carter, in 1803, was “The Frugal Housewife: or, Complete Woman Cook: Wherein the Art of Dressing All Sorts of Viands is Explained in Upwards of Five Hundred Approved Receipts” (Has anyone ever wondered how those long titles ever fit on the cover of a book?)

Sometimes the author of a cookbook, if a woman, would write anonymously to preserve her dignity and reputation. “A New System of Domestic Cookery, published in 1807 “by a Lady” was later identified when the book was reprinted.

And, in 1808 Lucy Emerson is credited with “The New-England Cookery, Or The Art of Dressing All Kinds of Flesh, Fish, and Vegetables—etc etc” and if it sounds familiar, it’s because Lucy plagiarized the 1798 cookbook by Amelia Simmons.

I was curious about copyright laws and when they went into effect, so – digressing and sidetracking, which I am known to do, I Googled a number of websites. I learned this:

The world’s first copyright law was the Queen Anne Statute, or “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. It was passed by the English Parliament on 10 April 1710.

The purpose of this was to protect work of authors, but copyright laws have now extended to all forms of media. The Queen Anne Statute was the origin of all modern copyright laws.

In the US, the basis for both copyright and patent law is established in Article 1, section 8, clause 8 of the US Constitution (adopted 17 September 1787).

The first actual US copyright legislation was passed by the Congress on 25 May 1790 and signed into law by then President George Washington on 31 May 1790. While Benjamin Franklin is rumored to have birthed the idea of copyrights, it can be seen that it was present in the UK well before then.

Well, despite the existence of copyright laws, would-be authors went right on plagiarizing, or pirating, other authors’ works.

In 1815, Priscilla Homespun published “The Universal Receipt Book” (do you think that was really her surname?) and in 1819, The New Family Receipt Book was published by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell, who published a number of other cookbooks in her time.

In 1820, Rundell published “The New Family Receipt Book” while (same year) Mrs. Frazer published “The Practice of Cookery, Pastry, Confectionary, Pickling, Preserving…”

One of the first of these that I actually recognize and remember reading about elsewhere is “The Virginia Housewife, Or, Methodical cook”, first published in 1824 by Mary Randolph.

There was in 1830, “Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats” by “A Lady of Philadelphia”—in 1832, a reprint identified the Lady of Philadelphia as Miss Leslie of Philadelphia.

From Feeding America, we learn that “by 1860 more and more cookbooks were being printed, and American cookbooks had become an integral part of the publishing business. The upheaval of the Civil War caused a decline in the publication of all books, including cookbooks. Then, in the 1870s, three major cookbooks explosions occurred, the effects of which are still with us. The first was a Civil War legacy: cookbooks compiled by women’s charitable organizations to raise funds to aid victims of the War – orphans, widows, wounded, veterans. When the Civil War ended, these organizations turned their charitable attentions to other causes. The trickle of these early books published in the 1860s and 1870s has become a flood today, as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of charitable cookbooks to benefit every conceivable cause are published in the United States each year…(another) important development was the growth of the cooking school movement. It began with the cooking schools started in New York City by Pierre Blot and Juliet Corson and intensified with the great cooking schools and their teachers – Mrs. Rorer in Philadelphia and Mrs. Lincoln and Fannie Farmer in Boston. These schools dominated American cookbook publishing for the remainder of the nineteenth century and early into the twentieth”.

So, fast forward a little bit – to the latter 1800s, when along came Fannie – Fannie Farmer. Fannie was born in Medford, Massachusetts in March, 1857, the oldest of four daughters, born into a family that highly valued education and expected Fannie to go to college. However, when she was just sixteen years old, she suffered a paralytic stroke and was unable to continue her education. For several years she couldn’t walk and remained at home with her parents.

During this period of time. Fannie took up cooking, eventually turning her mother’s home into a boarding house that developed a reputation for the quality of the meals they served. At the age of 30, Fannie – now walking with a limp – enrolled in the Boston Cooking School. Fannie trained at the school until 1889 learning what were then considered the most important elements of cooking, nutrition, diet for convalescents, cleaning and sanitation, chemical analysis of food, techniques of cooking and baking, and household management.

Fannie was one of the school’s top students. She was kept on as assistant to the director, and in 1891 took on the job of school principal. Fannie published her best-known work, “The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book”, in 1896. Her cookbook introduced the concept of using standardized measuring spoons and cups, as well as level measurement.

“The Boston Cooking School Cookbook” was actually a follow-up to an earlier version called “Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book”, published by Mary J. Lincoln in 1884 under Fannie Farmer’s direction. Fannie Farmer’s cookbook eventually contained 1,849 recipes. Fannie also included essays on housekeeping, cleaning, canning, and drying fruits and vegetables, and providing nutritional information. The book’s publisher (Little, Brown & Company) didn’t expect good sales and limited the first edition to 3,000 copies, published at the author’s expense. The book was so popular in America, so thorough, and so comprehensive that cooks would refer to later editions simply as the “Fannie Farmer cookbook”, and it is still available in print over 100 years later. (Yes, Virginia, a first edition of the 1896 cookbook would be worth some bucks especially since only 3000 copies were published).

Fannie Farmer’s book listed ingredients separately from directions, presented readers with accurate, level measurements. Earlier cookbooks would instruct the cook to “use butter the size of an egg”. (What size egg? Small? Medium? Jumbo?) or to “heat the oven until you can only hold your hand inside for 15 seconds, (or until you have a second degree burn?) or might call for “a teacup of flour” (what size teacup?).

Actually, Ms. Farmer wasn’t the FIRST to list ingredients separately from directions; Sarah Tyson Rorer had done that some years before, in her book “Mrs. Rorer’s Philadelphia Cookbook” (where Mrs. Rorer had a cooking school of HER own), but the concept of level, accurate, standardized measurements brought science into the kitchen.

Why are these old cookbooks so fascinating to read? Certainly they often lack usefulness in today’s kitchen; the recipes are generally vague about directions and quantities needed. However, they provide us with a stunning glimpse into the past, in an area (the kitchen) that most of us are familiar with. We see – perhaps better than most historians – just how time consuming and difficult a housewife’s role was a hundred or two hundred years ago. With the vast amount of work required in the kitchen, it’s a wonder that the lady of the house managed to accomplish so many other things as well. I have been reminded that families were often large and it was not uncommon for a maiden aunt or a grandmother or other extended family members to live in the house and thereby providing extra helping hands (confirming the axiom that many hands make light work).

Middle to upper class homes one hundred years ago might easily have had a maid or two, or a housekeeper or cook as well. I think we can safely assume that not ALL households had extra aunties or grandmothers, nor did all families have maids and cooks. Meals alone were a full time task that began at sunrise. If the lady of the house had a wood-burning stove, it meant laying the wood for the fire, keeping it hot, baking breads (which started with making one’s own yeast and sometimes getting the yeast starter going the night before) and then preparing meals for the entire family. Although wood stoves were commonly used, gas and oil stoves and ranges were available from the late 1800s. Miss Parloa, the author of a cookbook titled “Miss Parloa’s Every Day Cooking and Marketing Guide”, copyrighted in 1880 and published by Estes and Lauriat, judiciously expounds on the virtues of gas and oil stoves and ranges; she writes that the two products were so near perfection that it was difficult to imagine how they could be improved upon.

Miss Parloa deplored, however, the commonly used refrigerators of her time. She claimed that the food developed a peculiar odor due to the wood used in the construction of refrigerator’s interior and shelves. As most of us know, these “refrigerators” were actually “ice boxes” which contained blocks of ice (which you purchased from an ice man). The food was stored, literally, on ice. A few years later, a “better” ice box came along. The ice was stored in a separate compartment with vents on either side to allow air n either side to flow freely through the upper compartment, where the food was kept. What would Miss Parloa think if she could see our modern refrigerator/freezers with automatic ice cube and cold water dispensers on the doors?

Another of Maria Parloa’s cookbooks was “The Original Appledore Cook Book/Practical Receipts for Plain and Rich Cooking” published in 1872 and reprinted in 1881. My copy is in a truly battered, tattered, condition with the binding falling away from the contents, but what is intriguing are the last dozen pages or so, all covered with handwritten recipes that are so faded, it’s almost impossible to decipher the script. (When I began collecting cookbooks, I’d buy anything in any condition—just to have the books.)

And then there were the Beechers. Father Lyman was a Presbyterian minister. Daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, published in 1852.

“Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book: Designed as a Supplement to her Treatise on Domestic economy” was published in 1850 by Harriet’s sister, Catharine Esther Beecher. But there is an intriguing story behind the Domestic Receipt book—as told in Cookbooks-A-La-Carte:

“Catharine Beecher invited to tea one afternoon in 1846—twenty years after their graduation from the Hartford Female Seminary—two dozen of her former students. They listened with interest and sympathy as she described how the year before, promising to write a new cookbook, she had taken an advance from Harper & Brothers to send her gravely ill younger sister Harriet to the Brattleboro Spa in Vermont and of how, now, with only the first of over twenty projected chapters written, the deadline was fast approaching—which, if not met, would result in a severe financial penalty.

There was a solution . . . if each of those present would write a chapter, with a sufficient number of receipts—recipes—for the projected book, the whole book could be completed in a week! Never doubting their wholehearted support, she had the titles for the chapters ready on little slips of paper in her hand–meat, fish, vegetables, soups, pies, bread, breakfast and tea cakes, cakes, preserves and jellies, pickles, food for the sick . . .

The completed assignments were quickly assembled into Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book, which soon became one of the nineteenth century’s most successful cook-books. Far ahead of its time, it warned about the dangers of animal fats and excessive sugar. Today there is, perhaps, no more detailed picture of what Americans were eating a hundred and fifty years ago and how it was cooked. In helping organize the kitchen and its work properly, Miss Beecher intended to enable women to lead longer, happier lives…”

In 1874 there was Marian Harland’s “Common Sense in the Household: a Manual of Practical Housewifery.” My copy is literally falling apart and is one of the oldest cookbooks in my collection. Marion Harland’s life was so interesting, it would be worth a post just about her. After writing 15 novels, starting at the age of 16, Marion wrote her first cookbook, “Common Sense in the Household” and continued writing many more books before her death at age 91.

There was also “English Bread-Book for Domestic Us, Adapted to Families of Every Grade” by Eliza Acton in 1857 and in 1877, “Buckeye Cookery, and Practical Housekeeping: Compiled from Original Recipes” – which has been reproduced in a facsimile edition.

Buckeye Cookery was the great mid-American cookbook of its day. It began life as a charity cookbook when, in 1876, the women of the First Congregational Church in Marysville, Ohio, published a cookbook to raise money to build a parsonage. They named it The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, in honor of America’s Centennial.
The author, Estelle Woods Wilcox, who grew up in Marysville had moved with her husband to Minneapolis, where he managed the Minneapolis Daily Tribune. From Minneapolis, Mrs. Wilcox edited the contributions of the Marysville women and wrote the introductory essays to each section. The book was published in Minneapolis and the ladies of Marysville accomplished their goal by raising two thousand dollars for the parsonage.

Throughout the last years of the century, cookbooks continued to be published—more of Miss Parloa’s, some of Marion Harland’s, the White House cookbook by F. L. Gillette which led to numerous reprints over several decades (and is worthy of a post all its own), right up to 1899’s Catering For Two; Comfort and Economy for Small Households by Alice James, and Marion Harland’s “Bits of common Sense Series”.

And then there were all the cookbooks published in the 1900s….but, as you know, except for those published between 1900 and 1911, the rest don’t qualify as antiquarian cookbooks. However, that being said – there were cookbooks like the Settlement Cook book, Sarah Rorer’s New Cookbook, a Manual of Housekeeping published in 1902, Fannie Farmer’s “Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent” published in 1904, Maria’s Parloa’s “Canned Fruit, Preserves, and Jellies: Household Methods of Preparation” also published in 1904, The Blue Grass Cookbook, by Minerva Fox, was also published in 1904, as was German National Cookery for American Kitchens, by Henriette Davids. The Times Cookbook by California Women was the result of a series of recipe contests in the Los Angeles Times and published by the Los Angeles Times in 1905, while the Good Housekeeping Family Cookbook was published in 1906- and the list goes on and on.

Collecting cookbooks is such a fascinating hobby—and it can be a valuable one, too. I bought a #1 Pillsbury Bake Off book at a flea market in Palm Springs one year, for $1.00. I almost didn’t buy it—the box of booklets on a table had a sign “books, 50c each” but when I held it up to the vendor, she said “Oh, I need a dollar for that one”. Grumbling, I paid her a dollar. It wasn’t until we were back in the car that I realized what I had—I had never before seen a picture of the first bake off book. They’re scarce and worth about $50.00 give or take a little depending on condition.

It’s an addictive kind of hobby as other collectors will testify. A few months ago, I began writing the current price of some of my old cookbooks on post-its to stick on the flyleaf, when I came across some of the going prices. The idea was for my family to have some kind of idea what some of the books are worth.

Did you know that Laura Bush collects vintage cookbooks? So do many top chefs including the Food Network’s Cat Cora. Booksellers throughout the country say that vintage cookbooks are in constant demand. A first edition of American Cookery by Amelia Simmons may be worth as much as ten thousand dollars—but I don’t think it’s the value of a book that attracts a true collector, as much as just HAVING a particular book. My having the #1 bake off booklet makes my collection of the Bake Off books complete even though they’re nowhere near being vintage cookbooks. Neither is the Vincent Price cookbook (which I do have)–one in good condition can be worth up to $200.00.

(Cookbooks written by the rich and famous is another whole ball of wax. I have several shelves-full of these books, dating back about 50 years. One of these days I will write about those).

Collecting cookbooks can pretty much take over your life, if you let it. (We have wall to wall bookshelves filled with cookbooks, inside the house. Bob had to convert half of our garage into a library to house all of our other books).

And when you aren’t reading antiquarian cookbooks, you can do as I do—WRITE about them!

Happy cooking and happy cookbook collecting!
Sandy

CROSS CREEK COOKERY BY MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS

“Cross Creek Cookery” is, in my opinion (after collecting cookbooks for 45 years) the quintessential regional American cookbook. In 1965, when I began collecting cookbooks, I focused primarily on club-and-church cookbooks because they so often presented a regional slice of Americana depending on the part of the USA they came from—from Boston you’d get New England clam chowder, while from Cincinnati you’d get Cincinnati Chili…but as time went by, the country has become more and more homogenized-you can go to a Denney’s or a McDonald’s in any state in the country and order anything on the menu…it will be the same menu in every part of the country. But collect cookbooks from years ago and you will get a far better sense of what regional cooking is all about.

After the publication and huge success of “The Yearling” in 1938, Marjorie’s publishers suggested a book about life in the Florida scrub. Marjorie’s thoughts were already running along the same lines; she didn’t have to fret over a title—the book named itself: “Cross Creek”. It was first published in 1942.

“Cross Creek was chosen for a Book of the Month selection, along with John Steinbeck’s “The Moon is Down”. “Cross Creek” received immediate critical acclaim with some reviewers calling her “a female Thoreau.”

“Cross Creek” rose to the top of the best seller lists and remained there for many months. The armed forces published a special edition of “Cross Creek” which led, in turn, to Marjorie being inundated with mail from servicemen…bearing in mind this was 1942 and the USA was deeply embroiled in World War II. Marjorie strived to answer all of their letters. I think the charm and quietness, the native humor and Marjorie’s love of the earth endeared her to the world during this difficult period in American history.

“Cross Creek Cookery” grew out of the popularity of a chapter in “Cross Creek”, titled “Our Daily Bread” so when Marjorie suggested to her editors at Scribner’s that she compile a cookbook, they quickly agreed. Of her cooking, Marjorie wrote (in “Cross Creek”) “Cookery is my one vanity and I am a slave to any guest who praises my culinary art. This is my Achilles heel…” (I smiled, reading those lines; I could have written them myself). She also said that it didn’t take much urging to get her to write a cookbook. “Scratch a cook” she wrote, “and you’ll get a recipe.”

“Cross Creek Cookery,” Marjorie wrote, “was a book of pure pleasure except for the heat of the kitchen” as “Marjorie tested recipes and the extra pounds she put on. Her husband Norton helped, writing down measurements and cooking time for the recipes. Elsewhere she wrote, “There are cooks who guard secret and precious recipes with their lives. This seems to me ungenerous in practitioners of an art…”

I have admired the work of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings most of my adult life but without really knowing who she was or the depth and range of her writing ability. She was not without fault, this Ms. Rawlings. She smoked too much (as many as five packs a day of unfiltered Lucky Strikes) and enjoyed alcohol to excess, and (as is evident if you have a copy of Cross Creek Cookery) relished good food, too, cooking recipes replete with Dora’s butter and cream (Dora was her cow). Marjorie’s health was often precarious as she fought repeated battles with chronic diverticulitis, for which, in the 1930s, there was not much treatment.

Marjorie said that her recognition of cookery as one of the great arts was not an original discovery, that her mother and grandmother had been famous cooks.

“When I read Della Lutes’ ‘A Country Kitchen’” writes Marjorie, “I wept in nostalgia for my Michigan grandmother’s dinner table…” (She goes on to explain that good cooking was not, as she expected it to be, a genetic talent, but after one memorable –inedible- meal, her mother in law sent her a copy of Fanny Farmer’s “Boston Cook Book” and “Lo and behold, my memories of my mother’s dishes suddenly fitted in with the new exactness and I could duplicate her secret recipes, her heart-melting egg croquettes, her chicken in aspic, her potato puffs, her white almond cake…”

Marjorie thought that, if she were destitute, she could have made a living as a cook, but only if it were in a place where the cream and butter and cooking sherry were in ample supply, for “Life at the Creek with Jersey cows has unfitted me for skimmed milk and margarine. And I should buy cooking sherry with my last dollar…”

“Our Daily Bread” told the story of cooking and eating in the Florida scrub—often prefaced with the catching of the entrée, whether it was alligator tail—which Marjorie considered fine eating when properly prepared—to raccoon, which Marjorie once prepared before she learned that the raccoon has a musk-sack which has to be removed before cooking. Her first attempt at cooking raccoon was a total failure.

Marjorie drew a line between eating rattlesnake (I guess!) and alligator, but conceded that “drawing a line between dangerous rattlers and harmless alligators is as though a cannibal said he would eat a friend but would not eat an enemy.”

“Cross Creek Cookery” was published in 1942 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Many of the recipes were her mother’s or grandmother’s. Many are recipes she created, or learned, living in the Florida scrub, using native ingredients.

The chapters range from soup (of which Marjorie says “I associate soup with either poverty or formal elegance”) to desserts (the longest section of all) including Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie and Marjorie’s Mother’s Almond cake with almond paste filling and boiled frosting.

Of the cake, Marjorie wrote that it made its appearance “spectacularly” on her birthday when she was allowed to choose her own dinner menu. It took a day to make, for the almonds had to be shelled, soaked in boiling water, the skins removed, the meats dried and blanched, then chopped fine. “The cake,” she wrote, “was as white as a virgin’s breast, as tender as a mother’s heart, and was made in four layers.”

Included in the chapter for hot breads were her mother and Idella’s biscuits, several kinds of cornbreads, hush puppies and an ice box roll recipe.

The Florida sea food section provides ten crab recipes, six for shrimp and others for Florida lobster, crawfish, and frogs’ legs.
Marjorie was also proud of her marmalades and included some recipes for them.

As you and I know, not too many cookbooks fall into a realm of which you can say “I can read it over and over!” – it’s like your favorite novel, something so special that every time you read it, you get something different from it. “Cross Creek Cookery” is like that.

It’s interesting to note that, as soon as Marjorie and her editor, Max, had worked through the galley and page proofs of “Cross Creek Cookery”, she took off on a trip to fulfill another writing obligation, traveling thousands of miles through southern forests to gather material for an article on American forests; however she was never able to satisfy the editors of Post and refused their suggestions for revisions. The article was eventually published in 1943 in Collier’s Magazine and titled “Trees for Tomorrow”—although this is not cookbook related, I point this out because Marjorie was a conservationist long before others became alarmed or it was fashionable to be concerned.

She was invariably ahead of her time. Her article explained that American forests were not infinite, the impact of the devastation of our forests on the countryside affected our towns and people. She combined interviews with lumber experts and simple people whose livelihood had disappeared with the disappearance of the forests in their environment. (See “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Sojourner at Cross Creek” by Elizabeth Silverthorne.)

On the night of December 12, 1953, Marjorie complained of feeling ill but thought it was her troublesome diverticulitis acting up again. Later that evening when she was unable to walk, Norton took her to the hospital. Doctors told him that Marjorie had a ruptured aneurism, that a blood vessel had ruptured at the base of her brain. As Elizabeth Silverthorne explains, “Life and time had loaded the dice against Marjorie. She was betrayed by her genes (both of her parents died young), by her own personal habits (heavy smoking and drinking), by her love of good foods that led to excessive weight, and by her personality (high-strung and tense). The next day another blood vessel burst and she died. She was 57 years old.

THE MINUTES TICK SO SLOWLY THE YEARS SO FAST A LONG TIME NOW, MINUTES UNBEARABLE SLOW MINUTES, UNTIL YOU COME. BUT THE YEARS WHEN YOU WERE GONE (WERE) ONLY AN INSTANT, A BREATH OF AIR ACROSS THE OLEANDERS, A BUTTERFLY ON THE ONE-DAY HIBISCUS BLOSSOMS.
SO, IT IS LIFE AND LOVE ARE SLOW, AND DEATH IS FAST (QUICK).
(Found among Marjorie’s papers after her death).

Most of Marjorie’s property was bequeathed to the University of Florida Endowment Corporation in Trust. She left her property at Cross Creek to the University of Florida. For a long time, the property became rundown and unkempt, until the University turned the property over to the Florida Department of Natural Resources, which now operates it as the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site.

In 1983, Sally Morrison wrote “Cross Creek Kitchens”. Sally was a ranger who worked at the Rawlings home for many years.

For a copy of “Cross Creek Cookery” you need only to go to any online book site—Amazon, Alibris, Barnes & Noble – they all have copies at many different price ranges.

A soft cover copy of “Cross Creek Kitchens” such as I have can be purchased from Amazon.com starting at one cent for a pre owned copy.

–Happy Cooking and Happy Cookbook Collecting!
Sandy

UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY OF THE MYSTERY CHEF

While going through some cookbooks—mainly rearranging some of them—I came across a first edition of The Mystery Chef Cookbook. I looked through it and wondered – who WAS the mystery chef? Why didn’t I know more about him?

Well, you know, Google is the greatest, fastest resource for information—so I googled, asking “who was the Mystery Chef?” and was richly rewarded.

The Mystery Chef was a man named John MacPherson who hosted a Philadelphia cooking program “The Mystery Chef” on NBC in 1949. It was one of NBCs first daytime programs and the show ran on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from March 1st through June 29.

MacPherson was a former chemical engineer who arrived in the USA from London in 1906. He started on radio in the 1930s when he took over a program for a friend and soon began to share his love of cooking with his listening audience. His “Mystery Chef” radio program ran from 1932 to 1945 – a period of time in which radio recipe programs were in their heyday. (What baffles me is that I never came across the Mystery Chef when I was writing about radio recipe programs…first for the Cookbook Collectors Exchange, and more recently, on my Blog.

Radio recipe programs were enormously popular almost from the inception of radio and continued for decades. NOW you have television recipe programs, a forum that started very simply and has grown until we have the Food Network and dozens of television chef celebrities!)

MacPherson’s programs featured recipes for a limited budget, which makes perfectly good sense considering that in the 1930s the USA was in the throes of a Great Depression. He was very popular with thousands of people who requested copies of his no-fuss recipes. In 1934 MacPherson copyrighted his recipe book which was published in 1936 under the title “The Mystery Chef’s Own Cook Book” by Longmans, Green and Co.

We have MacPherson’s own words in the introduction:
He asks “How did I, a man, ever come to take up cooking as a hobby?” (Presumably a period of time when male chefs were rare?) “Well, the answer is—I didn’t take up cooking as hobby. Some would say I drifted into it by accident, though I myself don’t believe such things happen by accident. I am a Scot, and therefore I see design I all things…”

MacPherson writes that he came to America in 1906 from London where he owned a rapidly growing advertising business. He came looking for American business and later decided to stay and learn American methods. He left the London business in the hands of his father who was a director for various large companies. His father often complained that John made money so easily and spent it much too freely; he thought if his son stayed in America it would be an opportunity to learn the real value of money. His father, who had been sending him 100 pounds decided he would change the amount to 2 pounds a week…all of which led to a quick change in John’s way of living. He gave up hotel living and found rooms in a boarding house. “The house was fine” he writes, “but words fail me when I try to tell you how bad the meals were…”

In the boarding house, John joined forces with a man who, like himself, had been used to the best of everything. The two friends left the boarding house, found a furnished apartment – and began to cook some of their own meals.

“At first we broiled chops and steaks,” John recalled, “then I roasted a piece of beef. It was good. I roasted chicken, cooking vegetables as well as potatoes, and we began to feel that were getting somewhere so we invited our first guests to dinner…”

He says if his first guests had said that someday Royalty* would ask to be invited to dine in his home, he would have thought they were crazy—but that is exactly what did happen. Many famous men and women dined as guests in the home of John and his wife.

(*MacPherson does not share with us what members of Royalty dined in his home).

It is John’s opinion that once you treat cooking as an art, it will quickly prove itself to be one of the most fascinating of all arts (to which I agree, wholeheartedly). He says it seems strange that so few people find pleasure in it or know that many of the world’s greatest men have found pleasure and relaxation in the art of excellent cooking.
Among those who have made cooking their hobby, he writes, are Alxandre Dumas, Whistler, King Edward VII…Luther Burbank, the wizard of plant life, George Eastman of Kodak and Enrico Caruso and many others. He says he could almost fill this book with their names – kings, prime ministers, princes, presidents, cardinals, great generals, admirals, scientists, great painters, authors, musicians and sculptors. MacPherson says that the only strange thing about his taking up the art of cooking as a hobby is that he should dare to tread where so many of the world’s greatest men have trod.

“Now among the arts,” writes MacPherson, “cooking is the only one I know that can be immediately handed on to another. You may have never coked anything in your life yet with directions clearly given, you can prepare a delicious meal…”

MacPherson also explains why he began calling himself the mystery chef. “The reason was a good one at the time I decided to us it,” he writes. “My dear mother, who was alive at that time, was horrified when she first heard that I had taken to cooking as a hobby…” (Apparently, mama thought having a son doing a cooking show on the radio was simply not acceptable).

In any event, the Mystery Chef was a popular fixture in Philadelphia for a long time. Other radio recipe personalities were crowding the airwaves as well. (I have written about some of these in my article “When Radio Was King Part 1” posted on June 21, 2009 on my blog and When Radio Was King, Part 2 posted on July 27, 2009). There are also some photographs of the old time radio program cookbooks posted on those two months).

There was, for instance, Aunt Sammy, a fictional character developed by the US Department of Agriculture. Aunt Sammy was so popular that recipe booklets written by Aunt Sammy were published; I have a couple of these in my collection.

If none of these names ring a bell, maybe you have seen cookbooks by Ida Bailey Allen, or Kate Brew Vaughn, both radio recipe ladies who went on to publish a number of cookbooks, or perhaps Mike Roy, who, along with the Mystery Chef, infiltrated this mainly female domain. These ladies (and sometimes gentlemen!) along with many others like them, were pioneers of another sort. They hosted radio recipe programs when radio was in its prime. Perhaps radio recipe programs is not the right term. It’s too limiting. They were friends, like neighbors, who came into your home and shared every day things with you, like recipes, or homemaking, or the trials and tribulations of every day living and making ends meet. For now, there was the Mystery Chef, in Philadelphia.

Some contemporary writers find it hard to understand, from today’s viewpoint, how simple radio recipe host and hostesses could talk about kitchen tips and household cleaning or tell jokes or read recipes on the airwaves. What many fail to understand is that farming was far bigger in the 20s than it is now, nearly 100 years later. There wasn’t any television, only radio, and that radio might have been the housewife’s only connection with the outside world from day to day. One writer asks, “Did the radio-powers-that-were really think women needed so much instruction, so many tips and suggestions to do what they’ve been doing for centuries?” The writer thought not, but I think they did. I collect old recipe boxes and handwritten recipe journals, and you’d be surprised how often a recipe was tidily written, with the note “from the radio” or more simply “radio cake”. Not only that but many of those recipes ended up in cookbooks, sold either for a very small amount, like a dollar, or were given away free and as a collector I can tell you that many of those books turn up all over the USA. And, during the Great Depression, women often had very few resources for obtaining recipes, aside from “on the radio”. It was a very poor time for our country, a time we can’t begin to imagine unless we had mothers or fathers (or grandparents) who went through it.

And, there was the Mystery Chef in Philadelphia. There was, apparently, plenty of room on the airwaves for all the radio recipe personalities. What made the Mystery Chef’s recipes stand out above many of the others?

Possibly the chatty commentary played a part. The recipes, many of which are the Mystery Chef’s own creations, come with very detailed, exact directions.
I’ve been going through the book trying to decide what stands out or might be considered spectacular by 1930s standards. Here is a recipe for Potted Red Cabbage. I’m at a loss as to why it was called Potted Red Cabbage. It wasn’t put into a pot or jar like Liver Pate might be. It seems pretty much like the red cabbage I have cooked a few times (it goes well with pork chops).

POTTED RED CABBAGE

1 red cabbage
2 TBSP bacon fat or drippings
1 medium size onion
2 green apples
1 TBSP lemon juice
1 TBSP sugar
Salt & pepper

Cut cabbage up small (recommend shredding it). Place the two tablespoons of bacon fat or drippings into a pot. Finely chop medium size onion. Put pot on fire and when drippings are hot, add the finely chopped onion. Then put in the finely chopped cabbage and cook 30 minutes without water. Add the apples which have been cut up small and add tablespoon of lemon juice and the tablespoon of sugar. Salt and pepper to taste and allow to cook for 30 minutes more, turning it over occasionally with a spoon. It is then ready to serve.

I can’t help but wonder if the Mystery Chef served his potted red cabbage to royalty. We’ll never know.
As a collectible cookbook, it has some merit; however the paper on which it was printed is the inexpensive type that has discolored. Recipe clippings someone left inside my copy have left deep stains on the pages. I’m not sure how you would categorize “The Mystery Chef’s Own Cook Book” – personally, I will keep it filed with my collection of radio recipe cookbooks.

Actually, for a long time I was under the impression that the Mystery Chef and Mike Roy were one and the same person. My bad! I stand corrected.

Happy cooking and happy cookbook collecting!
–Sandy

THE MOTHER BOOKS: (THOSE BATTERED & TATTERED COOKBOOKS THAT WERE YOUR MOTHER’S OR GRANDMOTHER’S)

Mine was the Ida Bailey Allen Service Cookbook that my mother kept in a kitchen drawer. I learned how to make cookies following the directions in this cookbook, which my mother bought for a dollar at Woolworth’s. From these pages I taught myself how to make Hermits, Ice-Box nut cookies, old fashioned raisin cookies and oatmeal cookies. My mother turned me loose in the kitchen when I was nine or ten years old—the only stipulation was that the ingredients for a recipe had to be on hand in my mother’s pantry. NO ONE ever went out and bought ingredients to make something and my mother’s budget of $10.00 a week to feed a family of seven didn’t allow much leeway—but raisins, flour, sugar, baking soda or baking powder, oatmeal, Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa powder—were always on the pantry shelves. (The raisins were often hard as pebbles I think I grew up thinking that’s how raisins were supposed to be). I’d read the recipes in The Cook Book by Ida Bailey Allen until I found something for which we had all the ingredients. Some other recipes, such as salmon patties, I learned from watching my mother make them. I have my mother’s Ida Bailey Allen Service Cook Book but am unable to explain how I acquired, over the years, four more copies of Volume One of The Book, and two copies of Volume Two.

My friend Doreen confided that her mother’s Five Roses Cookbook is the one she treasures. (Five Roses is the brand name for a type of flour sold in Canada.) From Five Roses, Doreen learned how to make cream puffs*, gingerbread, and sponge cake. She adds that she puts a quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar into the whipping cream to keep it stiff. She thinks the nicest cream puffs are filled with whipped cream mixed with vanilla or lemon pudding.
Doreen’s mother’s Five Roses Cook Book is copyrighted 1938 by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company Ltd, Jean Brodi author. Doreen writes, “Marketing is worth nothing now as it is in pieces. Doreen covered it with a homemade cover** in the 70′s but the pages are worn thin, yellow and crumbing away. The Book offers cream fillings for cakes and Pies include Coffee, Caramel, Butterscotch, White Mountain, French Vanilla, Lemon, Rich Lemon Butter, Chocolate Cream and Pineapple Cream, plus others.

Sandy’s cooknote: *My mother used to make cream puffs—I have her recipe (it was in her recipe box) but don’t know where it came from, originally. Possibly from the Service Cook Book? There IS a recipe in the Service Cookbook for Cream Puffs with Orange Cream Filling and elsewhere, a recipe for Cooked Cream filling. Cream puffs, I expect, is a standard recipe you can’t fiddle around with very much. It’s all about the FILLING.

Another memory from the 60s – we used to have a Helm’s Bakery Truck that came around our street in Burbank when we first moved to California. OMG, they had the BEST cream puffs and éclairs! Like the cream puffs and elcairs, Helm’s Bakery is a thing of the past.

In my personal collection of cookbooks there are about half a dozen books that have homemade covers, often of oil cloth, to protect the covers of the books.
I’ve written about the Meta Given cookbook that mysteriously appeared in our household when I was about 12 or 13. Eventually, I made it my own as I did other books I found and confiscated from the family bookcase – “Eight Cousins” and “Rose in Bloom” both by Louisa May Alcott were just two of the other books I claimed for my own. Years later, I learned those books had belonged to my cousin, June. We inherited them when June outgrew them.

**My cousin Renee has the cookbook that belonged to our Grandma Beckman, apparently, it was passed on from Grandma to Aunt Rainey who was the youngest child in the Beckman family.

In 2006, the NY Times published an article titled “Kitchen Classics, in the Eye of the Beholder” which reads in part, “When Joan Hotson turned 65, she says, each of her five daughters began angling to inherit The Book. “They knew it wasn’t going to happen any time soon, but they were quite determined,” Ms. Hotson said. The object of their interest was a long out-of-print cookbook, “Pillsbury’s Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection,” published in 1959. Ms. Hotson received her copy…as a wedding present in 1962. “There are very few recipes in that book I haven’t made, and all my girls make their Christmas cookies from it,” said Ms. Hotson, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. “The flavors are very distinctive.”

Ms. Hotson said she has trouble finding recipes for baking from scratch. “It seems like they all begin, ‘Take one box white cake mix,’ ” she said. For 10 years, Ms. Hotson haunted secondhand book stores and contemplated a massive photocopying project. Then the Internet saved her: she found five copies at oldcookbooks.com. “That 1959 book is the one people really want,” said Patricia Edwards, who runs the Web site with her husband, Peter Peckham, and stocks thousands of cookbooks in a warehouse in Reno, Nev. “It was the first time the company did a collection, even though the competition began in 1949. I can’t keep it in stock.”

Sandy’s Cooknote: I have a huge collection of Pillsbury Bake-Off Cook Books (including the elusive by highly desirable #1 of the bake off series that I found at a flea market sale, quite accidentally) but only one of the 1959 Best of the Bake-Off Collection with a thousand recipes. It’s understandable why this particular Cook Book has remained so popular. To see it is to love it. Everything is made from scratch, girlfriends!

“New and revised are not always a good thing,” said Bonnie Slotnick, a cookbook dealer in Greenwich Village. “Cooks don’t necessarily want the newfangled or low-fat versions that publishers think they do.” Most often, she says, people are looking for one of the “mother books,” big, popular cookbooks from the first half of the 20th century that were also comprehensive guides to everything from training servants to raising children, such as the Woman’s Home Companion books, the Boston Cooking-School books (predecessors of the Fannie Farmer series), the encyclopedic works of Meta Given and the American Woman’s Cookbook…” I would add to that an old Joy of Cooking Cookbook or one of the Settlement Cookbooks—both of which have been published and republished dozens of times. And, I swear, I must have a dozen of the American Woman cookbooks—I have never tried to find all of them. I’ve started putting them all in one place as they turn up. I’m up to six so far.

My sister in law, Bunny, has a decrepit falling apart Joy of Cooking cookbook that is held together with rubber bands. I had the opportunity to leaf through it during one of my visits to my Brother Jim’s home. And although Joy of Cooking undoubtedly ranks #1 in the Mother Books, it was certainly not the only book of its kind.

Nancy Leson, a food writer for a newspaper in Seattle did a piece about moms’ hand-me-down cookbooks and wrote, “My mother cooked — when she wasn’t too busy working. But unlike me, she was not a cookbook junkie. Instead the shelves in our Philadelphia kitchen, handcrafted by…my handy stepfather, held a single tome wedged between two heart-shaped bottles of Paul Masson: The name of the Mom Cookbook Nancy refers to is “Cooking for Young Homemakers.”

Nancy called her sister to ask about the cookbook. She was told it is kept on a baker’s rack in her sister’s kitchen. Nancy says she didn’t feel the slightest bit slighted that her mother chose to gift that book to her sister and says she deserved it. “But Bubbie’s hand-chopper? That’s another story” says Nancy. (The kind of story I would love to hear. My cousin Diane has my grandmother’s rolling pin—and that’s another story too!)

Sandy’s Cooknote: “Cooking for Young Homemakers” piqued my curiosity as anything like this tends to do. I am quite sure I don’t have it in my cookbook collection, but as I was searching on Google for more information, I believe I found the author of Cooking for Young Homemakers” to be a woman named Ruth Herolzheimer, who wrote a number of cookbooks (some of which I DO have) for the Culinary Arts Institute. I’d have to have a copy of “Cooking for Young Homemakers” to do a comparison. Ruth Berolzheimer also edited The United States Regional Cook Book which was first copyrighted in 1940 by the same publisher, Halcyon House, that published the Browns’ “America Cooks”. ***

Bob’s daughter in law, Angel, shared the following with me about her recipes:
“My Mom wasn’t much of a cook, but my “second” Mom was a wonderful cook. Over the years she’s taught me countless recipes. Whenever she gave me one it was always written on a recipe card. Since then I’ve collected them up and created my own binder full of good old fashioned foods”.

Another Nancy who has been reading my blog, offered the following:

“Inspired by you, I ventured down the (ugh) basement last night to try and find that book, which I did–and it is Lily Wallace’s New American Cook Book, the 1947 edition published by Books, Inc.

[Lily Haxworth Wallace, a “Home Economics Lecturer and Writer and Instructor in the Households Arts Department at The Ballard School, New York City” was the Editor in Chief, “assisted by fifty-four leading Authorities on Domestic Science and the Art of Modern Cooking].

Nancy continues, “I remembered one more recipe my mother made from that book–and it wins the prize for the most stained, “used” page in the book–”Shortcakes”, which was our standard summer dessert with strawberries or peaches. It is not the sponge cake type, but more the biscuit type…Do you have this book?”

Sandy’s Cooknote: Actually—I do have Lily Wallace’s “New American Cook Book”…what I haven’t figured out, yet, is why several different cookbooks of the 1940s are so similar in format.

My new friend, Jean, wrote the following: “I have 6-7 (copies of) Joy of Cooking, including a signed one that was my grandmother’s. Too bad it’s in very bad condition. The main thing I remember cooking from it (and mom cooking from it) was caramel custard–not flan, but custard with the caramel mixed in. Mmmmm. Very comforting and full of calcium and protein. I made it for mom after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer…”

Jean continues, “I have to say that the format of Joy of Cooking recipes is not the most appealing for me. BUT it is a lot better than that of many subsequent books. I actually put back at least one cookbook yesterday because I knew I would find the format offputting…”

Sandy’s Cooknote: I can relate. When I am browsing in a bookstore looking through cookbooks, one of the first things I look at is the format and how big the print is.

It was predicted, in the early years of the Internet, that cookbooks would be killed off, since cooks had free access to millions of recipes that were once confined to magazines, cookbooks, card boxes and libraries. (And what do you do with the recipes once you print a copy and try out the recipe? Are you going to throw it out? Not me! This may explain in part how I ended up with over 50 three ring binders full of recipes).

“The trade in old cookbooks used to be more for collectors,” said Frank Daniels, author of “Collector’s Guide to Cookbooks.

“Now everyone has access to all the book dealers in every town, he says, “and because of that, prices have come way down.” As a result, dealers say, there is a lively new trade in out-of-print cookbooks that is driven not by the meteoric careers of chefs or the research needs of libraries, but mostly by people with an attachment, often irrational and sentimental, to a particular book or recipe. “I get a lot of calls from people who know only that the book they want had a blue cover, or they remember that there was buttermilk in the gingerbread recipe”

Perhaps the number one quest in those searches are the Mom Cookbooks.

And there’s a lot more to it than looking up a recipe on Google – which I do quite often, myself, especially when I am in a hurry and want something fast. But does that deter me from buying cookbooks, all the cookbooks I can find or afford? Not at all. But many of them have a greater sentimental value than others. My sister Becky and I both participated in compiling cookbooks for our PTAs as well as other organizations we belonged to – and finally, our greatest achievement, the Schmidt family cookbook that we titled “Grandma’s Favorite” in honor of our paternal grandmother. Since all of our siblings, children and grandchildren received a copy of “Grandma’s Favorite” we hope it will become the Mother book in all of their homes.

“There is certainly a brisk trade in nostalgia,” said Nach Waxman, owner of the Upper East Side cookbook store Kitchen Arts and Letters, which also operates a book-search service. His most-wanted title is “The Art of Jewish Cooking” by Jennie Grossinger, the matriarch who ran the kitchens at Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills (it closed in the late 1980s). “That’s an example of people who want a cookbook to keep a flame, or a flavor, alive,” he said. “You can’t buy a book today with a recipe for knishes made with chicken fat, or strudel that tastes like the strudel they remember their grandmothers making…”

Nach Waxman’s comment about “The Art of Jewish Cooking” had me scurrying through the house searching for my collection of Jewish cookbooks. Sure enough, I have two (albeit paperback) copies of this very cookbook.

And something else; I’ve heard from readers of my columns on sandychatter who have lost a favorite cookbook and are trying to find it. I try to help them find the book they are looking for—I’ve never charged for anything other than the postage for any of the cookbooks I’ve found

And now—someone surely saw the handwriting on the wall –there are a slew of cookbooks with “MOM” or “GRANDMA” in their titles.

Here are some titles you might want to search for:

RECIPES MOTHER USED TO MAKE, Edna Beilenson, 1952. This is an oldie but a goodie, published by Peter Pauper Press and adorned with a pink and white candy stripe cover. In the introduction, Edna writes “the recipes to be found on the following pages are the recipes for foods our mothers and (how time flies!) our grandmothers use to make. They create the dishes that were responsible for those spicy cinnamon-and-sugar smells that greeted our nostrils when we came running home from school, hungry and tied, with childish thoughts on the well-stocked cookie jar….”

Edna also writes, “These remembered smells of remembered foods will vary, however, with the backgrounds from which we come, and it is for this reason that our recipes have been divided up geographically…”

Edna laments that these recipes are from the “good old days” which for her, one assumes, were the thirties or forties, since her book was published in 1952. And, curiously, near the end of her book is a section for “European Recipes” that I found interesting with its recipes for mock caviar (made with eggplant), a simple chicken liver pate, gazpacho (which hasn’t changed much) and – most specially – a recipe for Hungarian Goulash which I consider to be quite authentic.

Sandy’s Cooknote: “Goulash” gets its name bandied around quite a lot and for many people goulash is synonymous with stew. But a true goulash won’t have a lot of vegetables in it – just a little onion, a tomato, part of a bell pepper – and potatoes. Most important is the beef and paprika for seasoning. I know this because I grew up on Hungarian Goulash cooked in my paternal grandmother’s kitchen.

FROM MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN, Mimi Sheraton, 1979. Mimi is the author of “Visions of Sugar Plums”, one of my very favorite Christmas cookbooks and a book I turn to every year, checking through it to see if there is something in particular that I feel like making. “From My Mother’s Kitchen”, subtitled “Recipes & Reminisces”, Mimi begins, in the Introduction with an exasperated comment from her mother, “Are we going to measure or are we going to cook?” as the two began the first of many joint sessions to prepare this cookbook.

“Like so many old-fashioned, great, natural cooks, writes Mimi, “My mother rarely measured or used recipes, and did so only when trying a completely new dish…”

FROM MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN was actually started by Mimi, decades earlier, when she had been living away from home for a few years and began to miss her mother’s cooking. She started a notebook titled “Mother’s Recipes” and in the table of contents listed over forty favorites that she wanted to be able to reproduce. Mimi also knew how her grandmother’s recipes were lost because they had never been recorded.

Sandy’s Cooknote: This is something I strongly related to. None of MY paternal grandmother’s recipes were ever written down. Now, Aunt Dolly—who married my Uncle Hans when she was a teenager—was the only one of the daughters- in-law who expressed an interest in learning grandma’s recipes. She did it by standing at grandma’s elbow and watching, carefully watching, every step. Consequently, a few of grandma’s recipes survive. But now, today, my Aunt Dolly no longer remembers some of those recipes and the one I have been chasing, like a phantom for so many years – continues to elude me. It was a pumpkin strudel that grandma made in the fall, when pumpkins were in season. It had a peppery taste and I don’t think the pumpkin was cooked beforehand. I think it was thinly sliced. Despite all of my German/Hungarian cookbooks I have yet to find that particular recipe. This story might help some of you to realize how important it is to have written copies of our mothers and grandmothers recipes.

Even though Mimi’s cookbook has a recipe for making strudel dough, the only filling recipes she provides are apple and cheese. Maybe my grandma’s recipe for pumpkin strudel was her own creation?

As for Mimi Sheraton’s cookbook, “From My Mother’s Kitchen”, the author’s Austro-Polish-Rumanian-Jewish roots were those of food lovers and cooks, and her book makes for good reading and great cooking.

MR. FOOD COOKS LIKE MAMA by Art Ginsburg, published 1992. You may know him much better as Mr. Food. Art Ginsburg, aka Mr. Food is a television chef and bestselling author of over 50 cookbooks who emphasizes simple recipes. He is the originator of “quick & easy cooking” who, for the past 30+ years, has paved the way for TV food personalities who have followed.

MEALS LIKE MOM USED TO MAKE, by Karen Brown, published 1993. This is a collection of 50s recipes; some I wasn’t so crazy about the first time around, having grown up in the 40s and 50s. I won’t eat anything—sweet potato or otherwise—that has marshmallows on it and my sons never liked Jello in any way, shape, or form—so I seldom made it. But I have been looking for my recipe for Angel Biscuits and there it is on page 137. I love the 24 hour salad but stopped making it when I realized it contains 2 cups of mayonnaise. Of course now you can buy the light or no fat mayonnaise so you might want to give it a try. That is a good make-ahead salad.

RECIPES MY MOTHER GAVE ME, by Vale Farrar Kelley, 1999, is a slim collection of recipes reflecting the places in which she lived and grew up- beginning with the Naval Air Station in the Philippines, and moving on to Japan, California, Virginia and Texas. The recipes were her mother’s and now they are in a book to become yours, as well.

MOM’S FAVORITE RECIPES, Gooseberry Patch, 2003—is there anyone out there who isn’t familiar with the Gooseberry Patch cookbooks? I can’t imagine. And here’s the thing about Gooseberry Patch: they put out a call for your favorite recipes (in this instance, the recipes of your mother’s that you liked most) – and when they have enough recipes, Vickie & JoAnn put them into a nice spiral bound cookbook. And, if one of you recipes is chosen by Gooseberry Patch to be included in one of their cookbooks – whoohoo! You get a free copy of that cookbook. I think I have about half a dozen or so of the cookbooks that I was honored to receive “free”. (Then, of course, you will want to buy copies for all of you friends and relatives since your recipe has been published, but that’s another story). I love Gooseberry Patch cookbooks.

IN MOTHER’S KITCHEN by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes, published 2005. From In Mother’s Kitchen: “Many of us remember learning to cook at our mother’s feet. Recipes, tips and traditions were passed on as children were asked to stir the soup or help roll out the pastry dough during family meal preparation. While Chef Ann Cooper gathered information for her cookbooks, she heard numerous stories from other women chefs about their fond memories of cooking with their mothers and grandmothers. Cooper, who learned to cook from her grandmothers, both first- or second-generation immigrants, became a chef out of her love for food, and giving and nurturing through food. She strongly believes that families need to slow down and take time to eat and prepare food together in order to carry on important sociological and cultural elements, as well as foster good health. She encourages parents to simply bring their kids with them into the kitchen, whether it’s to help with a certain recipe or to prepare an entire meal. The book is a compilation of not only stories such as these, but of wonderful, heirloom recipes from many different cultures and old photographs of young, smiling girls cooking with their moms.

There are chapters on Mothers & Grandmothers, Daughters, Motherlands and even Remedies handed down through generations to heal common ailments…”
MOM’S UNDATED RECIPE BOX, Donna L. Weihofen, R.D., 2005. In the introduction, Donna writes, “Mom’s home cooking was something special. She and the other neighborhood moms used those wonderful recipes that had been passed along from one generation to the next. We have fond memories of simple family suppers, holiday feasts, picnics, potlucks and after-school treats…” Donna’s idea was to take old family favorite recipes and give them a facelift, reducing calories and fat grams without compromising the appearance or the flavor of the recipes. All the recipes in “Mom’s Updated Recipe Box” come with nutritional information per serving.

IN MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN/WRITERS ON LOVE, COOKING AND FAMILY published 2006 various authors (I started re-reading this last night and am thoroughly enjoying it the second time around). Recipes not required but the ones included will make your mouth water and send you off to the kitchen to start mixing and stirring. Not really a cookbook, per se, but really a collection of essays from some of our favorite food writers—Maya Angelou and Dorie Greenspan, the late M.F.K. Fisher, Ruth Reichl, James Villas, Holly Clegg – and others. This is a nice little soft cover book you can tuck into your purse to read while standing in line in a bank or places with long lines, like Sam’s Club & Costco.

Maya Angelou’s Caramel Cake and the story that goes with it? A must! The next best thing to reading cookbooks is reading stories by cookbook authors.
My own mother passed away the day after my birthday, in September, 2000. While she did make a great loaf of bread – and baked 2 huge loaves in roasting pans twice a week when we were all very young—I think it’s ok to note that she really wasn’t what you’d call a great cook. What she WAS good at was stretching a ten dollar weekly allowance for groceries to keep five children and two adults fed. We had a lot of organ meat dinners (such as liver, brains and kidneys) because those were the cheapest cuts and during WW2, weren’t rationed. My sister used to say that none of us really knew what a hamburger should taste like because mom mixed a loaf of bread into a pound of ground beef. My paternal grandmother was the acknowledged cook in the family—but more to the point, none of us ever went hungry (unless you count the number of times Biff got sent to bed without dinner for being late. He loves to tell the story – my sister and I would sneak food to him and he never really WENT hungry).

One of my best memories of my mother and our respective childhoods is that she always baked a cake for whoever was the birthday boy or birthday girl. It’s tradition I have carried on…now to include grandchildren!

Mother’s Day is approaching so I hope, if you have a cookbook that was your mother’s and you cherish it, you will spend a little time thinking about how it happened to be handed down to you.

I may have to get out that Ida Bailey Allen Service cookbook and make some cream puffs for mother’s day….in mom’s memory.

–Happy Cooking and Happy Cookbook Collecting and if you are a mother, then Happy Mother’s Day to you! Sandy