Two weeks ago, a family donated eleven big boxes of
cookbooks to the Cancer Society Discovery thrift shop. I’m the volunteer book lady there. Like an old style can of tuna, these books were
solid packed. I made a decision to just
get those eleven boxes of books off the floor, out of the way, and sort for
damaged books later.
We volunteers are a disparit bunch on Wednesdays. Three of us work in a far corner of the back
room sorting area. I come in early to
move everything out of the way for two ladies who are slower than I. I place Gloria’s favorite chair before her
low table. Once a week she sorts the
donated cards there. I move all the
hanging racks to the far side of the big room as Joan prices the books from our
small corner also. She can’t reach the
high ones, nor can she reach the low stacks, so I try to arrange these within
her range before she gets to the store. Joan
lives in a wheel chair.
As the day goes by, I am able to slow down a little. The shredded pile of cookbooks catch my eye,
and I pause to see what they are. A Milwaukee Settlement House Cookbook tops
the pile with little bits of paper sticking out from its pages. Put together as a fund raiser for the
Settlement House in the nineteenth century, this book is a treasured repository
for middle European family recipes such as kuchen and torten.
Both the front and back boards are detached, and there’s
nothing covering the spine. This edition
is from 1943, and though the interior paper is acid free, perhaps the World War
II shortages hurt the volume’s construction.
Not the contents though. I find
myself glued to the three pages of apple deserts with, I am sure, a happy smile
on my face.
“To my friend Miss Lillian Kemp and to my pupils and radio
pals…” says the dedication page on the next book, Mrs. Petersons Simplified Cooking.
The author, Mrs. Anna J. Peterson put this volume together in 1924 for
the “Home Services Edition The Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co.” The yellowed paper and brown fabric cover are
all too tired to make it a saleable book.
The type size is small and the book’s beige on brown not at all
eye-catching. The contents look
interesting though. Great effort was made
to make these recipes easy to follow listing first a basic recipe followed by a
list of variations. No twenty-first
century, single page instructions here.
No giant photograph filling the facing page.
Here, how to stuff a tomato is described in one terse
paragraph. It’s followed with three even
shorter paragraphs of stuffings. I pause
over the “Second Stuffing,” an assemblage of peas and walnut meats that doesn’t
seem enticing, before seeing a slaw stuffing and a cottage cheese stuffing.
I could do the slaw. I could also
do the cottage cheese which is mixed with minced peppers and onions.
Two
more ruined books wait for me. The New American Cook Book and The Chicago Daily News Cook Book. The Daily
News volume is a sad case. The spine
is gone and the signatures and stitching flap in the wind, but it has kept its
well-designed title page. Using nice
Deco type styles, this page compresses an amazing amount of information in a
little space. Price, $1.00, it says. That was a lot in 1930. Inside the type is tiny, ten point, and
typical newspaper font of the early twentieth century similar to Times New
Roman. Very unreadable for blind old
ladies like me.
I
move on to the New American and find
it carefully planned. I can put Cabbage
and Apple slaw together with cooked salad dressing, number 737, and never have
to use the index at all. There are color
pictures to tempt the palate to try Beet or Potato Salad, numbers 782 and 780,
and an even more fulsome title page that left me feeling as if I were reading
Victoriana.
Although
the spine and boards are held on with an enthusiastic application of packing
tape, the contents charm me by bringing back memories. Number 3045 are Hermits. Mother made that very recipe for me when I
went away to boarding school. Grandmother’s
Peanut butter cookies are just across the page.
Modern
twenty-first century cookbooks are wonderful marvels. They are well illustrated, well designed for
ease of use, and easy to understand. They
list fewer recipes, and their glossy pages show you how to eat well with less
of all the things that taste really great.
Inside these old books reside lard, suet, salt, sugar, meats, memories
and love. Sometimes you can’t beat those
memories or love.
Life is Really in the
Footnotes:
I find the cookbooks fascinating. You have such interesting volunteer work. Obama keeps me busy but I'm not always thrilled -- or am I being picky?
ReplyDeleteOh you poor dear! Forced to plunder about in that treasure trove of cookbooks. (If I had to look at these, I'd think I'd died and landed in cookbook heaven!) I hope those won't be tossed. Please say they won't. I still say our cooks began to stray somewhere in the 50s and 60s when those new products that were supposed to make our lives easier--those mixes and stuff loaded with preservatives--started us out on a bad journey. And moving into the industrial era took us away from walking and a more active life. I just had a thought, Mage! YOU could spend some time adapting some of those old recipes and methods to develop your own cookbook! Wouldja send me a signed copy when it's published?!! :-)
ReplyDeleteI think you were a cookbook in your previous life.
ReplyDeleteCookbooks everywhere how exciting. I love them. Especially the ones I find with notes and stains and newspaper recipes in them. I just replaced my broken 1967 Joy of Cooking with a another 1967 I found on amazon. When looking through the later editions I was surprised to see how much larger the portions were than in the 60's.
ReplyDeleteI have plenty of time but not enough interest to make home-cooked meals since my husband isn't eating much these days. If I cook or bake, I eat most of it myself and that is not good at all.
ReplyDeleteWow, this is a beautiful well written piece that I could see making it into various collections of short stories or the New Yorker, if you punched it up to make it a bit longer and gave it a twist at the end.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of my foray into old garden books. Wonderful.
Dianne
I love the old cookbooks and I loved your piece. If I worked there, those books would never make it to the sale shelves. They'd all go home with me. Good I'm not there.
ReplyDeleteMy mother had the Settlement House Cook Book. Some of the recipes dumbfounded me. I wish I could remember some of the old names. They were things we had never heard of, let alone made. Too bad I can't remember. I'm sure I could look them up on the net now.
Seeing all those books reminds me of the semi-annual book sale at my local library. I went for years, but now tend to stay away as I am trying to get things out of my house and not bring more stuff in.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it does make me think of being a volunteer some time in the future.
There's a lot of history in that stack! And obviously, you've done a little browsing. :)
That was a joy to read - thank you.
ReplyDeleteI was born in 1930 and money sure was tight then.