Cook booklet from the 1900's

Pay Dirt, I found at least a dozen cook booklets from the early to mid 1900's from a church bookfair. Several are total gems....

Airy Fairy, Cake Baking Made Easy....Delicious Cakes for Every Occasion from 6 foundation recipes copyright 1932

Bananas ....how to serve them
56 recipes including: cakes, pies, fritters, scalloped, glazed , etc.....
copyright 1942


Enjoy Good Eating Every Day, Spry....with Anut Jenny
wow, this one is phenominal.....too bad it's all about Spry aka crisco
Aunt Jenny in comic book form teaches you how to make crusts, cream and custard pies, fruit pies, dumplings, shortcakes, cream puffs, gingerbread, "sauce-y fudge pudding", ice cream sauces, lots of cakes including refrigerator cake, mallo fudge cake!!!, pink enchantment cake, then into coiled minute frostings, 7 minute, coconut toffee icing, fillings, then main dishes....chicken pie, pot roast, meat loaf, fried chicken.....weird they have you brown the chicken in fat then add water and cover!, apple fritters, doughnuts, croquettes, cottage fried potatoes, ....wait 3 recipes for fried chicken?!, cookies including date swirl cookies, gingerbread nut cookies, biscuits and cinnamon rolls, waffles, breads, rolls.....48 pages of cool old timey recipes probably ave 4 to a page. Now to adapt them to butter.

Royal....the reliable cream of tartar baking powder
63 pages, 1935....another gem.....recipes you just don't see anymore.

Nestle chocolate kitchen recipes by Jane Foulton
1951, ole' Jane the home economist has put together 31 pages of chocolate recipes.
Including some interesting ones.....corn flake meringoons. nut crumb drops (yes theres bread crumbs involved), bars, wafers, thinsies, patties, ref. cookies, spicy chocolate bread pudding, yep another keeper!

Betty Crocker's 101 Delicious Biscuick recipes....AS made and served by well-known Gracious hostesses, famous chefs, distinguished epicures, and smart luninaries of movieland.
pics of the above with their biscuick recipes!
Fig roll with lemon sauce, Apricot Honey Shortcake, Macherel Turnovers, Cheese dumplings with tomato sauce...
1933

Good Housekeeping 1959 breads and sandwiches......kolacky, raised lemon doughnuts, bran date quickbread, almond filled hot cross bun, and the sandwich list includes checkerboards, ribbons, mosaics, pinwheels, envelopes,
68 pages of ideas....


100 Bake Off Recipes, from Pillsbury 1969.....oh man...tuna cheddar sandwich bread (imagine making a yeast dough and rolling tuna/cheddar into it pinwheel style and baking the loaf!!!:eek:) the grand prize winner's recipe was magic marshmallow crescent puffs.....essentially you roll a marshmallow in sugar and cinnamon then wrap a crescent roll around it and bake, ice with a glaze.

The 30-50's were much better recipes on the whole.....

57 prize winning recipes from Heinz ketchup.....1957

Baker's Favorite Chocolate Recipes....pay dirt. 108 pages 1943
page 2 has headings that say sugar savers, in spite of scarcities, for success....it's a walk back through time. Loads of details on how to use chocolate as well as using corn syrup or honey, they also put how many eggs are used in each recipe along the side of it's name.


Karo....1949....actually making jams with karo.?!

Really neat booklets. They can tell you an awful lot about what's going on in the average home.

cook booklet, cookbook.....ok, sorry for posting wrongly.
Scan, um.....like with a xerox machine that works with a computer to majically transfer shtuff to the web? .....sorry not got that technology.

These books are a delight, the banana one has banana tea cake, banana bran nut bread, b. dutch coffee cake, b tea muffins, b. spice cake, b, nut cake, b shortcake....then the ever popular:banana meatloaf, ham banana rolls, tomatoes tropical.....too much......someone just kept going and didn't have any brakes on their imagination and it went wonky.
But....the cakes, muffins...etc read great!

I grew up in the 60's, this Pillsbury Bake OFF recipe book from 1969 is so dramatically different from the 1940's or 50's ones.....
It's really bizarre food.....
snappy snack rolls:
1/3 c instant minced onion
1/3 c baon flavored bits
3T chives
Pillsbury biscuits
cheese
green olives cut in 1/4s with pimentos

Did we really eat shtuff like that? I gotta call my mom.

+Called my mom and she said, "yep....marshmallows and karo were really big in the 60's"....her company dessert was hot coffee pourred over marshmallows that melted and possibly some whipped cream folded in then toasted almonds on top....I remember it being pretty tasty.

Karo apparently was the solution for non grainy products.

This Nestle Chocolate chip booklet has chocolate meragine kisses with salted crackers added....bizarre now, but as I read back through the various recipes in different booklets, there's use of flake cereals, breadcrumbs and crackers.

The Baker's chocolate booklet from 1943 had chocolate mint wafer photo in the back, looked an awful lot like Girl Scout Thin Mints.....wonder which came first.....

The Airy Fairy book has a standard proportions for butter cake chart that has shortening
sugar
eggs
milk
flour
baking powder
salt
flavoring
baking time
temp
baking pan
running across the left hand column, then accross the top is:
1 egg cake
3 egg cake
4 egg cake
pound cake

In most of the earlier cookbooks there are recipes that start with "economy..." which is interesting, it was OK to be frugel and actually the world acknowledged it, have you seen that in the past 20-30 years?
Hmmm.


So, much can be gleanned from this look into the past, I've got numerous National Geographics too....it's more interesting to read the ads than the articles. Early 1910's refrigerators, most ads have pricing on them.....1950's ads for European travel.....Cambell's Soups from the earlier magazines....

Last week, Joan Dye Gussow, Sidney Mintz, Warren Belasco all talked and answered questions at Washington University....there were several academic points that just stuck in my craw. Warren Belasco a food historian talked of women not cooking in the 1900's, the poor or the wealthy....but my memory is that women cooked, most 3 meals a day....including baked goods. Most moms stayed home or had teacher, secretary, nurse type jobs....but the vast majority were "raising children".....which meant cooking.....
It would make an interesting thread to talk about food history of the last century. If these booklets are any indication of what the typical housewife made it was serious amounts/varities of cakes, baked goods. Our wonderful German bakeries disappeared in the early 1990's....St. Louis was a bakery rich town, that went down to a handful......

Phoebe,
They all have pictures.....Spry with Aunt Jenny has cartoons of Jenny making dishes, chatting with women, just real laid back.....

Most of the photos from the 40-50's are so dull next to anything from the 60's...
these women were serious bakers.