The other day we were at my mom’s house, and mentioned that we were thinking of doing a blog about old recipes. I said “I wish I had more of my grandma’s recipes.” My mom said “Oh? You mean like the ones in her cookbook?” and went to the cupboard and pulled out a little blue book stuffed crazily with newspaper and magazine clippings.
I had no idea this book existed.
I talked her into letting me borrow it to scan, and found a mother lode of old recipes. The book was given from my grandfather to my grandmother in February 1934, when she was still 16 years old. (They married later that year, when she was 17.) It has a bunch of handwritten recipes in with the printed ones, and then there was the collection of clippings (not photographed here; I took them out of the book and stored them separately because their deterioration was damaging the book). It looks as if, for most of her married life, she kept recipes in this book one way or another.
We will be using this as a recipe source, but I thought you might enjoy a peek inside as well:
You may enjoy tracking down a copy of Jean Anderson’s _American Century Cookbook_, which is a book of recipes from the decades from 1900 – 2000, with interesting sidebars of food history.
Thanks! I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Thanks for posting this. I love these pictures. I recently received a hand written cook book from about 1920, and have the same intention myself. 🙂 It’s a little hard to read, because the whole thing is written in pencil, but I think I can decipher most of it. 🙂
I’m looking forward to watching you try these recipes. My DH loves Windsor McKay and we have the lovely “Rarebit” comics as regular reading ’round here. 🙂
[…] they’ll be here eventually. Here’s a quick post for the meantime.) I was going through my grandma’s cookbook from the 1930s, looking for something that would be good with dinner, when the word “asparagus” caught […]