Reading between the recipe lines

I have to tell you a secret.. well actually it’s two secrets.. first, I am not much of a cook(okay, that’s no secret in my house.)…I mean, I can muddle through a recipe and it turns out okay most of the time.. (if I am not being lazy about some of the steps..) but as for whipping up Martha -like concoctions while wearing my pearls..it ain’t happening. Most of my cooking involves a lot of over-cooked meat and swearing… Have you ever seen the Three Stooges episode where they are served a really tough steak and dunk it into their drinking glasses to try and eat it? Many a night I have broiled up a great cut of meat only to see my kids look longingly at their water tumblers and grab a hunk of meat between thier canines and fists and try to tear a piece off like the crazy animals they actually are (though house monkey’s would be the term I prefer.).

Anywhoooo…The second secret is that (and this is the kicker) I collect cook books.

Now I do have to say not they are just any cookbooks, but those cheap, plastic bound, local  community cook books put out my neighborhood associations and church groups. You know, the kind with the plastic binder. I am in love with them.

There are no pictures and half of the time they aren’t very colorful, but there is something about them that touches a  part of my domestic core.

These are recipes put out by real women. Recipes their family has loved and eaten. Their best recipes offered for a small chance to see their name in print. I love how you can tell  the year the book has been published, tells the history of that era and the place it was published tellsall  about the local food.

I have one from New Jersey filled with seafood recipes from cover to cover and my book from the Midwest is all about comfort foods and beef with maybe one fish recipe. I have one from the depression era. More than three-quarters of the recipes  are about doing without.

I love reading about Mrs. Applebaum’s Hot salami dip or Mrs. Jablonsky’s Spam meatloaf. 

I love the running joke to make Elephant stew (it’s in a lot of them.) and the crazier the recipes the better.

 Even though I haven’t cooked too many things out of them, I can sit for hours and just flip through the pages.

A 1970’s book has  a Harvey Wallbanger cake and a huge portion of my 1950’s book is laden with gelatin  recipes (okay secret number 3.. I can’t stand Jello.). Every book I collect is a new study on the human experience and  a bit of history.

My goal now is to find older books , from the 20’s and 30’s. I am not sure how hard this is going to be because a lot of them weren’t treated very well. They were either tossed in  a drawer and forgotten about , used till they fell apart, or just tossed in the trash when grandma was moved.

My maternal Grandmother passed away in  November at the age of 98 ( She drove up until June!). We recently had to go through all of her belongings and the first thing I grabbed was all of the old cook books. 

She had recipes she had jammed in there, written on and made up herself (I kid you not one was how to cook a squirrel written with an old ink well pen.). I am so glad to have that part of her and that small part of her life .

I am actually not really sure where this post is going, but I just wanted to share I guess that as crazy as it seems, history isn’t always in the kinds of books we think it is going to be in.

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