Vintage Cookbooks
With the bounty of vegetables that summer has afforded us, I’m always brainstorming new and inventive ways of cooking the many beans, turnips, squash, tomatoes, potatoes et. al. we’ve been getting weekly from our CSA. Then I discovered The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer, published in 1918 but reproduced in its entirety online. The chapter on summer vegetables is helpfully organized by name, from artichokes to turnips. How did I live before, unschooled as I was in the nine different ways you could cook a tomato?
How about kicking it back older school with recipes from the White House in 1887? The White House Cook Book is a “comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home.” You can also expend little effort but manage to bowl over your dining companions just the same with The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking (1903) by Helen Campbell.
Also, in these unsettled times, please see Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918), by C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss, because “serv[ing] the cause of freedom” never goes out of style.
You’ll also do well to be reminded of the following advice on vegetables by Mrs. Brian Luck, who wrote The Belgian Cook-Book in 1915:
Nearly all these are at their best (like brunettes) just before they are fully matured. So says a great authority, and no doubt he is thinking of young peas and beans, lettuces and asparagus. Try to dress such things as potatoes, parsnips, cabbages, carrots, in other ways than simply boiled in water, for the water often removes the flavor and leaves the fiber. Do not let your vegetable-dishes remind your guests of Froissart’s account of Scotchmen’s food, which was “rubbed in a little water.”
I’m not sure what that crack about brunettes was all about (should I take umbrage 91 years after the fact?), but rest assured, Mrs. Luck, I will strive not to evoke your idea of gastronomic Scotland in my culinary endeavors.
