For What It's Worth


Thursday, February 2, 2023

Vintage cookbooks Part 2 - the personal touches...



Last year, I wrote a post about several vintage cookbooks that I found at Powell's Used Bookstore. 

I had meant to follow it up with the newspaper clippings that the previous owner had tucked in her Better Homes and Gardens 1965 edition.

I got such a kick at seeing the ads (all from the 1965 San Francisco Examiner newspaper), and what recipes were trendy at the time and the cost of things. The original book owner was also a member of Weight Watchers and had a lot of meeting notes and recipes - "for ladies" lol


In these clippings, you can find recipes for  Gourmet Halibut Mousse with grapefruit and avocado, Corn Custard, and for a special "gala occasion" there's Breast of Chicken Pergourdine - boned chicken breast rolled in chicken liver stuffing. Yum

There's Mrs. Robert Preston's Black-Eyed Beef and Husk Salad, which won the National Cooking Contest search for Australia's *The Great Australian Dish*.  Black-Eyed Beef is filet of beef - stuffed with prunes and bacon, dotted with butter, baked then brushed with an egg yolk, wrapped in puff pastry then baked again. The Husk Salad is sliced ham, pineapple, tomato and croutons.

There's a hearty salad recipe of strips of bologna, cheddar cheese tossed in a green salad - "the family will eat it all up."!

The recipe for beef stew called Carbonnade a la Flamande, described as a Belgium peasant dish, sounds good and I think I'm going to give a try. It's basically, chuck roast cut into 1/2 inch thick slices (not cubes) then arranged side by side with onions, broth, beer, veggies and herbs then baked at 300 for several hours. It sounds really easy and delicious. 

The ads are hilarious. You can see the evolution of cooking (& the women's social revolution) happening at this point. There are more processed foods to add to fresh food for busier lifestyles and working women. 

~ Spray starch - for the woman who doesn't really have time to iron!


~ Post Toast'em Pop-Ups please try us and we'll give you .50. In cash!

Trivia - Post invented the mylar bags to keep moist food fresh but weren't able to ramp up production before Kellogg's snuck in and beat them to the punch with Pop Tarts. Post finally rolled out Country Squares but they never took off, so they rebranded as Toast'em Pop Ups and were willing to give you .50 in cash to give them a try.


Then we have the personal notes, mostly from Weight Watchers...It cost $2 a week and they had very strict rules of attendance and weigh ins. And you mustn't lose your original handout (pic below) You will NOT get another!!

Per usual in the 60's - there is lots of gelatin lol and we were starting the anti sugar trend with the *pink stuff* and liquid no-calorie sweetener. Diet soda, cottage cheese, skim milk (powdered) and fish were popular as diet foods.




My favorite thing about finding this particular cookbook was that it was so personal. With all the clippings, WW handouts and handwritten notes/recipes, I feel like I made a friend. 

I don't know her name but I think of her as Jane lol

I know she made a lot of friends at WW and loved recipes that had baked vs fried versions. She like baked hamburgers. She also really enjoyed the summer popsicle recipes. And I think she liked to entertain. She clipped a lot of fancy recipes and had a note to make sourdough bread. Or maybe, like me, she just thought they looked good and then got lazy and never made any of it lol

It also makes me wonder what Jane's later years were like. Was she still married? Did she move from San Francisco to the Portland area where I found this book - or were the books passed on to family and they no longer wanted them? Did they love Jane and cherish the personal touches, at least for awhile?

Finding this cookbook has sort of kicked off the vintage cookbook collector in me. I now spend hours perusing the cookbook section at Powell's looking for books with inscriptions or clippings/handwritten notes. My cutoff is $10 to buy it though unless I think I will actually use the book. 

I am really not a collector so this a weird development! Honestly, I think it's because I'm getting old(er) myself and maybe becoming a touch sentimental. Again, weird...I'm a very unsentimental kind of person lol.

Let me know if you collect anything or think I'm getting weird in my old age 🤣



24 comments:

  1. This is just wonderful! I love that they had WW meetings back then! haha that is so funny. I do love seeing the vintage cookbook ads, they are so fun to see.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It started in 1963, so it was fairly new. The cookbook was fun but all her clippings really made it special.

      Delete
  2. Oh, these are priceless. I love flipping through old cookbooks but the personal touches really put these over the top. The descriptions of the "fancy" recipes makes me positively cringe. Liver stuffing, beef stuffed with prunes... ugh. Oh, and the salad with bologna. Haha! I hope Jane had a great time making her recipes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's so interesting what's popular at a given time. I wonder what people will think decades from now about our overnight oatmeal, sheet pan dinners, and quinoa bowls lol

      Delete
  3. Karen historic cookbooks were part of the plot of Ms. Demeanor. I am giddy seeing this parallel. That's a neat experience finding a book that the reader left so much of themselves in

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm going to have to check that book out!

      Kevin just came back from visiting his family and brought me a treasure trove of old cookbooks from his grandmother.

      The books themselves are fun but it's the personal touches for me.

      Delete
  4. What an incredibly cool find! I love it. Maybe your local library would want to display?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have no idea. I've only been once to get my card lol

      Kevin just brought me home several more that belonged to his mom, grandmother and great grandmother!

      Delete
  5. No I think it's a cool thing to collect. I mean , it was a different TIME and looking back... really reflects that. I think back to growing up and I think my mom dabbled with Weight Watchers for a bit in the 70's- I remember hearing how strict they were! She was very bog on cottage cheese and skim milk too...

    The beef stew recipe does sounds good!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah - it's more than just recipes. It's kind of a time capsule and when they include notes and clippings it's even cooler.

      I'm making that beef one though! lol

      Delete
  6. That is so cool!
    On a side note, nope to pineapples in anything!!! Only raw

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ha! I like pineapple and pepperoni pizza. That's very controversial. But, I can't have pineapple anymore (too acidic and I have problems) so it doesn't matter, I guess.

      Delete
  7. I love this. I used to have my grandma's cookbooks but they didn't really have recipes I wanted to use. lol

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can't say I would make many of the recipes but it's fun to see what was trendy at the time.

      Delete
  8. This is so cool, I'm a little disappointed in myself I didn't keep all of my nan's cook books as they would have been like this with the personal notes and comments throughout but I am not a cook and I also didn't have the space for everything at the time. Seeing some of the receipes also sort of reminds me of that tiktoker who makes all those vintage receipes and comments if they work or not and is just hilarious.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I do not do tiktok but that sounds awesome. I follow a 70' food account on Twitter. They have really gross things lol

      Delete
  9. This is awesome. All the personal touches make it so fun to own and explore.

    I do collect a lot of things--llamas, Stitch, Toothless, Star Wars, Yoshi, Harry Potter, Marvin Martian, cats, HRC cups, Funkos, and books. I'm basically a large child. LOL. I'm also very sentimental. It's hard for me to throw away pictures and cards (birthday, Valentine's, Christmas, thank you, etc.) because I get to read things from people who many not still be around.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I tend to narrow things down and keep just one or two special things from someone. We had to move a lot when Kevin was in the military so I couldn't have a lot of things.

      Delete
  10. Fish mousse. I cannot imagine much that sounds worse than that. What a cool find though! When you said, "I think she liked to entertain," my first thought was, "Or this was her version of Pinterest and she liked to save recipes she never used" lol.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's a sardine jello mold that was also pretty gross lol

      She probably was just a collector. I only cook (not very well) for Kevin and I but someone looking through my stuff might think I entertained too lol

      I'm wondering what future people will think of all our quinoa and elaborate smoothie bowls!

      Delete
  11. "I am really not a collector so this a weird development! Honestly, I think it's because I'm getting old(er) myself and maybe becoming a touch sentimental. Again, weird...I'm a very unsentimental kind of person lol."
    😂

    There are some weird recipes in there, but then again...some of the modern taste combinations are daring too LOL.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I forgot to say, I love the Valentine banner! Go Cupid LOL.

      Delete
    2. Oh, I'm sure our recipes are going to be made fun of too! lol

      Thank you xoxo

      Delete
  12. Post Toastems! Ha ha. I had forgotten all about them. Do they still make them? 🤔

    I still use the "pink stuff" in my coffee and I hate all other sweeteners for coffee. I carry the packets in my backpack in case restaurants have something else. 😏 However, in tea I have to have white sugar. ☕

    I'm so happy you have Jane's cookbook as a treasure. It makes me sad her family didn't keep it. Maybe she had no family left? We lived across the street from a house were I never saw anyone come or go. I found out an elderly man lived there and there must have been a caregiver coming and going, but I just never happened to be looking when they came and went. One evening an ambulances with the siren on pulled up and took the man away on a stretcher, that's when I realized who lived there. A few weeks later a truck came and took away the furniture, but there were boxes and boxes of older books and documents put out to the curb. I took a few books and an interesting
    looking board game about Ancient Greece. What made me cry were all his framed diplomas; including one for his PHD. I wish I had taken them to memorialize him in a way, like you are doing with Jane's cookbook. The books and the game made me realize I probably would have enjoyed hanging out with him, and he was just across the street. 😔

    Anyway, I have things stuck in the Good Housekeeping cookbook my mother gave to me in 1985. I have also written favorite friends' and family recipes in it. I know Sebastian will keep it after I'm gone, but after that... who knows. I hope someone like you finds it. 🤗

    ReplyDelete