Antique Cookbooks

One day in the mid 80s I was sitting at my grandparent's kitchen table having coffee with them and hanging out.  We did that a lot.

Grandma for some unremembered reason brought out an old cookbook that had been published by a local club of some sort in the 20s or 30s.  We had a ball laughing over that cookbook.  It, in some places, asked for 5 cents worth of hamburger for a recipe.  We sat there envisioning a pot of spaghetti today with a half teaspoon of hamburger in it and laughing together, and then reading more and laughing more.  She left me that book in her will, but it had disappeared by then into the somewheres of life.

It began my love of old cookbooks.  I love them!  I have one favorite that was written in 1849 and has the most spectacular recipe for turtle soup and includes instructions for how to both kill the turtle and butcher it prior to cooking.  Truly a skill I might never have known.  It also has a social handbook which includes instructions for how to dress.  A quote from the book that makes me laugh SO hard, but is so telling of the times in which it was written and full of pathos at the same time it is funny.  "Showy brooches and other geegaws are best left to negroes and south sea islanders."  It might be the only cookbook I know that will tell me how to make a cake that takes 40 eggs, or start a roast with 8, 10, or 12 pounds of meat interchangeably.

Without my antique cookbooks I might never have known what a forcemeat ball is, or that to digest peas they must be cooked for at least an hour, how to flour a pudding bag properly, or how to cook a calf's head.  I would never have realized that an omelet was exotic or that lobster was so common to eat in the NE that they had to hide it in their dishes.  I have learned how to make breads in a dutch oven over a fire, and how to grow and dry herbs for medicines.  In my old cookbooks I learned what the word dyspepsia meant and how to gut a chicken without ruining the meat.

Old cookbooks are filled with all sorts of wisdom.  They will show you exactly what the life of the people who wrote it was like.  They will sometimes even give you cures for cancer!

They give me a sense of history and a look into the lives of the women who came before me caring for their families and trying to deal with earaches and childbirth.

The only thing they don't give me is cooking instructions.  I never use a cookbook.