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 🤣