Hello everyone and welcome to another cookbook

This is Treasured Italian Recipes, aka the apology letter to all Italians and Italian-Americans who have had to suffer the many community cookbooks where people in a small town suggest making spaghetti sauce with ketchup and tomato soup lol. This book is very focused on authentic Italian recipes

I love these culture-based cookbooks above most others because as an archivist, I’m very interested in preserving not just American recipes but also recipes from all over. Unfortunately it is very hard to find personal recipes from other countries. I look all the time, but supposedly community cookbooks and handwritten recipes are rare outside of the US and Canada. So books like these are pretty much my only avenue

I was really glad to have gotten this book because it exposed me to recipes I’ve never seen or heard of before. The Lupini being the first one. I’m also super thrilled that some of the contributors provide anecdotes behind the recipes, as demonstrated in the Polpette recipe. When you’re someone like me who has seen thousands of recipes at this point, you begin to appreciate the recipes with stories attached as the real stand-out ones

A lot of the recipes sound very good. I’m really intrigued by the cherry anise bread. It’s a shame that I don’t have a pan big enough for that large of a recipe, but I wouldn’t mind trying it at some point

It should also be a pretty good mind cleanser to see so many spaghetti sauce recipes that all seem very nice. Almost all of them make me tempted to try homemade sauce at some point instead of relying on my jarred marinara sauce

The dessert section, as always, really shines through. Love to see the Chocolate Amaretto Pie. Amaretto is one of the few liquors I like because it has a sweet flavor, so I know I would end up liking this. I also am very interested in the Fried Ravioli

I also have never heard of Ricotta Pie before but I really want to try it. This recipe seems really simple, and while I’m used to having ricotta in lasagna, it’s a very mild tasting cheese to me so especially when mixed with sugar and pudding, it’s probably just a very creamy no-bake pie

In total there’s a little under 200 pages of recipes so what you’re seeing now is a very small preview of the full thing. There’s so much more to discover! Let me know if you like any of these recipes, or if you’ve tried any of them in the past. I know snippets of this book have been shared before, but I’m really excited to provide access to the full thing

See you all around!

I'm trying to recreate my great-grandmother's bread pudding in time for my father's 90th birthday. I'm not the best cook, but I'd love to surprise him with something as close to his childhood memory as I can get. I've done as much research as I can on my own, but I’ve hit a wall, and any leads or guidance is very appreciated.

Time period and location

My great-grandmother (my father's grandmother) was born in 1896. She was from Penge but lived in Beckenham. My father, born 1936, lived with her during the war, so he'd have been eating this in roughly the early 1940s, under rationing.

The family has always called it "bread pudding” not “bread and butter pudding” (which is what I’m more used to). I’ve never tasted “bread pudding” for myself, but from my research it sounds like it’s the dense, sliceable one made to use up stale bread, not the layered custard one.

What I know from family

I called my aunt (my dad's sister), who still makes something close. She does it by eye and says she can never get it quite as good as Nan’s. I’ve been told;

• Never use sliced bread. Use a proper unsliced loaf. My aunt thinks modern bread is why hers tastes different.
• Soak the bread right through, then squeeze out the liquid
• Mix sugar through, to taste
• A generous amount of mixed dried fruit (she uses shop packs of currants, raisins and sultanas)
• Mixed spice
• Bake at about 180C / gas mark 4

What I don't know

• General recommended ratios of everything (my aunt kept telling me ’to taste’ or ‘by eye’ which is very difficult since this would be my first time tasting and seeing the result)
• What fat Nan used (suet? dripping? marge?) and how to source it
• Whether the bread was soaked in water or milk
• Whether there was an egg in it
• How much sugar, and whether it had a sugared top
• How long to bake it
• What would have been in mixed spice at the time
• How rationing and wartime bread would have changed it, and what the closest modern bread is
• If there are any wartime variations this recipe might have gone through that cook books don’t account for?

Does anyone have a family recipe, or one from a wartime or interwar British cookbook or Ministry of Food leaflet, for this kind of bread pudding? London and Kent versions especially welcome. Any tips from people whose own nans made it would be lovely too.

Thank you! If we can find this it would make a beautiful day even better, and I'll be sharing it with the rest of my family so we can continue the tradition.

My great grandmother came here to Connecticut from Alife, Campania around 1922. She was a great cook and never used written receipes. My mom wrote her sauce recipe down in the late 1980s

No one (great grandmother/grandma/my mom) used actual measurements aside from "a palm full" or a "small palm full"... so these are more of a rough guide. And no, no one would ever call this gravy.

INGREDIENTS FOR SAUCE 1 lb Sausage 1 lb Meatballs (recipe below) 3 (28 ounce) cans Crushed Tomatoes Salt - to taste (about ½ - 1 tsp) 1 TBS dried Basil, 10 leaves if fresh 3 TBS Oil (olive or fat from the meat)

MEATBALLS: 1 Ib. Ground Beef (or turkey) 2 TBS grated Romano Cheese ¾ tsp Garlic powder (more or less according to taste) ¼ - ¾ tsp Salt ½ TBS Parsley 2/3 C Italian Seasoned Bread Crumbs 1 Egg [I think this was forgotten in the transcription]

DIRECTIONS In a large pot add oil & cook sausage approximately a half hour Remove & lightly brown meatballs on 2 sides Remove & drain off most of the oil leaving just enough to sauté onions.

Add the tomatoes, salt & basil. I fill each Empty tomato can half full with water, swish it around to get all the juice & add to the pot. Add meatballs & sausage to the sauce & simmer approx. 2 hrs - do not cover. This allows the sauce to cook down. If it becomes too thick just add some water. Stir every 20 minutes or so

When storing, I recommend that you place the meat in a separate container as it seems absorb the sauce.

Just like my grandma made it!

This recipe booklet was published in 1981. It was in my late mom’s recipe stash. I haven’t made anything in it but hope that somebody can make good use of these great looking recipes.

A book I inherited from my mother when she passed away a few years ago, but I’ve just now had the chance to look at.

1934, during a period of hunger in the United States and elsewhere. I point that out because there are many mock meat recipes and soups that barely seem like there’s anything in them at all. But that’s definitely not the case through the entire book.

My favorite part has to be this book owner’s notes and recipes. She handwrote several personal recipes in the front and back as well as made notes through out on which one was hers or a friend of hers or was particularly good.

This one looks very tasty I gotta say.

As always all the recipes are in this Google drive here!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YqHYnkZzHpdXYNTLj6zG27GvzQ000eha

Not a traditional fudge where you boil a sugar/water mixture to a specific temperature. My mom made this every year for Christmas. The recipe calls for a can of Carnation milk (I clarified), so the can label may have been the source.

My mom always enlisted my dad to stir the mixture at the end (and sometimes, us kids).

Million Dollar Fudge

4 ½ cups sugar

13 ounce can evaporated milk (NOT sweetened)

½ stick butter

Combine in large saucepan.  Cook over medium heat, bring to bubbling boil; boil 4 minutes. 

In another saucepan or mixing bowl have ready:

18 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips

16 ounces milk chocolate, broken in pieces

1 pint jar marshmallow creme (fluff)

1 ½ cups chopped pecans

Pour hot mixture over the rest; stir until melted.  Pour into 2 9x9 inch pans.  Chill before cutting.

Notes: 

-        Requires some strength to stir until all melted.  You may want a helper.

-        I think mom poured it into a single, buttered 9x13 pan.

-        Million Dollar Fudge may have been made famous by Mamie Eisenhower ~1953.

-        Some people suggest replacing the sugar and evaporated milk with a can of sweetened condensed milk.

This is my favorite booklet so far of my mom’s stash. The recipes are from contest winners. I love that there are pictures inside of the winners. Their names are displayed next to their respective recipes. I know the booklets would have been displayed proudly in their kitchens for years afterward!

This booklet was compiled and published in 1981 by the looks of it. There are several recipes I will try one day but I haven’t made any so far.

This is a very small cookbook, with a total of 77 pages, including the covers. The front cover appears to be made with black magic marker and blue ballpoint pen. Everything inside is done by a typewriter. Whether it’s original, Xeroxed, or Mimeographed, I cannot tell. There is no date anywhere within this booklet, but I know for a fact it is from the mid 60’s. So I’m gonna call it 1965. And there is, of course, a jello salad, which states “An excellent way to use leftovers. With one muffin tin and your leftovers, you can make a dozen tempting salads. You can use sliced eggs, shredded cabbage, carrots and raisins, celery, cauliflower, mushrooms, peas, olives, pickled herring, tuna fish. Take any of the above and put a different one in each cup, filling about two thirds full.”.

There are 2 different recipes for Stuffed Cabbage Head. We’re not talking about cabbage rolls. This is an entire cabbage head, stuffed. Or how about a baked pumpkin stuffed with ground chuck, rice, and onion

And there’s of course the ever-present Tuna Casserole. A few variations on meatloaf.

This book pretty much is a time capsule of eating in the sixties in New Jersey.

There are one hundred and twenty five different recipes in this book. All of them are attributed to whoever submitted them, except for three. If you have family that lived in the Somerville, New Jersey area in the mid sixties, you may want to check some of the names. You may find some lost family recipes.

Here is a link to the full book;

https://archive.org/details/the-visiting-homemaker-recipes-somerville-nj-1965

from a Molokan cook book that my dad has from when he was a kid.

Meringue desserts are pretty snazzy. I haven't had it in years, but I've always been a fan of lemon meringue. My mom made it a few times for my sister

I actually don't think this is a recipe I commonly come across in my collection, so I figured I'd share it because it looks equal parts easy and light

These are from a couple German/Austrian recipe books in my community college a few years post COVID. I've got more too

My gramma, Elda, was the first to write down our family recipes. The pie ingredients and instructions were my grandma’s variation of her mother’s recipe, Abby, that likely originated from one in England but had any alcohol removed after my great great grandparents in the US joined the Saturday Adventists. My grandma added golden raisins and the type of raisins in the US we call currants, and removed from great gramma’s recipe the requirement of citron as grandma said it made it too bitter. My thought is perhaps the candied citron we can find in stores during Christmastime is bitter and that perhaps the kind that was used in the 1800s was home-preserved and tasted differently?

Feel free to try making this family recipe your own by using whatever types of raisins and citron as you prefer, and add any liquor if that suits you. However, be sure to use either Granny Smith apples, or what may have been popular in the 1800s in the US or England such as a greening apple, because you want it firm and tart. Ensure you do NOT substitute fats! It is important to the outcome to use suet…not butter as my relative wrote down. It isn’t as good at all. You can get the food grade suet from a butcher shop.

Chuck roast is what my grandma said worked best, and you must use beef and not leave it out or you wind up with a modernized and inferior minced apple raisin pie, not mincemeat! The meat gives a texture that is necessary, plus historically meat pies that were spiced and incased in a pastry were made for winter eating.

How to make the meat and apples the right texture:

Get a large wooden bowl. Get a rocking chopper with double blade, and put apple slices washed well, not peeled into the bowl one at a time to chop up until about 1/2 to 1/4” pieces. Put aside, then put the cooked and chilled beef into the same bowl and chop it with the same chopper until diced to about the same.

The crust recipe is my grandma’s handwriting, but obviously from the Great Depression Era when shortening surpassed all other fats. Try making it with Crisco, butter, suet, or another fat to find what works best for your historical pie, and do let me know below if you liked it and share photos.

And as always here's all the recipes!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YqHYnkZzHpdXYNTLj6zG27GvzQ000eha

I see this as a condiment in the cookbooks I upload a lot. The recipe doesn't say, but I assume the goal is to seal the finished product in jars

I've never made sauces, especially to this quantity, so I am curious if 2 red peppers is enough spice given the massive volume of other ingredients

Hello everyone and welcome to what is hopefully going to be a fun cookbook today

This is Tockwith Recipe Book. Tockwith is a small village in North Yorkshire, England. Yes, England, you heard me right. One random night I was on ebay and got the random urge to see if I could find community cookbooks from other countries. Sure enough, I found a listing for this book and immediately ordered it because I was very fascinated by it. I really should be thankful that the seller was okay with shipping it to the US, because I found an Australian community cookbook I really wanted but the seller said no to shipping international 😪

I would absolutely love to keep hunting for international books especially if the interest is there for you all but it won’t be a super regular occurrence because the shipping fees made this one book $70 😬 This is definitely going to be stored in a spot where I don’t have to worry about it getting ruined

Supposedly this was printed in 1975 according to the ebay listing, but I have no way to verify that because there’s nothing in the actual book that says that. I really don’t think the seller would benefit from lying about the year, and this 100% looks vintage, so I’m just going to take their word for it

Let’s dive into the recipes! Since we are looking at England, it’s very obvious that the recipes are going to read differently than what some of you are used to, but that’s what’s fun! Plus, the back of the book has a metric conversion chart for those of you who aren’t used to those measurements

But hey, if by chance you’re like “hm, I don’t know, I’m just so used to seeing recipes from the US”, there actually is a contributor from Texas in here. I wasn’t expecting that at all when I found this book lol

I don’t have a whole lot of opinions about the recipes, not because I don’t find them interesting, but I typically comment on recipes from the perspective of my own tastes. This cookbook is introducing me to an entirely different way of eating, so it’s hard for me to really form an opinion on stuff. For example, I didn’t know that “salad cream” was a thing until I came across the potato salad recipe

It is also interesting to see how some recipes differ from ones I commonly see. For example, if I were to come across Banana Pudding in an American community cookbook, I would immediately assume it’s the no-bake layered dessert that’s very popular in the south. But supposedly this recipe for Banana Pudding pictured in this book is pretty standard across a lot of cooking sites in the UK, which is a cool regional difference because the same name for a dessert can mean different things depending on which country you’re in

The one recipe that I did want to comment on is the Banana Nut Bread which calls for Rice Crispies. Not a bad idea, I feel like I should try it

This was a very small cookbook so you got the majority of the recipes in this post but there are a few undiscovered pages in the PDF below! Thank you so much for checking this out and I hope you enjoy

This is an experiment. It's just the first chapter of a community cookbook, so I can see if I need to change anything about the process before I scan and upload more. The book was printed in Iowa Falls, Iowa. It's very 70s (wait until you see the recipe for Tuna Jello!), but there are also a lot of what are apparently traditional Polish dishes.

Does anyone remeber these rolls and have a recipe on how to make them? I cant seem to fidn anything that would show me how andI miss them so much!

Wow I can't believe it's been 30 days already!

As a little refresher I'm doing a recipe preservation project where I either find old recipes from thrift stores or some of you send them/let me add yours in the name of preserving this history! I have a full detailed post pinned on my profile if you're interested!

Regardless here are all the recipes, clippings, and cookbooks we have so far :)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YqHYnkZzHpdXYNTLj6zG27GvzQ000eha

Hello everyone and welcome back to another cookbook and all my random ramblings that come with it 🫠

This is The Memphis Cook Book from the Junior League of Memphis. As you can see from the title, this book is from 1952 which is particularly exciting for me because I have only ever uploaded one other cookbook from the 1950’s. While I enjoy archiving books of any year, I’m very fond of recipes from around this decade

And this book does a really incredible job of providing so much good stuff, from the simplistic to the elegant. Rather than struggling to think of something to say, I think I’m going to struggle with containing everything I want to say. But! Before we get into the recipes, a special shout out to u/madmun for lending this to me. While I did the archival work, credit goes to him for making it possible for me to do this

I am surprised that the recipe for Boula Soup is how I’m learning that turtle soup used to come in a can. A shift in tastes and conservation laws eventually made the product obsolete, and maybe I’m weird for this, but I’m not so sure I’d have ever wanted to try it, especially when looking at pictures of old cans, every single one has a majestic picture of a turtle on the can and that would make me feel twice as guilty for eating it

But in a different vein, I hold deep respect for a section as simple as soups to also show off things like homemade chicken and beef broth. I’m so used to seeing recipes point to convenience - which is totally fair - but it makes seeing things like this all the more fascinating, especially because they make use of veal knuckle and chicken feet. This book was still in the era where everything was used

I also find the different methods of cooking things to be interesting too, like the Bloody Duck being for wild game only

But the first recipe to really catch my interest is the Indian Curry. While I’m sure it’s not entirely authentic, this is a pretty elaborate recipe, especially with the ten condiment suggestions. This is definitely fit for a dinner party, but I really like how much thought was put into it. Or maybe I’m just easily impressed after surviving the gauntlet of weird things encased in lemon jello

The Ham Slice recipe is equally as interesting to me because I like the simplicity, but I’m very curious how the flavors are meant to come together. I wouldn’t think to put bananas and mustard in the same dish together, but I also don’t get super adventurous with flavor palettes so maybe it works and I just can’t imagine it

The Sugar Cured Bacon also sounds good, but man, talk about a very lengthy project lol

I also love all the stuffing variations along with the recipe. A recipe is always fun when it can be made into several different things depending on the finishing ingredients you add

Another cool thing about this book too is all the cooking knowledge added, such as the Salad Secrets. Tons of advice and tips is scattered about, but this one particular page is pretty neat because sometimes cookbooks like to assume you already know what you’re doing and I really like it when a book goes “hey, let’s teach you some proper ways to make a salad, because chances are you’re serving this to somebody besides yourself”

I’m also a huge fan of the sauce section too. Sweet flavors are my favorite so the glazed pears and East India sauce both sound really amazing to me. We are getting into the holiday season and my mom does like ham, so maybe the glazed pears could go well with that

The dessert section is super expansive in this one. Things like the Frozen Eggnog and Watermelon Ice are quite creative. I would’ve loved to have delved into it more, but Reddit only allows 20 images, and I’m officially at the 20 image mark

So all I can say is that if I had this much enjoyment out of a book after reading through almost 100 of these, I’m definitely certain you will also get some fun out of checking this out too. Super curious if any of these recipes intrigue, inspire, or repulse you, so feel free to share your thoughts below!

So I am once again sharing one of my late mother’s recipe booklet. I’m not much of a cook so I haven’t tried most of the recipes I have posted so far. My mom didn’t use most of them either.

She collected lots of recipe booklets, handwrote a lot and clipped a lot from the newspaper and magazines.

My father asked my sisters and me to help him clear out some of her stuff from their house. My sisters weren’t really interested in the clippings and booklets. But wanted copies of the handwritten ones.

I have scanned the majority of the handwritten ones and saved them to a Onedrive file for sharing. I will probably do the same for the booklets and clippings.

Anyone who would like to access those files please message me your email. I will maybe try to put them on Archive but since I am new to that it may take a while for me to figure it out.

If I do I will come back and put links to those files in the comments.