One of the Best Cookbooks Ever!, something that’s been in my family forever… I have made sooo many recipes from this book, but I selected recipes to post here more for the quality of the portraits of the cooks, the content of their blurbs, and achievement of a representative sample of types of food. It’s not all Jell-o molds and heavy meat-laden dishes, though those are certainly represented.
I would also like to point out that this humble comb- bound cookbook was printed by the Allied Printing Trades Council– it is union made. It was printed, trimmed, drilled, and bound in Milwaukee, the same city in which it was written, designed, photographed, and tested. The print shop itself was probably not far from the very kitchen tables where the some of the cooks represented here served their dishes. I don’t know too much about high- output printing, but the quality, particularly for the postage- stamp-size photos of the cooks in the actual cookbook, makes a deep impression on me every time I look through it. Whatever you may feel about unions, they have been and still are a huge part of our nation’s working life, improving the quality of the tangible objects in our lives as well as improving the quality of life for those who make them. This cookbook is an artifact from a time when “union made in the USA” was not such an anomaly as it is now.
Click on the image below or select from the dropdown menu above to view excerpts from this wonderful cookbook.
