I love reading and collecting community cookbooks. They offer not only recipes, but portraits of the communities which produced them. They give us glimpses-sometimes charming, sometimes not so appealing- of a period of time and a particular place. Celia Sack of Ominvore Books sent one such old cookbook from The Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama, dated 1919.
The verso of the title page of Culinary Crinkles had a marvelous quote from John Ruskin answering the question "What does Cookery Mean?"
"It means the knowledge of all fruit and herbs, and balms and spices, and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory in meats.
"It means carefulness and inventiveness and readiness of appliance.
"It means the economy of your great grandmother and the science of modern chemists.
"It means much tasting and no wasting: it means English thoroughness and French art,and Arabian hospitality; and it means in fine, that you are to be perfectly, and always, ladies---loaf givers.*"
(from Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust)
* In Sesame and Lilies Ruskin had proposed that lady derived from "bread-giver" or "loaf-giver."
One can forgive what we would regard as sexist language;he was a man of his Victorian times
Did you have any idea that were engaged in such a lofty enterprise? Me neither.
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