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Monday, September 03, 2012

A new project?

This doesn't look very exciting, but it could be. These are a collection of handwritten recipe books, plus some torn from newspapers, mostly from my mother in law's mother, some from my MiL herself. The earliest goes back to 1913.

I have started slowly going through them and identifying recipes to try out. I find them fascinating from a social history point of view as they show a different way of life going back a century.

There is a lot of duplication, of course, and stuff that doesn't suit most modern tastes, plus recipes that one or the other of our immediate family members would not, or could not, eat. But I thought it would be fun and instructive to work through some of them, test cook them and turn them into modern day recipes.

Progress reports will be posted here. I am still in the very early stages of picking out potential recipes so there won't be photos for a while though.


2 comments:

Jan said...

I have some old recipes which were written for cooking on wood stoves. Fascinating some of them. Others less so which boil shredded cabbage at a rolling boil for 30 minutes! Some of them have handy hints for home cures.

For diarrhoea the suggestion is a medicine glass of equal parts of whiskey and opium. One glassful after every trip to the bathroom for two hours and then one glass per hour. I think after a few glasses of opium and whiskey the patient probably had no idea of complaint and could not be bothered working things out anyway!

2paw said...

That sounds like a wonderful project. My friend gave me a family muffin recipe last week so I'm planning to try it out. It's like a trip back in time!!!