New Cookbooks!

A rare, 1943 edition

EARLIER today, I was thrilled upon opening my mailbox to find both of the cookbooks I'd recently purchased online had arrived! One was a 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking (I'm finding that I'm quite into "vintage" recipes) and the other was The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. (the latter is actually not a cookbook, but rather a food memoir "embellished with fifty recipes")

A brief inscription on the flyleaf reads,
"Hullo Mabel!"... from Stella

Upon opening my copy of The Joy of Cooking, I was rather surprised to find several snipped and folded recipes placed here and there throughout the entire book!

As I pulled out the first handful, I was expecting to find modern recipes... but to my surprise, the recipes all seemed to be from circa 1943!

- Click any of the images to enlarge -

I excitedly and carefully unfolded the aged and delicate pieces of paper and examined each, front and back. Some of the clippings had more to tell than just a recipe...

It seems our friend Mabel had a thing for pickling, because I found more than one recipe for pickling something or another... and of course she had plenty of staple recipes like meatloaf, under which she penciled the words "very good."

But some of the most interesting clippings I came across were the ones that had little stories attached or interesting advertisements or articles on the opposite side.

This recipe with "white wonder icing"
sounds worth giving a try...

I don't know which I like more:
Horseradish Pickles or "He'd Avoid It"!

On the back of a recipe for apricot sherbet, an
advertisement for "Knox" (to remedy lessened stamina)

And just to reaffirm Mabel's existence, some personal mementos and a few recipes written on the end sheet in her own hand.

Mabel was keen on collecting four-leaf clovers;
I've come across two thus far

Carrie's Fruit Cake;
"(very good)"

Yet the item I found most awe-inspiring of all was an article from the New York Herald Tribune (dated July 9, 1944) titled "Summer War on Weeds Calls for Many Attacks"... on which the opposite side was the following advertisement:

- Click to enlarge -

The Joy of Cooking, by Irma S. Rombauer