This book is a hand-me-down from my mother – a collection of recipes from our local congregation in Oklahoma sometime in mid-1970s.  Adventures in Food was a fundraiser for the women’s organization, published by the Walter’s Publishing Company, then of Waseca, Minnesota.   Walter’s is still operating today, publishing yearbooks and church directories as a subsidiary of a large printing conglomerate, but in the mid-70s they were a small family operation “printing Cook Books [sic] for churches and other organizations at a cost that they can afford to pay.”

Adventures in Food is a plastic-coil bound softcover weighing in at nearly 200 pages and over five hundred recipes.  The recipe text appears to be hand-typed on an electric typewriter and manually formatted.  Recipes are divided into nine categories, from appetizers to the mildly unappetizing ‘miscellaneous’ but otherwise presented in no particular order.  There’s no story or context or commentary beyond the instructions and the name of the woman who submitted the recipe.

There are a few multi-colored introductory pages listing cooking terms and techniques, identifying types or flatware, and listing the dates of Easter Sunday from 1972-1995.  There are a couple of jokes and poems included for filler, such as:

Women’s faults are many, 

Men have only two —

“Everything they say,

And everything they do!”

Or a spaghetti recipe with instructions to “stir it up and cook it until Perry Mason is over”.  It has the sensibilities of an old Farmer’s Almanac. 

Main Dishes