The presumptious-sounding Breast of Ozark Fryer Parisienne is a simple and elegant chicken-and-toast entrée. The recipe is adapted from the 1956 Beta Sigma Phi International Cookbook, one of nearly a dozen smothered-in-sauce chicken recipes from the extensive chapter on “meats”. The good ladies of mid-century Beta Sigma Phi were perhaps too patrician to follow……
Tag: 1950s
Cookbook Review: Elena’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking, by Elena Zelayeta (1958)
Elena’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking (1958) is a recent find from a local antique shop. The titular Elena is one Elena Zelayeta, born in Mexico in 1898 and emigrated to Northern California as a young woman. She was, at various times in her life, a restaurateur, entrepreneur, cookbook author, culinary instructor, and local television personality. …
Cookbook Review: Mennonite Community Cookbook (1950)
Mennonite Community Cookbook is an ambitious collection of traditional Mennonite recipes by Professor Mary Emma Showalter, who founded the Home Economics Department at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. In addition to an advanced degree from Penn State, her credentials include being a descendent of a “long line of Mennonite cooks in the Shenandoah Valley”….
Old-Time Meatless Recipes (1955)
I’ve never been sure what to make of Katharine Morrison McClinton’s Old-Time Meatless Recipes. It is nominally a cookbook, with around a hundred recipes. But Ms. McClinton wasn’t a chef, she was an antiques writer. She wrote more than thirty books and countless magazine articles for antique collectors over a fifty year career, and this…
Cookbook Review: Christmas Convoys (1952)
Christmas Convoys is a slim pamphlet prepared by the Cupples-Hesse Corporation, a Midwestern paper supplier, and simply labeled “Christmas 1952”. I haven’t got the faintest idea what a “Christmas Convoy” is supposed to be. The cover art, with a stylized depiction of kitchen tools hanging from a Christmas tree, and the introductory notes aren’t any…