OP: The Post-Telegram Cook Book

$60 · Offered by Kitchen Arts & Letters · No longer available

When this first crossed our desk, we thought, “ho-hum—another of those dismal books.” Weary home cooks flogging tired old standards, carloads of canned and packaged products, magazine clippings, dreadful shortcuts, and all the other disappointments of so many “contributed cookbooks.” That turned out to be surprisingly far from the truth. What we discovered was a marvelous old-fashioned collection of recipes, many with a New England bent. Some are familiar, and a few have surely timed out, but this is, at bottom, a brimming repository of ideas and approaches that makes one itch to get into the kitchen and indulge in some good, honest cooking. This 1934 publication—based on recipes submitted for a contest sponsored by a newspaper group in Fairfax County, Connecticut—is pure comfort. Naive, simple, economical (this was, after all, five years into the Great Depression), and easy to follow, this is good cooking shared over the back fence. We see pork casserole, corn-stuffed green peppers, chicken fricassee with dumplings, Cape Cod pudding, chicken salad éclairs, Salem fish chowder, Waldorf salad (endearingly spelled Wadorf), and a palate-popping array of pies and cakes. We didn’t count the recipes, but the compilers claim 1001. And they are, indeed, virtually all from-scratch, calling for cans mainly to supply such “exotic” items as pineapples. The recipes are short and to the point; no wasting time telling folks that the apples have to be cored or how many minutes to allow for bo

• Binding: Hardcover

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