Antique cookbook stuffed with lots of clippings and handwritten recipes. Regional cook book Waterman, Illinois, local cookery midwest

WATERMAN COMMUNITY COOK BOOK.

by Parent Teachers Association
Somonauk: Reveille Print, n.d., [1910s-20s]

Plain cloth-covered card covers, 8-3/4" x 5-3/4", 167 pp. Wear to covers, covers and binding rounded from the insertion of at least 107 clippings or handwritten recipes laid in variously between the pages, with some toning to pages from any newsprint clippings, title page torn about halfway along binding. Good condition.

The cookbook-as-file is probably as old as cookbooks themselves. Maintaining a system for found recipes usually falls into three categories: the manuscript cookbook, the file box, and within the leaves of relevant and/or most-used cookbooks. The fact that this community cookbook has so many recipes laid in may indicate that it was one of the few, if not the only, cookbook in the household.

Almost all recipes have contributor names. The recipes are old-fashioned in that the instructions are minimal; in some cases, there is just a list of ingredients. I think the only exception is the lengthy instructions for the Cross Word Puzzle Cake (p. 98). Although invented in 1913, crosswords didn’t get widespread notice until the 1920s, when several newspapers ran them daily. The inclusion of this cake recipe marks one of the earliest, if not the first, culinary adaptations of the puzzle. In 1925 a “new and unusual” pie recipe “Cross-Word Puzzle Pie” appeared in the Chicago Tribune. (Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History, p. 97)