I didn't really do anything yesterday - other than teach, go to W.'s funeral, and go to the last German class.

So today I'm going to talk about one of the cookbooks I own.

I enjoy cookbooks. I have a huge number of them and I'm always on the lookout for more. Many of my cookbooks are older or "vintage" - I think I said somewhere that one of my minor life goals was to collect a complete set of the 1960s "Farm Journal" cookbooks. (And the Farm Journal County Fair cookbook is pretty much my go-to book for basic baked goods).

But I've been looking again at one I bought, I think, shortly after I bought my house.

It's a version of the The Settlement Cookbook. It's a book my mom had and used a lot and seemed to be a good "basic" cookbook.

(Yes, it's subtitled - and even my more modern version is - "The Way to a Man's Heart," which I openly admit I find oogy. But it's a good cookbook).

It was written by volunteers at the Settlement House in Milwaukee. Settlement Houses were aimed at helping new immigrants assimilate. Because of the populace (I presume) that the Milwaukee Settlement House served, the cookbook has a lot of German, Eastern European, and Eastern European Jewish dishes in it. (or those choices may partly reflect the ethnicities of the women who compiled it - note the names on the title page of the old edition. By the time my edition was printed, only Mrs. Kander's name was still being used). (More on the Milwaukee Settlement House. And I think it's interesting how the investment of Mrs. Kander and her friends paid off - the men who ran the Settlement House wouldn't give them the $18 needed for the printing, but they managed, and the proceeds from the book wound up funding a community center.)

It's amazingly full of recipes. For example, there are some 20 different types of pancakes - from buttermilk hotcakes to crepes Suzette to Dutch babies to pancakes made with matzo meal.

There are very simple recipes - aimed at new cooks, or perhaps at women who know well how to cook but are living under "reduced circumstances" and who would find it overwhelming to try to cook as they had before they left the Old Country.

But there are also very complex, advanced, and rather obscure recipes. I particularly love the sections on cakes and pastries. There's a recipe for Dobos Torte (which anyone who's received the Swiss Colony catalog has probably seen - except I bet the homemade variety is a lot better). There's something called Himmel Torte that I'd love to try making, if I could only find the 7" by 11" pans it calls for: three layers of what is basically a sponge cake, topped by a merengue of whipped egg whites mixed with spices and nuts, then, when the layers cool each is topped with raspberry jam and a sort of creme Anglaise (the recipe is on that "more about the Settlement House" page I linked to above)

Many of those recipes are far more complex than most people would make today. I'd like to try some of them just to see what they're like, but also to say I made them. (Perhaps, if reading a novel "allows the characters to live" for a period of time while you are reading it, making a recipe from an old cookbook allows it to "live"?)

There's also several chapters on preserving food - there are instructions on how to pickle just about any vegetable out there: beets, and radishes, and cabbage, and it tells how to make mustard pickle and picalilli. And there are three recipes for pickled green beans: plain pickled beans, dilled beans, and "sweet" pickled beans ("sweet" not so much in the sense of there being sugar in the recipe, but to set it apart from the dilled beans. The Sweet beans have a cinnamon stick and cloves mixed in the brine. If I get a good yield of beans from the garden this year I may try making those).

There are also lots of basic instructions. I think a while back (maybe even a whole year!) I was ranting about the dumbing-down of cooking - of the way some manufacturers or publishers were figuring no one knew what "cream" or "braise" meant any more and so were dropping those words from recipes. Well, right in the front of the Settlement Cookbook there is a glossary - aimed, I suppose, both at new cooks who don't know the lingo as well as experienced cooks who may just be learning English.

There are also "practical" chapters with advice on feeding babies (some of that may be out of date: I'm not sure I'd want to give a young baby tomato dishes, both because of the potential for developing allergies as well as the potential for the acidity causing diaper rash), cooking for people on bland, liquid, or other restricted diets.

There are also lots of meatless recipes: I do not know if that was a legacy of one of the World Wars, or if some of the Settlement House folks came from cultures with larger vegetarian populations (I mean, pre-1970s or so) than the U.S., or if it was part of the idea of having kosher recipes - that way, if you had a meatless soup you could incorporate it into a "milk" meal. But there are quite a few (well, some of them use chicken stock but you could always sub veggie stock). There's a black bean soup among the meatless recipes I want to try.

There are also, scattered through the book, recipes using matzo meal, or recipes designated as being OK for Passover (there's also a Passover dinner menu, complete with a recipe for haroset, at the beginning of the book, in the menu section). I wonder how many other "general" cookbooks have that?

I love looking through the book because it has so many recipes that I haven't seen anywhere else. They have, for example, an entire chapter on sandwiches you can make - ideas for making "salads" of leftover meat, or ways you can combine cheese and other foods, or even vegetable-based sandwiches.

And there are wonderful "named" recipes. If I have one complaint about the book, it is that the recipes that have an evocative name have no commentary explaining that name. For example, there is a "Milwaukee sandwich" (chicken and Roquefort cheese, served hot with parsley) but no indication of why it is so called. So for things like the Bishop's bread and the Shrewsbury cakes, you have to look elsewhere if you want them explained (and I do. I like to know why a recipe is called what it is. I like to know, for example, if some recipe goes back to the 1600s or something. It makes it more interesting to me.) That said - if they explained all the recipes there probably wouldn't be room for so many, so I'm willing to forgo the explanations.

There are also chapters on "how to do" things - even including things like "how to light a coal stove" and "how to pasturize raw cow's milk." (I think there are also instructions on how to purify water for drinking and make simple soap).

The edition of the book I have was printed in 1965; the most recent "edition" date given is 1954. But in the introduction the editor comments that the older recipes have been left in, and the information on how to do things (like build a campfire and light a coal stove) have been retained - because, the editor realized rightly - they are hard to find elsewhere. (And I am happy of that. I may never need to know how to make soap, but if I did, it is important to have the instructions. And, I would observe, important to have them in book form: if I am HAVING to make my own lye soap as a survival-type thing, doubtless the Internet - and very possibly electricity - would not be available). (I wonder if the most recent edition of the book has retained that information. I hope so.)

I don't really keep a list of "desert island" books - for one thing, it's too hard for me to decide - and for another, I guess, I tend to go very practical and say, "I'd like a book on edible vs. poisonous plants of the place where I was going to be stranded, and maybe a book on boat-building, and maybe one on navigating by starlight." But I do think this book would make the cut - both for the practical information but also for the wealth of recipes that I could read, and dream about cooking once I got back to civilization.

(Incidentally, if you are interested in cookbooks, Feeding America is worth a visit - it has scans of historic cookbooks and links to old recipes from the Detroit Free Press, and a video tour of cooking-related collections.)