Resource: St. Cloud Times Community Cookbooks

The St. Cloud Times has a feature in their Life section where they take a community cookbook and provide a recipe from it. A search in their online archives shows over 100 postings of community cookbook recipes. Today's  post was from the Avon Lakers' Ladies Cookbook (1980).

This is a nice feature and might be helpful to those who had/have family in this area. While it does not provide the names of everyone that contributed a recipe it does, through the title, let you know what is available.

The unfortunate part is that older articles require you to pay a fee to see the entire article. An abstract is free. Consider setting a Google alert for "community cookbooks" to keep up with the articles they post today and in the future.

Leftovers, Leftovers: The Thanksgiving Aftermath

So all the food is put away. The guests are gone. Your house needs another cleaning. Now what to do with all that food?

Several editions of The Metropolitan Cook Book was published  by Metropolitan Life Insurance in the 20th century. The 1925 edition provides homemakers with tips for healthy eating  including advice well suited for today. A variety of foods is stressed in one tip,   "there should be a liberal amount of fruits and green vegetables..." One of  their "useful suggestions" state that "it pays to buy clean food from a clean store " (Amen to that).

The goal of the cook book is "to help the housewife in her everlasting question, "what shall I have for dinner to-night?" One of the sections  tries to answer the question of what to do with leftovers. The introduction to those recipes state:

Almost any left-over meat may be combined with other foods, well seasoned, and be made up into very palatable dishes. Beef, veal, mutton, lamb, chicken and ham are all desirable and may be combined. Fish may be substituted for meat in many recipes. Trim off carefully all non-edible parts. Cut or chop mean in fine pieces of uniform size. Do not mash.

My guess is that for those who grew up in financially difficult times or during war time these recipes are easily recognized.

The recipes for leftovers include:

Thanks for the Memories: Thanksgiving

Woman Cooking from the US National Archives. http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=513406

As genealogists our concentration is rightly focused on the lives of our ancestors. While that should be the majority of our focus at some point it's a good idea to consider what our descendants will remember about us or even know about us. As we approach Thanksgiving I have been asking people that I know how is Thanksgiving different now from when you were a child?

Obviously, the people you gather to eat with now might be different. Where you eat the food might be different. One of the things I have been interested in is how is the food different?

One of the dishes we had when I was younger was mincemeat pie. This was one of the many pies that my great-grandmother made. I previously wrote about some of my thoughts about mincemeat in a blog post here. Suffice it to say pumpkin pie was my favorite and so I was not interested in there being any other pies. Eventually as people in my family weren't as interested in mincemeat pie and as my great-grandmother was unable to help with the cooking, that pie eventually disappeared from our Thanksgiving table. I will say now as an adult, I'm sorry I never tried a piece of my great-grandmother's mincemeat pie.

So as you start reflecting on Thanksgiving, think about recording some of your Thanksgiving memories that can be shared with family. These questions/answers can be included in a family cookbook, in a Christmas letter, in your genealogical database or even on your blog. These questions are going to be different depending on what years you are reflecting on. For me, Thanksgiving is different if I'm thinking of it from when I was in elementary school, later as  a high school student  and then as I have a family of my own.

Some questions to consider include:

• Where did you spend Thanksgiving each year?

• Who prepared Thanksgiving?

• Who attended Thanksgiving? (names of family and friends)

• Did you have any traditions that went along with Thanksgiving? (playing football, putting up Christmas lights, watching TV, saying a special prayer, etc).

• What was your favorite Thanksgiving food?

• What was the Thanksgiving menu? (include recipes of dishes)

• Did you ever have a Thanksgiving disaster? (kitchen caught on fire, plumbing backed up, dog ate meal).

• How was Thanksgiving different when you were a child (different food, different traditions).

• What decorations were used for Thanksgiving?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Food Friday: Fried Squirrel ala World War II

Recently, I was in Solvang (California) checking out the used cookbooks at the local bookstore, The Book Loft. (On a side note, these great independent bookstores are a dying breed and deserve our support). They had a great selection of community cookbooks compiled by all kinds of different fundraising groups. I ended up picking up a few that looked unique and then headed off to a play we were seeing that night.

On the long drive home, I started perusing the cookbooks and started wondering about the story behind one of the ones I had purchased. I couldn't quite figure out who the group was that compiled it. It was different than the church, school, hospital, alumni group, local community  groups I was accustomed to. It was obvious the book had to do with World War II and after analyzing some of the stories I knew that the atomic bomb  dropped at the end of World War II played some integral part in why these women knew each other.

This cookbook, a combination of recipes and memories, was complied by the Oak Ridge '43 Club. Members of this club were those living in Oak Ridge (Tennessee) in 1943. One of the nicknames of this city is the Atomic City. Those who lived in Oak Ridge lived under a veil of secrecy not only from the rest of the world but also to a degree, amongst themselves. They were working, unbeknownst to them, on materials for the Manhattan Project.

What I love about this cookbook is that it's not just a compilation of recipes of the time. It is a history, told in the words of the women who lived it. The book includes biographies, sketches of what the housing looked like at Oak Ridge and rich descriptions of their lives. This is truly a cookbook/history book. We definitely need more of them. 

Today's Food Friday is a Fried Squirrel recipe. I think it's important to remember the foods people had to eat during hard times and to listen to their stories. To learn more about Oak Ridge see the Oak Ridge website. This cookbook is available here.