Food Friday: Bo-Peep Recipes

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

Collecting community cookbooks is like a disease. For some reason you can tell yourself that you have more than enough but there's always that unique one staring you in the face at the local library bookstore just begging to be appreciated by you. So reluctantly you think about how you can save money on dinners, bills, (you name it) this week in order to buy 1, maybe 2, ok let's be real, 5 or more community cookbooks.

But this time is different. Really. This time I ran into two that were from a new-to-me women's group. The Bo-Peeps.

Now I'm saving the other cookbook for another post because it is fabulous with its history and stories. But for today, we'll be using recipes found in From the Sheepcamp to the Kitchen. Kern County (California) Wool Growers Auxiliary "The Bo-Peeps" (1991).

There's a lot to like about this cookbook. The cookbook starts with a nice history about the group.

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

And there are  pages of photos of the organization's ephemera. Why don't other groups add this type of history to their cookbooks?

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

Now I struggled with what recipe to spotlight today and I decided on this 3/4 page because of the information it provides. Though my guess is some of my readers will enjoy these recipes for the weekend.

Sure, Sol Y Sombre is great but notice that the contributor included her maiden name. Genealogists love that because it makes research so much easier. I also like that the Mayo recipe includes the notation that it was submitted by the daughters of the recipe originator. (I just wish they would have added their names.) The mayo recipe is from an owner of the Noriega Hotel. You can read more about the Noriega Hotel at their website.

From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega

As I was paying for my books, the bookstore volunteer remarked how she had found a community cookbook from the 1970s and how awful the recipes were. Maybe she was telling me this to warn me in case I was eager to whip up some sort of tuna gelatin mold for dinner. I explained to her that for the most part, I don't care about how awful the recipes are. These cookbooks tell the story of women's lives. For me, that's the addicting part of collecting community cookbooks.