Hello everyone and happy Thursday!
Today’s book upload is Art a la Carte, from, as you can see on the cover, the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings, Montana. I was super excited to get this one from the used bookstore, especially because this book features some artwork from local artists. It’s one of my cooler “in the wild” finds
However, with that comes the downhill slope of seeing that this book only contains two sections – vegetables and desserts. This is a far cry from a standard community cookbook which would usually contain appetizers, beverages, casseroles, meats, some outlandish sauce recipe that uses ketchup and Hershey’s syrup. It’s not entirely unusual for a cookbook like this to be constrained, as I do have other community cookbooks that only focus on one or two sections, but I did find it a little strange for this book
They also made the choice not to credit the contributors under each recipe. Again, not entirely unusual, but definitely strays from the norm. I wonder if it seemed “classier” to not add attributions under each recipe
Looking through the vegetable section, there’s not a whole lot of recipes that jump out for me specifically, although I did get a little chuckle out of the Potato Pie being called “a bit on the spicy side”
I will say, though not my first time seeing it, the Tomato Pudding has me slightly intrigued. I’m curious which bread would be the best for this sort of dish
The first desserts that catch my attention are the gingerbread and applesauce bars. I see gingerbread recipes a lot, but this one made me really read the recipe and go “huh, yeah, with those instructions that looks simple enough”. The applesauce bars just look easy to make. I’m a sucker for easy desserts
I’m also liking the idea of the Montana Gold Bars. Pretty sure this is similar to a regular jam bar recipe, but they still look good. Would be interested in eventually trying with different flavors
As always, the recipes are always fun to look through and I’m happy to be sharing this with you all for whatever purpose you’ll use it for. Definitely check out the full book if and when you get a chance, because the artwork is very nice!
Thank you for checking this out, and I’ll see you around in the next blog!
by _Alpha_Mail_
3 Comments
https://archive.org/details/art-a-la-carte
Here is the link! Hopefully the scan on this one looks really nice. Slowly but surely, I’ve been improving my methods
Here is a rundown of my next few uploads I have planned:
Saturday, September 5th – A 1984 church cookbook. Will be pretty standard
Sunday, September 6th – A 2011 cookbook dedicated to a racer. It has very interesting recipes, like pork with a “root beer” sauce. It will only be posted about on a different sub, but it will be available on my archive profile all the same
Monday, September 7th – A 1982 cookbook from the University of Washington
Tuesday, September 8th – I believe it’s from 1994? But it’s a NATO women’s cookbook, which means lots of different recipes from different cultures, so that should hopefully excite you
I’m going to try and get more books in the hopper for later next week. Not sure which ones they’ll be yet, but it should hopefully be exciting to find out!
Thank you so very much for these! You’re doing important historical work, and it will be appreciated for generations to come.
Something I really like about these old cookbooks is that they used what a person might have on hand, with maybe a can of something or one different kind of vegetable or whatever. I understand that not as many fresh ingredients were available at the time, but even today most of us won’t keep lots of fresh herbs around or a huge variety of fresh vegetables without having to buy a whole bunch of it at the grocery store. I really like the creativity that went into these recipes
Oh I love this so much, my mother worked at Yellowstone and I cannot wait to make a couple of these!!! Thanks for sharing … Meet me in Montana ….