I completed three food-related publishing projects this year. First, in July, I published the second edition of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods, my collection of recipes from Chicago’s television chef and IGA icon, Eddie Doucette. It includes an interview with his son, which I expanded for a more detailed post in September, He was the chef.

In August, I published my own personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book. It’s a compilation of recipes that I used to save by way of photographing them with my phone so as to have them available while traveling. It’s a lot easier to access now that they’re in PDF, ePub, and print form.

And finally, in October I started publishing facsimiles of the vintage cookbook pamphlets I’ve been writing about. The first to get this treatment was The Horsford Cook Book from 1877 or so. Also available: Mrs. Winston’s Receipts for 1876 and the ca. 1880 New Centennial Cook Book.

For the moment I’m only doing this for works from 1929 and earlier¹. But that leaves many more to come in 2025 and up, so stay tuned to the food section of Mimsy Were the Borogoves or The Padgett Sunday Supper Club.

I continued preparing for the sestercentennial this year with a collection of 1876 recipes from a handful of cookbooks celebrating or benefiting from America’s centennial. I cannot overstate how much I recommend surprising your family and friends with a mashed potato pie in place of the more traditional sweet potato pie. There are a lot of dishes that have disappeared into our history that deserve restoration, and this is at the top of the list for me.

I also managed to restart my refrigerator cookbook revisited history survey with Montgomery Ward Cold Cooking from 1942. The Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest from 1947 is coming soon, and I have a few more tidbits up my sleeve to round out that trilogy.

Of course I also picked up a few new cookbooks this year. One stands above the rest: Exotic Cooking of India. This is a 1985 community cookbook from the India Association of Indianapolis. It is filled with recipes the likes of which I’ve never seen in a professionally-published Indian cookbook. This “peanut chutney”, for example. It’s basically a homemade peanut butter, flavored with garlic!

Garlic Peanut Chutney

Servings: 16
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Vatsala Gunale
Review: Exotic Cooking of India (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 1 cup roasted peanuts
• 4 tsp chili powder
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp cumin
• salt to taste
• oil to taste

Steps

1. Blend the peanuts, chili powder, garlic, and cumin in an electric blender.
2. If peanut butter is desired, blend in peanut oil or a neutral oil to achieve desired consistency.
3. Salt to taste.

This is great everywhere you’d use peanut butter, and everywhere you’d use chutney. Of all the recipes I’ve picked up this year, this is one I’ll be keeping on hand most.

Picked up a lot of cookbooks driving through Missouri and West Michigan. And that muffin pan in the back is for microwave muffins!

Garlic peanut butter on coffee ice cream…

Sarkis Pastry in Anaheim is dangerously close to Zankou Chicken.

Philadelphia-style ice cream from the 1942 Cold Cooking refrigerator manual.

A Bowl of Red and Exotic Cooking are probably the standouts among these books from the New Braunfels library sale.

If there’s a second amazing cookbook that I found this year, it is the 1922 One Hundred Delights from the Hills Brothers Company. This isn’t surprising; the Dromedary series of cookbooks almost all have great recipes.

Caramel tapioca makes a great fruit spread.

A wonderful date corn bread, very reminiscent of Irish soda bread, that you will be seeing more of.

“Our motto: The Golden Rule.”

Eleven of the one hundred delights from Dromedary date, coconut, and tapioca.

Store these Westinghouse rolls in your refrigerator and bake them as needed… for up to two weeks!

You’ll be seeing more of One Hundred Delights hopefully later this year, but I promised “more to say about tapioca” in My Year in Books. The caramel tapioca from One Hundred Delights is a wonderful and versatile dish. It is the proverbial ice cream topping and floor finish rolled into one (though I wouldn’t recommend the floor finish). It’s great on its own, on top of ice cream, and as a fruit dip. Or even, if you’re the kind of person who brings filled celery to parties, as a very different celery filling.

Caramel Tapioca

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 1 hour

Ingredients

• ½ cup tapioca
• ¼ tsp salt
• 2 cups boiling water
• ¾ cup sugar
• ¼ cup boiling water
• ¼ cup sugar
• ½ cup coarsely chopped walnut

Steps

1. Add tapioca and salt to two cups boiling water in top of stovetop-safe double boiler.
2. Boil another two minutes, stirring constantly.
3. Cook in double boiler until tapioca is clear and transparent—about twenty minutes.
4. Put ¾ cup sugar in frying pan and stir constantly on low until it becomes a golden brown syrup.
5. Remove from heat and add ¼ cup boiling water.
6. Return to heat, return to a boil, and boil one minute to dissolve.
7. Add syrup to tapioca.
8. Add ¼ cup sugar and walnuts.
9. Mix well.
10. Pour into serving dish(es) and chill.

If you’re interested in cooking Italian, I can’t recommend La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy highly enough. This is probably my favorite gift received in 2024. It’s a very comprehensive tome filled with what appear to be vintage and modern recipes, each highlighting the specialties of a particular region. I made a Pear Pie from Piemonte for Easter and a Lemon Sorbet from Campania to go along with it. The sorbet was unique, to me: as a binding it used beaten egg white, making it a very creamy sorbet, almost frothy. It was the highlight of some very good Italian dishes from that book.

One of my New Year resolutions is to buy fewer cookbooks and explore the ones I already have. The Regional Cooking of Italy is at the top of the list of books I want to explore.

Jim Fobel’s Finnish Cardamom “Braids” were a great Christmas bread—both to display and to eat.

This pear pie from Italy’s Piemonte region is also flavored with hearty red wine.

Italians don’t just make the best ice cream. They also make the best sorbets.

I don’t know how much the soy flour contributed to this hot cocoa, but it was delightful.

These “Swedish” macaroons from a 1960 SDG&E cookbook helped me use up candied fruit in a very decorative manner.

Just before Veterans Day in November, I posted about 42 Tested Recipes for Stoy Soy Flour. It’s a pamphlet from World War II, back when Veterans Day was Armistice Day. It’s not so much a rave about soy flour as it is a short-term band-aid for getting through the flour and protein rationing of the war. I’m fascinated by the various whole grain cookbooks from outside of the hippy and commune movement, but this book is even from outside the whole grain movement! While I’m not sure the soy flour had anything to do with it, Stoy’s hot cocoa was a winner.

Of course, with A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book under my wing I did a lot of eating outside of my home this year. For Valentine’s Day I went to Kingfisher in San Diego; I hesitate to recommend it only because I want to continue being able to get in!

An older favorite in San Diego is The Smoking Goat. I’ve been going several years and their food is just as great as it was when I was introduced to them. While going through an old cookbook I discovered I’d used one of their bookmarks to mark a recipe. What the marked recipe was I’ve already forgotten, but the bookmark itself contained their recipe for a goat cheese cheesecake that is phenomenal.

Smoking Goat Cheese Cake

Servings: 12
Preparation Time: 2 hours
The Smoking Goat

Ingredients

• Crust
  • 7 oz graham crackers, crushed
  • 2 oz sugar
  • 2 oz butter, melted
• Filling
  • 2 lbs cream cheese
  • 8 oz goat cheese
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla

Steps

1. Crust
   • Combine the graham crackers, two ounces of sugar, and butter.
   • Press graham crackers into the bottom and partially up the sides of a 9-inch springform cake pan.
   • Bake at 350° for five minutes.
   • Remove and cool.
2. Filling
   • Whip the cream cheese and goat cheese together thoroughly.
   • Whip in eggs one at a time, scraping sides often.
   • Whip in sugar.
   • Whip in vanilla.
   • Place a pan of water on the lower rack of the oven and preheat oven to 325°.
   • Bake on middle rack for 60-75 minutes until firm.
   • Cool before removing from pan.

I used their cookie crumb crust recipe, using Lazio walnut cookies from the La Cucina cookbook, when I made a wonderful cocoanut pie from Mrs. Winslow’s. That’s crossing three countries and two centuries!

Kingfisher put on an amazing spread for Valentine’s Day. The oysters were incredible.

And of course I had to compare The Smoking Goat’s recipe to their actual cheesecake. Photo courtesy The Joy of Food.

The Heat Wave at Sovereign Thai is not a drink I would normally get. But it was a very nice change of pace for lunch.

I made these bags just before heading to San Diego, for two 1952 Mineola, Texas recipes: Oatmeal Cookies and Fudge Squares.

It’s hard to pass up a good eggplant and garlic dish, and Shan Xi Magic Kitchen in San Diego really delivered.

Michigan is known for its cherries. It is not known for its amaretto. But I had a cherry amaretto ice cream at Elsie’s in Fremont, Michigan, that I can heartily recommend if you’re ever in the area.

If you’re in Newaygo on a Wednesday night, stop in at the VFW for a great burger.

Honey Popcorn Crunch, from Mrs. Walter T. Kelley’s 1979 My Favorite Honey Recipes.

A cherry amaretto cone at Elsie’s in Fremont, Michigan. Just the thing for a hot June day!

A baked custard from my mom’s 1960 high school notebook. Now I want to try it with saffron and pistachio.

Tomato jam from 1876 is a great way to use up excess cherry tomatoes.

Michigan isn’t just known for cherries from trees. I happened to be traveling in Michigan during a glut of cherry tomatoes, so I also made Mrs. Winslow’s tomato jam while there using cherry tomatoes instead of normal ones. It was a hit. I left three jars with my dad to give out as he saw fit. He saw fit to keep them for himself, and by the time I got back for Thanksgiving there was only one left. He’s already talking about making some next year during tomato season. That’s from a man who doesn’t generally like jam!

At LibertyCon in 2023, Les Johnson went on one of his many oratorical detours, this one about the amount of antimatter produced by various foods. As he went through a list of foods that produce a lot of positrons, I started thinking, that sounds like a great recipe for fudge.

So in 2024, I brought “Les Johnson’s Antimatter Creams” to the con suite. It was a hit, at least with Les.

Needless to say, I was energized!

Which of course means, per Ron Porter, that Les is “not from this world”.

Les Johnson’s Antimatter Creams

Servings: 36
Preparation Time: 1 hour
Jerry Stratton

Ingredients

• 2 ripe bananas
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 2-½ cups sugar
• 1 cup rich milk or cream
• 1 cup chopped brazil nuts
• green food coloring

Steps

1. Mash the bananas and lemon juice.
2. Beat the milk into bananas a few tablespoons at a time.
3. Stir in sugar.
4. Bring to a boil over medium heat.
5. Cook, stirring often, until mixture reaches 234°-240° (soft ball).
6. Remove from heat, add brazil nuts and several drops of food coloring.
7. Let cool to about 195°.
8. Beat until creamy.
9. Pour into a buttered or lined 8x8 pan.
10. Score into squares while still warm.

Molly Sullivan added “this sounds like a convention I need to be going to”. Per my remarks about Kingfisher, stay away, stay far away. Until I get my ticket, and then you should definitely sign up.

On the road again… in East Texas, I stunk up my hotel room in Corsicana by making another of my favorite recipes, Garlic Eggplant and Pork. It’s in the Deplorable Gourmet^• if you want a copy of it. Remember, it’s for a good cause!

Some amazing oatmeal crisps from a ca. 1963 Arkansas Garden Club cookbook.

Les Johnson (thankfully) enjoyed the antimatter creams based on his remarks about foods that emit positrons at the previous LibertyCon.

Making real use of A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book in a hotel room bathroom.

A Godfather at the Missouri Athletic Club on the road back from the holidays.

I mailed out potato chip sandies—with sour cream and onion chips!— and coconut brittle to friends for Christmas.

Last year was a good year for food. And I hope to continue bringing good food into this blog in 2025. Keep Mimsy Were the Borogoves in your news feed if you’d like to share in the feast. I’d love to have you.