Mimsy Were the Borogoves

You can tell by the phrase “more than 135 years” that this ad was placed in 1916 or thereabouts. Walter Baker updated their ad copy every year.

While general searches can provide a lot of information about a cookbook, specialized newspaper and magazine archives will also be helpful. Many old periodicals aren’t indexed in general search engines. Check your local library to see if you have access to online newspaper and magazine archives. My library provides access to newspapers.com, so that’s what I use. The Internet Archive has many old magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, McCall’s Magazine, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. These are especially helpful for looking up old advertisements, in order to see product packaging or design¹ and compare them to ads in the undated cookbook.

Advertising pamphlets regularly go through multiple printings and whether the year is included on a particular printing can seem completely random. This means that finding versions of a pamphlet on the Internet Archive can help you date that book even if your copy is not on the archive.

For example, The Quaker Oats Wholegrain Cookbook went through at least five printings. I have the fifth printing, listed as from 1979. The Internet Archive has two printings. One is labeled First Printing 1978 and the other has no printing number or year at all. That space on the back cover is blank. All three of the printings appear to be exactly the same other than that back cover line (or lack thereof).²

Why is there an undated version? Is the undated version at some point after the fifth printing when they decided they were never going to change it so why bother? Is it a zeroth printing, and the first printing is really a second printing? Or did they produce a printing after the first where they removed that line, and then added it back later?

The answer, of course, is “who knows?” But knowing that the first and fifth printings came out in 1978 and 1979 also means that the second through fourth printings came out in that range.

I also rewatched Jacques Pépin’s wonderful Heart & Soul cooking show.

“I can’t advise you to start drinking heavily,” said Johnny Depp as John Belushi in Fear and Loathing on Saturday Night, “but it’s always worked for me.”

This year I started experimenting with old-school drinks from three sources. From matchbook covers I discovered the very nice Gin Rickey: ice, gin, lime juice, and soda water. At New Braunfels in October I picked up The ABC of Cocktails, a 1957 collection of similarly-abbreviated drink recipes, and discovered the Bee’s Knees: honey, lemon juice, gin, and ice. Both are marvelous, refreshing drinks. I recommend adding rosemary, but it’s wonderful either way.

From Barimetro, the sliding drink recipe card of the Hotel Las Brisas in Acapulco, I discovered the Bourbon and Vermouth Manhattan, flavored with bitters and a red cherry. As well as a very dry Martini: 1-½ ounces of gin with 1/16 ounce of dry Vermouth. Quite good with a good gin, such as The Pianist.

And therein lies a story. I’ve never been a fan of gin, but it is useful to keep on hand for certain drinks. Especially now that I’ve discovered the above three cocktails. Last year or the year before I discovered The Pianist, and it’s the first gin I’ve really liked. So, when I ran out at the end of the year—due mainly to discovering these three wonderful gin cocktails—I went to get more… and discovered it’s been discontinued.

Being as I am not a gin connoisseur I just bought the next interesting one on the shelf, Shiner gin. It’s not a bad gin and like The Pianist it’s from Texas. But it highlighted that I really do prefer The Pianist to random gins off the shelf. So I went back online and started searching area liquor store web sites to see if anyone still had it in stock.

Also available on Amazon^• and Lulu.

I hope you have great plans for this summer! This New Year marks a great milestone in American history: Independence Day 2026 will mark the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In celebration, for the next eight months, through the summer picnic and reunion season, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club will feature even more recipes from our 1976 and 1876 celebrations, and from 1796.

I have collected most of the recipes from my last three Independence Day posts into a small cookbook, The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery (PDF File, 7.0 MB). The book also includes a handful of recipes I’ve tested since those posts, and from the same sources. It collects bicentennial, centennial, and vicennial recipes, the latter from America’s first native cookbook, the 1796 American Cookery. That’s three centuries of American independence: the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Also available in print.

Tomorrow is Christmas, and have I got a gift for you! I was driving across Missouri when I found this tiny little 1916 pamphlet/book in a library sale’s discount box. And by “discount”, I mean anything in the box was ten cents.

The full title is Table and Kitchen: A Practical Cook Book (PDF File, 15.3 MB). It’s an advertisement for the Royal Baking Powder Company’s “Dr. Price’s Cream Baking Powder”. Dr. Price’s was a single-action baking powder, that is, it did not contain alum. It used only cream of tartar as the acid.

While the cover is wonderful my initial thought was to leave it. I’m not a huge fan of how recipes were written in that era. I’ve seen other baking powder cookbooks, and have not been impressed by them. Further, there was practically no cell service in the area, so I couldn’t look up whether the book had been scanned online or not yet. But at ten cents I decided I couldn’t leave it: its next stop would certainly have been the recycling bin out back.

When I got to the hotel that night, I discovered that (a) it was not yet available anywhere, which meant I would at least get a good blog post out of it, and (b) there were a lot of very interesting, if sparsely-described, recipes inside.

One particular aspect of these old recipes that annoys me is a tendency to use what I call reverse Polish notation, or, as my gamer friends would say, Hastur he who must not be named oh shit. I wrote about the same writing “technique” in A Vicennial Meal for the Sestercentennial and Table and Kitchen’s eggnog recipe is a good example of the form:

Egg Nog. —Six eggs well beaten (white and yolks separately), one quart milk, one-half cup sugar, one cup brandy, nutmeg. Stir yolks into milk, with the sugar first beaten with yolks. Add brandy, then whites of eggs. Whip well.

“Christopher Ludwick was a true hero of the American Revolution. A German immigrant, he made his fortune in part by baking gingerbread in Philadelphia, and then used his baking knowledge, patriotic spirit, and all of his fortune to aid the American cause.”

Contributions to the 2026 Semiquincentennial are beginning to appear. Max Miller here accompanies a 1773 gingerbread with a short history of the amazingly patriotic baker Christopher Ludwick. He served under Washington both as a military baker and as a spy.

This Australian cookbook is deceptively old-fashioned.

Community cookbooks are notorious for not including any indication of when they were printed. I’ve just published a list of cookbooks on the Padgett Sunday Supper Club where I’ve had to guess at the year. This is both to help others who might have the same cookbook and wonder when it was made, and in the hope that someone may remember when the book was published either because they’re in it or an ancestor was in it—or they were part of the organization that published it. If you’re among the latter, please write!

This list should automatically update. Whenever I’ve had to guess what year a book was published, that book should automatically show up in the list.

Many people attempt to use graphic design clues as a guide to a cookbook’s date. I see Glen Powell do this all the time, for example, and while I understand that his extensive experience gives him a better sense than I about the relationship between era and design, I never trust that kind of estimate. Changes in style can take decades to completely spread across North America and the United Kingdom. There were some people still typing their cookbooks well into the seventies and the eighties, and others producing what appear to be quality, modern finished products as early as the thirties.

I have an Australian community cookbook, for example, that looks to me like it was from the fifties, maybe early sixties, and possibly even earlier. The graphic style, the writing style, even the measurements and oven “temperatures”, all scream mid-twentieth century. But it has advertisements from businesses that weren’t in business at their advertised location until 1969. From the advertisements, I’m dating that book between 1969 and 1976.

Reprints can also cause problems with dating. I have a Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook from Culinary Arts Press that lists itself as being from 1936; I am nearly certain it’s a facsimile reprint, but it might not be. Culinary Arts Press is one of those organizations that was often ahead of its time in graphic design—and then kept using a similar design aesthetic well into the fifties. Of course, if it is a reprint, I have no idea when it was reprinted. I can only hope that it’s a facsimile reprint so that the date of 1936 at least can be reasonably applied to the recipes.

In this business, you never really know.

The wheat kernel explained by Vernice Rosenvall in Wheat for Man, 1975.

I was wandering through an antique store in Corning, Arkansas, when I ran across this marvelous manual for what I think is the original Rival Crock•Pot. The pamphlet is sadly not dated, not even with the year-like code that later Crock•Pot manuals would sport on the back cover. However, Rival’s version of the slow cooker was introduced in 1971.

What struck me about this particular printing of the pamphlet, however, is that it contained instructions for a “special Bread 'n Cake Bake pan”.

Our Bread ‘n Cake Bake pan makes a miniature oven of your Crock-Pot! It’s custom designed for marvelous, easy baking of cakes, breads, casseroles or baked potatoes… right in the Crock-Pot… Homemade breads give off that oldtime aroma and have that hearty taste. If you like yeast breads, the “batter” way is the better way. There’s no need to knead… and little waiting for dough to rise.

I of course immediately went to my usual vintage haunts looking for the “Bread ’n Cake Bake” and found one in great shape. It may have been easier nowadays than finding a two-pound coffee can suitable for baking. If you do want to go the full vintage route and use a coffee-style can, you might be able to use a not-quite-one-pound Cafe du Monde can, or a not-quite-two pound beans or tomatoes can.

To top it all off, the very first recipe for homemade bread in the Bread ’n Cake Bake section of this manual was for a graham flour bread. Grandma’s “Dark” Bread incorporates “½ cup whole wheat or graham flour” into the dough. I’ve been experimenting with graham flour this year, so it seemed the perfect place to start.

It was so good, I haven’t made any of the other breads in this section yet.

Graham flour is not readily available today. Most recipes—even this one—suggest using either graham flour or whole wheat flour. However, whole wheat flour is not quite the same thing. Graham flour is literally the whole flour. Whole wheat flour is more of the flour than white flour, but not the whole flour.

“He gave his eyes… for cornbread.”

This is a very easy cornbread and a very easy use for pumpkin parts. There is no boiling or baking the pumpkin to prep it before using it. Just grate it like carrots. This recipe is in fact a slight modification of a carrot cornbread recipe from the El Molino Best cookbook. El Molino is itself a great cookbook with a great California-style cornbread.

I included the El Molino cornbread in my own Traveling Man’s Cookery. It’s a relatively sweet cornbread because, while it contains very little added sugar, carrots themselves contain quite a bit of sugar. It’s why some people choose to make carrot pie instead of pumpkin pie: it means less processed sugar. I’m not in that camp, but I do like the sweetness that carrots add to cornbread.

Pumpkins are not nearly as sweet as carrots, so this Halloween version is not nearly as sweet a cornbread. I switched out the brown sugar for molasses—preferably, sorghum molasses—to give what sweetness there is in the bread a hint of autumn.

Another syrup that ought to be great with pumpkin and cornmeal is maple syrup. So if you don’t have a source for sorghum molasses, or just don’t like it, consider trying maple. As a last resort, brown sugar will be fine, too. Brown sugar has molasses in it. Depending on the manufacturer, brown sugar is either sugar before the molasses has been (completely) removed, or white sugar with molasses added back in.

Serendipitously the color of pumpkin is much like the color of carrots. The orange in each case combines very pleasingly with the yellow of cornmeal. But given that foods as different as carrots and pumpkin taste great in this recipe, you could probably use any squash or root vegetable that you enjoy.

Zucchini would be the canonical choice in the area I grew up. I suspect it would produce a more green cornbread. You might even play that up by adding some herbs. Whatever herbs you enjoy with zucchini ought to be great in zucchini cornbread.