Mimsy Were the Borogoves

This cover, and the back cover, are a large part of why I decided to do print reproductions.

I’ve added a new section to The Padgett Sunday Supper Club explicitly listing all of my print cookbooks in one place. Mainly this is to help you avoid excess shipping charges from Lulu if you enjoy reproductions of old cookbooks. All of the vintage reproductions, and most of the custom cookbooks, are available on Lulu.com.

If I wrote the book, it will be on both Amazon and Lulu. Reproductions will only be on Lulu. While Amazon does apparently allow books without the submitter’s name on the cover, they will also delay such books with questions. Navigating that sort of bureaucratic hassle is something I try to avoid.

Further, Amazon requires a bar code on the cover and I want to keep the cover reproductions clean. Some of them are quite beautiful. My first true reproduction is The Horsford Cook Book that I featured in A Centennial Meal for the Sestercentennial. It’s a wonderful book with some wonderful recipes. It’s the reason I decided to try printing reproductions. It’s not just that the recipes are great recipes, but the front and back cover are beautiful. At six inches by nine, I’ve published it larger than the original’s 3-⅝ inches by 5-½. If you enjoy putting such things on your walls, you may want to separate the cardstock cover and use the front and back as posters.

Since publishing reproductions via Lulu seems to work well I’ll be doing it with several other books I intend to feature in the future.

After posting A Centennial Meal back in June, I’ve made one more recipe from the Horsford book. I had six egg yolks left over from some Italian pudding and decided to try out a couple of gold cakes. I made the gold cake from Horsford and another gold cake from the 1926 Rumford Recipes for Cake and Cookie Making sliding cookbook.

“I remembered something my dad told me,” Doucette said. “He had a cooking show on NBC television for years… he knew the business. He said to me, ‘Be yourself, and nobody else. Don’t be an imitator; be a creator.’ Those words always stuck with me.”—Eddie Doucette III

In February I chatted for a few hours with sportscaster Eddie Doucette about his father the chef, whose recipes I’ve collected in Tempt Them with Tastier Foods.

“I think most people don’t remember Eddie Doucette the cook,” his son said toward the end of our talk.

Most people if they remember anything with the name Doucette it would be because of my more recent time in the media. It’s a shame, that someone like him who was truly a legend in his profession, that there’s not much notoriety for him today.

That certainly seems to be the case. The 1985 Chicago Celebrity Cookbook by Ann Gerber doesn’t include any mention of Eddie Doucette. Nor does Mike Douglas’s 1969 The Mike Douglas Cookbook, even though by then Eddie had made several appearances on the show.

When I first ran across the name, it was atop a few pages of recipes a viewer had typed up from his Chicago-area television show, Eddie Doucette’s Home Cooking.

He had savoir faire, that ability to make you want to sit up and move closer to the TV, grab a paper and pencil and start writing it down.

Despite the title of the show being typed across the top of the documents, the eBay seller I bought them from thought it was from an old defunct restaurant—probably because that’s the only food-related hit that came up in an Internet search on Eddie’s name.

New England

The earliest reference to Chef Eddie Doucette that I can find is the 1940 census for Felchville-Natick (JPEG Image, 1.0 MB), Massachusetts. His occupation is listed as “Chef” at a “private school”. He has a wife Teresa, and a son Edward. The Doucettes are 26, 24, and 2 years old, respectively. He’s working year-round (52 weeks a year) and full-time (48 hours a week). He makes $2,080 annually. They’re living on 7 Atherton Street in Natick.

Except for the Date Sticks the recipes aren’t impressive (so far). But the presentation is fascinating.

I have no idea how recipe-based advertising campaigns were designed in the heyday of promotional recipe books at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the best such recipes I’ve seen is a Dromedary/Hills Brothers recipe for maple coconut candies, which I’ll be talking about later when I get to some of those cookbooks. It was one of three recipes in an ad for their Dromedary Fresh Keeping Cocoanut, a coconut-in-a-can product.¹ It’s an amazing candy, and yet I’ve never seen it in any of the contemporary Dromedary cookbooks. Did they have separate recipes for their ads? If so, how would they choose which goes in a book and which in an ad? Would they use their best recipes in the ads or in the cookbooks?

Presumably, they had their own ideas about advertising. And, like oven terminology their ideas were different than ours in profound ways. One of the most fascinating relics of the era are these two sliding recipe cards from the Rumford Company. Recipes for Cake and Cookie Making is from 1926, and Recipes for Biscuits, Muffins, Rolls, Etc. doesn’t have a copyright date but, judging from the code, is from 1929.

Three different kinds of potato chip cookies: sandies, brown sugar, and chocolate chip.

National Potato Day is Monday. You might think that I would eventually run out of unique ways to highlight potatoes on their special day. That is the retrograde thinking of someone who does not appreciate the wonders of potatoes. If you feel that way, you might as well stop reading now!

This year I have a very unique cookie from the seventies, made with a very different potato chip than they would have been made with then. Back in the seventies and even early eighties, these would have been made with everyday thin potato chips, such as Lay’s or an off-brand, or, perhaps, to use up the dregs of a Charles Chips can before the next can arrived. By the time you got to the bottom of the can, they were pre-crushed, perfect for baking!

One of the amazing potato innovations over my lifetime has been the slow takeover of the potato chip industry by kettle-style chips. They’re better all around: crunchier, greasier, and more flavorful. I don’t know specifically when they first started appearing, but I do remember the first time I had a real kettle-style chip. It was in Los Angeles in 1990, on one of the side streets connecting Hollywood and Sunset. The chips were “Krunchers! Jalapeño Chips”, cooked in peanut oil. They had just a faint flavor of peanuts to go along with the jalapeños, something that Borden, sadly, viewed as a flaw and corrected soon after.

I always wondered where these chips were going… (Ezrawolfe, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

When I tell people that I want to stop acquiring more cookbooks and start using the ones I already have, this is one of the things I mean: researching weird cooking through the ages. About a year ago last April, I was looking over the clearance rack at one of the grocery stores I frequent, probably Big Lots!, and I came across a bunch of kettle-style jalapeño potato chips for $0.62. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to try one of the ostensibly stranger cookie recipes that I see regularly in community cookbooks, potato chip cookies.

It occurred to me that if potato chip cookies are good, jalapeño potato chip cookies would be even better.

Why did I write A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book (PDF File, 10.0 MB) (also available in print on Amazon^• and on Lulu)? This is not why: a few years ago, a friend told me after a particularly great vintage dish I’d made for game night, that:

“You should write a cookbook.”

“Would you really want a cookbook filled with other people’s recipes?”

“Yes.”

This was, of course, a clamor of one, and did not result in my writing a cookbook. It only provided the working title—Other People’s Recipes—and that only after I’d come up with a focus for the book.

It may not be obvious browsing through the recipes, but this is a very focused and specific book.

Despite the fact that I enjoy finding obscure cooking pamphlets and making them public again, I have never had any desire to write my own cookbook. My focus was in scanning these old cookbooks so that they’re available for anyone to download and enjoy.

But I did have one habit that allowed me to share my favorite recipes for making while traveling. When I found a recipe that I particularly wanted to remember while visiting friends and family, I would photograph the recipe and keep the photograph on my phone and tablet. This meant not only that I’d be able to make it while traveling, but that when a particularly popular dish elicited requests for the recipe, I was able to easily share it.

It’s an interesting relic of the shortening wars, even if it’s not a great cookbook.

I considered saving this post until Christmas, but the fact is I was not very impressed by this book, which doesn’t make it much of a Christmas present. Call it Christmas in July.

“Aunt Jenny” was a semi-made-up character much like other characters of the era. She was more real than others, however, being played mostly by a single actress, Edith Spencer. That said, I’m not sure that the photograph-like drawing (or drawing-like photograph) on the inside cover is of Spencer. She has surprisingly few photos online, and none in that particular pose. Most make her look older and wiser, with glasses to emphasize her auntie-ness.

Aunt Jenny was the spokescharacter for Spry shortening. Spry shortening was a product of Lever Brothers Company, and was probably Crisco’s major competitor. While they never reached Crisco’s market share, they did take a significant percentage. You can’t get Spry anymore, although there are rumors of shortening with its name on it in some foreign lands, so the most appropriate replacement is probably Crisco. The best replacement is probably butter, or, depending on the recipe, lard. But I can’t say that with certainty because all three of the recipes I tried from the book were not particularly flavorful, despite using very flavorful ingredients.

I bought this book realizing it was a Christmas book, obviously, and that it was some sort of a Spry book, but not exactly how it was a Spry book. My copy doesn’t have the outer cover, making it look like the title is A Cookie Wonderland from Santa’s Kitchen.

Because my copy doesn’t have the outer cover, I apologize for the quality of the first two and final two pages. Not having them, I couldn’t scan them, so I found a scan online at another blog that tried out these recipes.

I should add that none of these recipes were bad. They just weren’t impressive, and I’ve come to expect that of Christmas books focused on cookies, especially vintage ones!

The second printing contains eighteen new recipes.

I’ve just made the second print of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods (PDF File, 13.7 MB) available. It includes eighteen more Eddie Doucette recipes I’ve discovered over the past year, including one extra matchbook recipe, German Potato Salad, My Way, which is well worth making—with or without Elvis singing in the background. And the 1966 Turkey ala King looks like a great way to get rid of leftover turkey from Thanksgiving.

If you already have the first printing, I’ve made a PDF of the new recipes (PDF File, 141.6 KB) that you can slip into your book. I’ve also made it available as a smaller pamphlet (PDF File, 203.7 KB). If you choose to use the pamphlet, you will need to print landscape, with short-edge binding, and then fold it over.

• Full Book as PDF (PDF File, 13.7 MB)
• Full Book as ePub (ePub ebook file, 9.7 MB)
• Purchase a print copy
• All the new recipes (PDF File, 141.6 KB)
• Pamphlet of the new recipes (PDF File, 203.7 KB)

A few of these new recipes are from old newspapers that have recently come online. The three from the The Carlisle Mercury of Carlisle, Kentucky, in 1965 and 1966, were from the Nicholas County School web site.

This is one of the two books I used most to find Centennial recipes.

Last year, I provided recipes from cookbooks that celebrated the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This year, I’m going back to 1876 for some great—and some merely good—recipes to help celebrate Independence Day. As we near the Sestercentennial in 2026, it’s interesting to look back on our shared culinary history during previous celebrations.

One of the benefits of 150-year-old cookbooks is that this year, all of the books I’m referencing except one are available for download. The only one that isn’t available, I’ve scanned in myself. So you can download the Rumford Company’s ca. 1877 Horsford Cook-Book (PDF File, 4.7 MB) now, too.

These are books that either directly celebrated the Centennial or advertised awards for taking part in other celebrations. There don’t seem to be that many. Some may have been lost, of course, but I wonder how popular Centennial celebrations were in 1876. It was barely a decade after the Civil War ended (1865) and only six years after the last Confederate state was readmitted to the Union. Ulysses S. Grant—General Grant in the war—had just finished his second term.

Clearly, not everyone was into the spirit of ’76. The Ladies of Plymouth Church in Des Moines, Iowa came out with a cookbook that they titled, literally, “76.” (with quotes). Despite its title it does not mention the Centennial at all. At the end of its introduction it quotes Jefferson:

“May you live long and prosper.”

But that turns out to be, not the founder, but an actor famous for playing Rip van Winkle. Whether Leonard Nimoy got his variation of this randomly, via Joseph Jefferson, or via Harry S. Truman, who apparently also appropriated it, is not recorded in the historical record.