The missing indexes
- May 23, 2020: St. Mary’s Altar Society Cookbooks
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Update 2: The index is now available on Amazon•, and it looks great.
Update: I’ve added an index by book, in case you only have one or two of the books.
I’ve been toying with making an index for a few of my index-less or basically index-less cookbooks for a while. Last week I decided these church spirals would be a good choice to try it out and see how much work it is, and whether it’s useful. One of them has no index, and the other two have indexes that are in page order rather than alphabetical.
St. Mary’s Missing Index (PDF File, 1.7 MB)
I came up with a system that helps me type recipe titles, pages, chapters, and authors quickly, but while the system for putting the index together is automated, the actual typing of recipe titles and author names was me, by hand. With thanks to Mrs. Bischoff. Her typing class was probably the most useful class I took in high school. The ability to type without looking at the keyboard—or even the screen—has been extraordinarily useful as a programmer.
I’ve tried to fix any obvious typos of mine, but scanning through pages and pages of names tends to dull the senses, and spellcheck doesn’t work well on names. If you see anything I ought to fix, let me know in the feedback, or in the comments of the social media site where you saw me post this link.
There are of course also typos that were in the original. I can, for example, make simple changes to people’s names that don’t harm the ability to find the recipe on the page. If it turns out that Delores Dougan and Dolores Dougan are the same person, I can change the incorrect spelling for the correct one in the source file.
As an aside, I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to put something like this together in the day before personal computers were easy to use. I used a combination of Perl, Python, and Nisus’s macro language to put this index together. The latest of these books were published three years before the first Macintosh came out!
This project is completely unofficial and independent of the Altar Society; I did it for myself, and am making it public in case others have use for it too. The index includes only three cookbooks; I’m not aware that the St. Mary’s Altar Society in our area did any others, and in any case these are the only ones I have.
America’s Bicentennial Cookbook 1976 Commemorating 25 Years of St. Michael’s School, Brunswick 1981 Hesperia Community Kitchens Presents 1981
More cookbooks
- St. Mary’s Altar Society Cookbooks
- The missing index for the St. Mary’s Altar Society cookbooks from 1976 through 1981.
- The Southern Living Cookbook Library
- One of the best magazine-related cookbook series is also the one of the hardest to find. The Southern Living Cookbook Library appears to be under the radar of food writers online, but it either had a very low print run or few people want to get rid of their copies.
- The Art of Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking
- If you’re on a diet, you want to avoid this book. But, as the saying goes, “Neither a fat wife nor a full barn ever did any man harm!”
- In a Persian Kitchen
- This is probably the best Iranian/Persian cookbook I have; it is definitely the one I use most often.
- Popular Greek Recipes
- This cookbook contains the first rice pudding I’ve made that actually turned out as good as the stuff I buy at Trader Joe’s!
- 44 more pages with the topic cookbooks, and other related pages