In My Year in Books I wrote that quite a few of the books I read this year were cookbooks. This may have been my most interesting year yet for cookbooks, vintage and modern. Besides the cookbooks I’ve acquired, I completed or began three projects in 2023 that were each fascinating in their own way.

Most importantly, in June, I published Tempt Them with Tastier Foods, a collection of recipes from Chicago-area chef Eddie Doucette, who was also the face of IGA groceries throughout the country. This was a fun project—especially testing some of the recipes Doucette encouraged people to try. He’s mostly forgotten today, and that’s a shame. He was a pioneer television chef in Chicago in the fifties, and went on to promote the fun of cooking around the country and around the world.

Eddie Doucette’s delicious and easy crèpe suzette.

His wonderful orange nog breakfast beverage.

And his New England ham and apple pie.

I also went through a 1950 recipe calendar and began a survey of early refrigerator manual/cookbooks, each of which I’ve written about elsewhere.

It was definitely my most interesting year for travel. This is the first time I’ve been to a place that officially doesn’t speak English.¹ I went to Italy, and it should come as no surprise that the food was amazing.

I began the trip in Venice, for an Adriatic cruise. Our group stayed at the Molino Stucky Hotel on Giudecca before sailing, and even the hotel food was amazing.

The food only got better after we set sail. In Kotor, Montenegro, a cookbook author and chef opened her home to us and we had a sit-down meal of local foods and local wines. A planned drive to an archaeological dig in Santorini was canceled, so I wandered about the island on foot catching the sights. One of the sights was a restaurant in the middle of nowhere at the top of a tall hill.

They opened at noon, so at noon I walked back there and had a most amazing meal with a great view of the island at the Argo. Mojito, escargot, a gyro with fries², and an orange soufflé.

I normally avoid hotel breakfasts. Not here.

I don’t think there’s a better place to relax and enjoy the view on Santorini.

A Montenegran meal—and music—from Vlasta Mandić in Kotor.

Even better, at dinner that night we discovered that the ship’s chef had brought in some carpaccio from the island.

When the cruise was over, I used Venice as a jumping off point for Padua, Florence, and Treviso. In Padua, I ate Tartare Tonnata at Antonio Ferrari’s. In Florence I had Salsicce di Maiale alla Griglia con fagioli all’olio—a long name for a very simple dish—at Ristorante del Fagioli. At del Fagioli I ended the meal with a dolce of biscotti in sweet wine.

A great start to lunch in Padova.

A wonderful light sweet to end a meal on a hot day in Florence.

The first tiramisù?

And being in Treviso, I couldn’t resist trying tiramisù at the supposed birthplace of the dish, Le Beccherie. They also had some of the best grilled cheese sandwiches toasted panini I’ve ever tasted!

While I was in Treviso, I wandered their bookstores and saw a book called Cucina Vintage. Vintage Italian food was impossible to resist, especially because the thirties was pretty much all Cucina Futurista, a book I had on my short list of excuses to wander used Italian bookstores.

It was a wonderful trip, and back in America I continued on the international food front by running through a couple of newly-acquired volumes in the Foods of the World series: The Cooking of India, The Cooking of Spain and Portugal, and Russian Cooking. This continues to be a fascinating collection, the rare combination of great food with great travel photos.

Very flavorful cardamom chicken from India.

A very strong ponce di arancio from Italy’s 1910s.

A Portuguese almond and red pepper sauce, great for sandwiches or salads.

The Cooking of India was especially wonderful. Santha Rama Rau provides insight into the strange caste system of India that goes well beyond what the other authors in this series did for their topics. Her father was from southern India, her mother from the north. Their cultures were so different that they spoke different languages. The only reason they could be married is that they were both of the same caste and subcaste.

Even when she discusses the foods of the Christian region of India, her friends there are Christians of Brahmin descent. It was so fantastical it resembled a fantasy world ala Eddison or Tolkien as much as a cookbook. It’s a culture completely alien to someone who grew up in the United States where the main caste was who plays football and who doesn’t.

George and Helen Papashvily produced something very different in the Russian Cooking volume. George Papashvily was born in the Republic of Georgia, and often goes right up to the point of describing the horrors of socialism and then stops. Food was abundant, yet queues were ubiquitous.

Bread, or the lack of it—that is what makes history. — Helen Papashvily (Russian Cooking)

It’s called Russian Cooking, but in fact it’s Soviet Union cooking, spanning from the Baltic down through Ukraine and Armenia and into Central Asia, which made it moderately more interesting in our curse of interesting times.

My cookbook finds this year also spanned United States cuisine, from California through Texas to Vermont. I’m stilling picking up the occasional Bicentennial cookbook, and Potter County, Texas had a wonderful one. There was a great Hawaiian fudge, with crushed pineapple, and, a sesame fried chicken; the leftover seasoned flour made a great batch of hush puppies, too!

In Saint Louis, I found a community cookbook from California Winemakers, the 1965 Adventures in Wine Cookery. It’s a fascinating look at the California wine industry before the era—depicted in the movie Bottle Shock—when California wines became famous. There appears to have been a real community spanning (what would become) large and small California wineries.

The book’s “Sophisticated Strawberry Shake” will eventually make it into one of my Breakfast Beverages posts. It’s a great excuse to have wine for breakfast. Keep an eye out for it.

I spent a lot of metaphorical time in Vermont as well. I started with A Vermont Cook Book, from 1958, with a lot of recipes for apples, for maple syrup, and for cream. It’s filled with very rich dishes, but the one that really takes the cake, so to speak, is the eggs in cream over rice. The eggs are poached in cream, and the whites just soak the cream right up. The so-called “Bridge Triumph” is peanut butter-maple syrup ice cream, and those are the only three ingredients: peanut butter, maple syrup, and cream. Whip them together, freeze them in the freezer, and Bob’s your uncle, as they probably don’t say in Vermont.

A really nice bicentennial fried chicken from the Texas panhandle.

Strawberries and wine made into a milk shake. Add bacon and all major food groups accounted for!

Yes, that’s an owlbear on this boiled cider pie. I made it for our monthly game session.

While researching last year’s El Molino Mills, I discovered Ellen and Vrest Orton’s 1951 Cooking with Wholegrains, which led to Vrest Orton’s 1973 American Cider Book. The Ortons, also, hail from Vermont, and I discovered something from the cider book that I’d missed or misunderstood in A Vermont Cook Book: boiled cider.

Don’t make cooking a science. Adapt it as an art. — Vrest Orton (Cooking with Wholegrains)

Apparently, boiled cider is a Northeast thing, but it’s easy enough to make. Just boil some cider until it reaches maple syrup consistency. It appears to be used mainly for making pie, which it excels at. I suspect it’s a great replacement for maple syrup in other recipes, too.

Domestic travel took me to San Diego yet again. An Old-Fashioned at Marisi on Valentine’s Day may well have benefited from the occasion, but it was a great way to start the evening.

A friend of mine made Maui comfort stew; I made the Mexican cornbread to go along with it.

If you’re in San Diego, the U.S.S. Midway is a must-see. This is the POW-MIA table.

Newman’s Bakery in Bellville, Texas, is a great place to wait for the antique stores to open.

Domestic travel also, in the form of a short drive to Bellville Texas for a burger and antiquing, meant stopping at Newman’s Bakery for some amazing cookies and kolache.

A great year—and I’m looking forward to trying out more recipes from these cookbooks in 2024. With that, I offer you this simple recipe for happiness in the New Year: Pellegrino Artusi’s Ponce di Arancio:

Ponce di Arancio (Orange Punch)

Servings: 25
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Pellegrino Artusi
Review: Cucina Vintage (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 1-½ liter rum
• 1 liter vodka
• 1 liter water
• 1 kg sugar
• juice of three oranges
• grated zest of 1 lemon

Steps

1. Steep the lemon zest in 100 ml of the vodka for three days.
2. Bring the water and sugar to a boil and boil for 5-6 minutes.
3. Cool.
4. Strain the lemon rind infusion through a fine sieve or muslin.
5. Mix the rum, remaining 900 ml vodka, orange juice, and lemon infusion into the syrup.
6. Bottle.
7. “It is normally served in small glasses, aflame.”
8. Can also be served mixed, with sparkling water.

A beautiful day on my brother’s farm in Michigan. I’d like to say that this is where all of my cornmeal comes from.

There’s really nothing better waiting for your meal than an Italian beer and Umberto Eco.

The San Diego Restaurant Cookbook included this tasty contribution from Peohe’s in Coronado.