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.

Drinking Heavily, Gin Edition

Add rosemary to the Bee’s Knees and it is the perfect drink.

A Gin Rickey—gin, lime, and soda water—is a wonderfully refreshing gin drink.

So of course I did a face-off between these two Texas gins.

I probably have enough gin now to last the rest of my life.

As anyone who has tried to use store web sites will know, their public-facing inventory is often apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate. But, since several stores in the area showed an availability I marked a few of them down and spent a solid morning going from liquor store to liquor store, thinking that one of them would probably have what their web site said.

Until the penultimate store, the best response was, we don’t have it. The worst, our inventory says we have negative amounts. I don’t understand how any designer or programmer could consider it a good idea to allow negative inventory. At the second-to-last store on the list, I met a very helpful and friendly employee, who volunteered to search the company-wide in-house inventory system which is, apparently, different from the store-wide public-facing inventory system.

Like negative inventory, that sounds like a recipe for failure, and given my experience a very successful recipe it was. The nearest store in their chain with any in stock was in Houston. I had no desire to drive all the way to Houston even for this, so I decided to give up and call it a day. And live with a lesser but still decent gin.

But just before leaving the parking lot of that penultimate liquor store, I checked the web site of the last store on my list, even though it was in the same chain. I noticed something different about its entry for this gin. Where most just gave you the option of buying it, this store’s entry gave you the option of buying a case of it.

So I went; and they had exactly six bottles—a case—and I bought them all. At the rate I drink gin this may be the last gin purchase I ever make. Because it was discontinued it was also the cheapest gin I’ve ever bought.

Bee’s Knees

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 5 minutes
Review: The ABC of Cocktails (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 2 oz gin
• 1 oz lemon juice
• ½ oz honey
• ¼ tsp rosemary
• ice

Steps

1. Mix gin with rosemary.
2. Warm the honey for ten seconds in the microwave.
3. Mix lemon juice in, potentially warming for another five seconds.
4. Add to gin.
5. Shake with ice.
6. Strain into a cocktail glass.
7. Add ice cube.

On a side note, it’s amazing how different each liquor store was, even within the same chain. I can understand why people have deeply-held favorites.

Also, why it’s impossible to find a particular liquor when going into a new store.

I and my addictive personality continued our research into early home refrigerator cookbooks this year. In 2025 I found a copy of the General Electric Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus cookbook. It’s the manual for the very first true home refrigerator/freezer, the 1927 General Electric “Monitor Top”. It was called the Monitor Top by consumers, because in 1927 people still remembered what that Civil War era ironclad looked like, and recognized the similarity.

The USS Monitor had been lost at sea in 1862, 65 years before the refrigerator debuted. But that’s still a smaller interval than that between the refrigerator’s debut and today. Next year is the first modern home refrigerator’s centennial! There are fewer people today who remember what life was like without refrigerators than there were in 1927 who remembered the USS Monitor!

The recipe portion of this manual was almost completely desserts and ice creams, and this was not a problem at all.

Researching Food History

An ad for the first modern home refrigerator/freezer. For reasons obvious now only to historians, it gained the nickname “Monitor Top”.

Notice the sign up top. This 1942 refrigerator at the Pima Air and Space Museum is still working and in use.

Homemade noodle soup with broth in the Depression.

A very refreshing orange and lemon drink from a 1933 Frigidaire manual. It minimizes the amount of fresh fruit by adding sugar.

Eddie Doucette and Everett Boss, two media chefs, compare notes in 1963.

While traveling in Texas I was also gifted a 1933 Frigidaire manual. It’s fascinating how very different it was from their 1928 version. That’s not surprising, because 1928 was just before the Great Depression and 1933 was well into it.

But an even greater influence on the newer book is that refrigerator manufacturers had a better idea of what people were using refrigerators for. That meant more entrées in place of all those wonderful desserts that filled the 1927 and 1928 books. The Cheese Soufflé was especially wonderful, very rich and creamy. But so was the likely Depression-era Noodle Soup, which was literally just homemade noodles in broth.

This year I started scanning these old refrigerator cookbooks, making them available for download and, in some cases, for purchase as reprints.

Refrigerator Cookbook Downloads

The 1927 General Electric manual—the first manual for the first modern home refrigerator/freezer!

This elegant logo adorned the cover of Frigidaire’s 1928 refrigerator manual.

Cream cheese ginger filling from a 1937 Westinghouse manual, on Grandma’s Dark Bread from a ca. 1972 Crock•Pot manual.

Norge used this very utilitarian cover for their 1947 refrigerator manual.

This 1927 Lemon Cream Sherbet is featured in my own Ice Cream Cookery.

These are all wonderful books. While I’ve published some of them as reprints on Lulu.com they are all available as free downloads. If you’re interested, follow the links. I also published Table and Kitchen, a 1916 baking powder cookbook, and my mother’s ca. 1960 high school home economics notebook. And there is more to come!

For Valentine’s Day I traveled to San Diego. The drive out is almost as much fun as San Diego itself. Kolaches, apple fritters, and then B’s Family Dining in Fort Stockton all highlight the first day of the trip.

San Diego Trip Traditionals

B’s Family Dining in Fort Stockton always has wonderful comfort food waiting.

Venchi’s wall of chocolate in San Diego is a pilgrimage worth making.

Always my first stop on the drive to San Diego!

The opposite of Italian chocolate; according to the Pima Air & Space Museum M&M’s were “a staple on every shuttle mission”. These were a special commemoration for the July 8, 2011 final launch.

It is always a delight to find something from Oma’s Choice, of Schulenberg, Texas, at a gas station during a long drive.

But San Diego also brought some incredible new food. Birrio tacos, basil tea, and a perfect margarita over Valentine’s. A second visit to Marugame Udon did not disappoint. And for Valentine’s Day itself, we ate at Animae. That food will speak for itself.

Valentine’s Day in San Diego

Tartare with crispy light crackers at Animae on Valentine’s Day.

And for dessert, Animae’s wonderful chocolate cream.

A beautiful sweet (basil) tea at Minh Ky.

Beautifully crunchy, fresh and greasy, birria tacos from Ed Fernandez.

Lost Cause Meadery in San Diego. Six different kinds of mead! All for me!

San Diego this year also included a wonderful dinner at a couple of more comfort-food-style places. Havana Grill on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard is a place I’ve been wanting to go for a while. It did not disappoint. And good old Ichi-ban on University, one of the few remaining holdouts from Old Hillcrest, remains a relaxing haven in the midst of an anxious neighborhood.

San Diego in the Summer and Fall

A Morel and English Pea Congee at Kingfisher in the merry month of May. Not just mushrooms. Morel mushrooms.

Polpo Croccante at Cesarina. It’s rare that I enjoy octopus, but Cesarina never fails to amaze.

Following the octopus, an amazing Gnocchi with Tartufona and Black Truffle.

The garlic potatoes at Havana Grill are alone enough to justify the trip.

Ichi-Ban, on University Boulevard in Hillcrest, is a wonderfully relaxing way to spend a September evening.

We also continue to enjoy Kingfisher and Cesarina. Cesarina’s octopus compared well with the octopus in Lisbon. Sadly, I did not manage to get a photo of the Lisbon octopus before eating it. Take my word for it—both were great.

Back in Texas, a friend sent me some wild game, including quail. This inspired me to take a look at a cookbook I’ve had for over two decades: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Cross Creek Cookery, a companion to her Cross Creek memoir. It is filled with tempting recipes from backwoods Florida, one of which is for fried quail. I had the pan-fried quail on its own, and with pan gravy… and then I tried deep-frying it. All three were good, but I have to say, it deep-fried amazingly well.

The end of the RPG zine Alarums and Excursions inspired me to try some of proprietor Lee Gold’s family recipes, including an amazingly quick potato soup. I’ll have more about that later this year, but besides those potatoes you’ll see her father’s cream sherbet accompanying at least one other dish in these photos.

Homemade in Texas

Tattered potato soup from Lee Gold’s family recipe collection. I’ve eaten several variations on this soup last year and already this year.

My most successful year for peppers, and a pretty good basil crop as always.

Dominique Ansel’s Peppermint Buttercrunch from the 2014 Food & Wine annual was my Easter tradition this year.

A friend sent some wild game from a Texas ranch. This is deep-fried quail using the guidelines in Cross Creek Cookery.

For the wild boar sausage I used the Ground Beef Stew in The Complete Potato Cookbook.

I collected my various favorite ice cream recipes into an Ice Cream Cookery, and published it back in April. But my main experimentation this year was prepping for the Semiquincentennial and preparing for publication my Sestercentennial Cookery. I made it live a couple of weeks ago, at the start of this 250^th year of independence.

Historical American food for the Semiquincentennial

I made Amelia Simmons’s Cranberry Tart, from her 1796 American Cookery, for Independence Day. It is also featured in my own Sestercentennial Cookery.

A chicken-tapioca omelet, from a World War I-era substitution cookbook. As the book says, “it seems a very slight sacrifice…”

My first offering this year: a collection of Bicentennial, Centennial, and Vicennial recipes to celebrate the Semiquincentennial in 2026.

Cakes? Cookies? This isn’t the last you’ll see of this speckled chocolate meringues from the 1876 Centennial Cook Book!

A different presentation for the classic beans and rice, from the Thomas Jefferson family cookbook.

While traveling over Thanksgiving, I ran across a copy of Marie Kimball’s collection of Thomas Jefferson’s recipes. His family’s pumpkin soup is very likely to feature in a future Halloween post. It’s amazing how American those recipes were: pumpkin soup, beans and rice, gumbo soup! Although some of them don’t date back completely to Jefferson himself, they’re all part of the recipes of his children and grandchildren.

But that’s getting ahead of myself. In April, I took a trip to Barcelona and parts North. The food, of course, was amazing. And not just the octopus.

I also had great fun browsing Barcelona’s bookstores, filled with books in languages I can’t read… and one language I can barely read. Most of the bookstores had an Italian language section. In one of the many Llibreria Lowcost bookstores throughout Barcelona I ran across a thin wonder from the very end of the golden age of blogging.

Barcelona and From Barcelona

March found me enjoying a smoky old-fashioned and a bowl of popcorn on a rooftop overlooking Barcelona.

Tintin discovers that the moon is made of chocolate, at the Museu de la Xocolata in Barcelona.

A marvelous place to dine hidden in the caves of the Cordoníu winery in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia near Barcelona.

I've wanted to try Açordas since reading about it in Peter Feibleman’s The Cooking of Spain and Portugal, and Matosinhos provided the opportunity.

A Torta Brownie from C’è tort@ per te with cherry ice cream from Frigidaire Recipes.

C’è tort@ per te is a collection of nostalgic cakes and cake-like desserts from prominent Italian food bloggers, collected by the Italian margarine company Vallé. It’s the perfect cookbook for someone learning Italian. Each recipe is accompanied by a short nostalgia trip written by the blogger in question. Some of them are absolutely wonderful. From Aurelía Bartoletti’s introduction to her soft cake with strawberries, I found this gem:

My travels around Texas also yielded some wonderful food. The food trucks at the North Texas RPG Convention are always wonderful. There was some serious barbecue on hand this year. But on the trip up I stopped at an antique store and found an old Imperial Sugar Company cookbook, Teena in the Kitchen. This is, like most of that Sugarland, Texas, company’s old books, filled with marvelous ideas. From Apricot bread to Banana fluff it made for several wonderful breakfasts last year.

Travels in Texas

Food truck brisket from Not Just Q at the North Texas RPG Convention.

Devil’s Food Fudge, from the Imperial Sugar Company’s Teena in the Kitchen.

Rhubarb Crisp from a Lakota, North Dakota 1964 cookbook, with sherbet from Lee Gold’s family recipes.

Deep fried ribs and onion rings from Yo! Catfish in Corsicana, Texas.

Peach and Nut Dainty, from the California Peach Growers 1920 cookbook, Delicious Recipes.

At the Temple library sale in August I found a wonderful 1964 cookbook of the American Lutheran Church Women of Lakota, North Dakota. All Loved and Cherished Wonders is filled with wonderful old recipes. Peppersnaps that contain actual black pepper! I need to do a post one of these days on black pepper baked goods.

The Canadian Goodies from Cherished Wonders hearken back to the golden age of dates in the twenties.

And at New Braunfels a month later, I found an old 1920 California peach company’s cookbook. California Peach Growers apparently made dehydrated peaches that, they claimed, could be reconstituted and used for anything you would use fresh peaches for. It even included recipes for preserves, which at the time were mainly used for dealing with an oversupply of peaches.

Each of the recipes I tried, I used fresh peaches for, and no changes were necessary. So maybe they were right!

Eggs a la Martin

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Review: Good Things to Eat (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 1 cup milk or cream
• 1 tsp butter
• 4 tbsp grated cheese
• 4 eggs

Steps

1. Cook milk, butter, and cheese together until melted.
2. Pour into a hot buttered pan.
3. Break eggs over top.
4. Bake at 350° for about fifteen minutes, until the eggs set.

Traveling to visit friends at a farmhouse barbecue, one of them came up to me and offered an old rebound and undated cookbook marked, by hand, Lenox, Iowa. By researching the names of contributors and advertisers I’ve dated it pretty closely to 1931. This particular copy was owned by a Mrs. Claude Dixon.

Mrs. Dixon wasn’t a contributor to the cookbook. She wasn’t a member of the Methodist church that appears to have published it. But in a close-knit community like Lenox in 1931 that didn’t matter. She was a violinist, a pianist, and a vocalist. She taught all of those privately and in groups. She was director of the Presbyterian choir, treasurer of the American Legion auxiliary, a Republican delegate to the Iowa State Convention in 1938, and a school board member.

She was a writer for both music and educational magazines and for local newspapers. If you lived in Lenox in the seventies, you might have studied music using a scholarship that her husband established in her name after she died.

I’ll be writing more about her later, though it may not be this year.

Traveling to Michigan over the holidays, I ran across a Benson, Arizona community cookbook from the seventies. The only connection I have with Benson is that I used to love stopping at Reb’s Cafe while driving to San Diego. Sadly, Reb’s is long gone. But it did leave me with enough pleasant memories of Benson that I decided to buy that cookbook. It has provided me with some nice, and occasionally unique, date candies, spoon bread, rice casserole, and pumpkin cookies. The latter were the last of the recipes I made from my Halloween pumpkin parts. You’ll likely see it in an October post in 2027 or so.

Traveling back from Michigan I stopped at a Missouri antique shop and found an old Quaker Oats pamphlet and the manual for the first Crock•Pot that also included an appendix for a bread insert! The insert turned out not to be hard to find, and it worked marvelously making a Graham flour “dark” bread with sorghum molasses.

Travels in Michigan

The rice casserole is from Benson, Arizona; the salsa is from Kawkawlin, Michigan.

This Add-a-Crunch is basically a very sweet oatmeal. So, perfect for Russian Ice Cream!

A Crock•Pot sandwich: Grandma’s Dark Bread made with the baking insert, and All-Meat Spread.

Overnight muesli, with dates and milk.

Golden Oatmeal with Herbs is a wonderful side dish that never took off.

The Quaker Oats book is a wonderful relic from the seventies, specifically highlighting the whole grain aspect of oatmeal. There were recipes for breakfast, recipes for dinner, and recipes for dessert.

I traveled to two libraries this year for food-related research. I went to Chicago for info on Chicago Chef Eddie Doucette, and to St. Louis for info on their hometown writer, Irma S. Rombauer.

Researching food at the Chicago and St. Louis libraries

A Monte Cristo and soup on a cold night at the Crow’s Nest in St. Louis.

The Ethiopian Plate at Demera in Chicago is a sight to behold and a taste to be shared.

The 1936 edition of The Joy of Cooking in the Chicago Public Library Reading Room.

Sunset from the Hancock Tower in September.

I did not eat at the Berghoff Restaurant in Chicago, but their sign is amazing.

While the original Joy of Cooking from 1932 is available in an only moderately hard to find reprint—I used interlibrary loan to check it out from my local library—the first traditionally-published edition from 1936 is much harder to find. The St. Louis library has it, and it’s not available for checkout. I had to use their reading room to read it. That research will play into a future post that has nothing to do, specifically, with the Joy of Cooking, and a lot to do with that Sestercentennial chocolate meringue up top.

As they would have said before an Eddie Doucette commercial break, Stay tuned for more great food!

Nut Dressing for Potato Salad

Servings: 6
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Irma S. Rombauer
The Joy of Cooking (1943) (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp finely-ground pecans
• 2 tbsp finely-ground blanched almonds
• ¼ cup lemon juice
• ¼ cup olive oil
• ¾ tsp salt
• ¾ tsp paprika

Steps

1. Beat lemon juice into nuts.
2. Beat olive oil in very slowly.
3. Season with salt and paprika.