A dessert recipe from“150 New Ways to Serve Ice Cream”
published by Sealtest System Laboratories Inc in 1936
One of the most decorative ice cream desserts is the parfait. Borrowed from the French, it truly lives up to its meaning, which is “perfection.” The recipes in this section consist of alternate layers of ice cream, crushed fruits, whipped cream, and rich, colorful syrups.
:: THE DEDICATION ::
To every other little bride
Who has a ”Bob to please,
And says she’s tried and tried and tried
To cook with skill and ease.
And cant! – we offer here as guide
Bettina’s Recipes!
To her whose ”Bob’ is prone to wear
A sad and hungry look
Because the maid he thought so fair
Is – well – she just can’t cook!
To her we say: do not despair;
Just try Bettina’s Book
This is the first edition from 1917 and it offers a delightful look at homemaking before the advent of sophisticated appliances and fast food as well as the modern reality of women’s work outside the home. Unintentionally funny and historically revealing, the whimsically illustrated narrative abounds in simple and surprisingly relevant recipes.
You can download the book in pdf format
by clicking the icon below
An article written by Annalisa Quinn posted at npr.org
“Blow not your broth at Table,” George Washington wrote in an early school exercise on civility. And “bedew no mans face with your Spittle.” Wise man.
Other etiquette rules hold up less well over time (“to Pull off the Hat when there is no need is Affectation.”) More recently, Emily Post warned young ladies against unchaperoned boating with young men, lest a sudden fog delay them and her reputation be ruined (sudden fog, as you perhaps know, is prime cover for you-know-what).
Warnings about hat-doffing and female chastity, thankfully, are gone from the modern etiquette book. Nonetheless, the tone of these books is often faux-antiquated, imitating the contractionless, precious, very white English of Ms. Post and her gloved ilk. It is grand-damey and transatlantic, with an implicit quelle horreur! lurking at the end of every “don’t.” (Or rather, “do not.”) Authors of such books do not hate, they loathe. People are not rude, but barbarous. Nothing is good unless it is terribly good. There is a good deal of vague nostalgia for more genteel times, as if our society growing steadily more just and equal does not quite make up for the disappearance of handkerchiefs and place settings.
And yet I love them. There’s something oddly charming about the idea that you could communicate your care and respect for other people through deft use of flatware or timely deployment of a handkerchief. That these rules will somehow help you bypass all the hard work of living a life with other people and learning how to treat them well in the course of it. Table manners are tiny, above-ground traces of a larger, submerged system of ethics; they are tools for expressing what is important to us as a culture.
Tower’s suggestions for those short on cash include replacing table centerpieces with goldfish in a vase. This implies, if not a direct hostility to the poor, at least that Tower did not do the exercise of imagining eating dinner eye-to-eye with a live fish.
Annalisa Quinn
At best, etiquette is ethics in a minor key. At worst, etiquette is a way to tell everyone you’re rich without having to say it aloud.
Jeremiah Tower’s Table Manners is a mix of both. It leans fussy: “The large soup spoons of yesteryear are now considered pretentious.” And prim: He cites “the new me-centered culture” as if people haven’t been making that complaint since Plato. But parts of it seem animated by a real belief that empathy can be taught. “The more you think about those around you and the less you think about yourself,” he writes, “the more likely you are to behave well.” Yet, there’s often an implicit utilitarianism in this guide — behave well and you will be invited to dinner.
Towers is a well-known chef, which makes his restaurant precepts specific and insightful (his advice for treating servers well is valuable, for instance) — but he’s less thoughtful about other aspects of etiquette. He doesn’t have the same open hostility towards the poor that many authors of such books have (Emily Post at one point suggested you pretend not to see beggars on the street, for example). But there is a kind of effective hostility through incomprehension. Tower’s suggestions for those short on cash include replacing table centerpieces with goldfish in a vase. This implies, if not a direct hostility to the poor, at least that Tower did not do the exercise of imagining eating dinner eye-to-eye with a live fish — or the effort of procuring one and caring for it afterwards.
“Even if fragrant old roses are your pride and joy from the garden,” he writes at one point, “you don’t want them competing with your $125 bottles of pinot noir.” People who actually drink $125 bottles of pinot noir just call it “pinot noir,” so it’s not clear why Towers would make himself sound unnecessarily snooty with the price tag, but it’s one of the several details that makes Table Manners not particularly inclusive.
So, how useful is this book? It depends. Do you really need someone to tell you not to shout “I LOATHE GARLIC” (here we go again with “loathe”) when someone serves it to you? Of course not — or, if you do, you are not likely to be reading an etiquette guide.
But perhaps it is human nature that I would find all the rules I already heed obvious and all the ones I don’t silly. Otherwise I would have to face the fact that my soup spoons are unacceptably, gauchely, preposterously, strivingly large and deal with the accompanying shame.
“No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use,” says our guiding light, Emily Post. I assume the same holds for spoons. But care for each other, expressed indirectly through small acts? That’s etiquette.
In order not to embarrass the article author completely I hasten to mention that the book cover at the top was the only illustration in her original post – Ted 😉
A lot of the recipes found on blogs featuring historic recipes are found in these free books found on the net. The books on Google Books are not downloadable and has to be read on Google’s pages, but the books on archive.org can be downloaded in pdf and other formats.
Google Books – Library of Congress
The one on Library of Congress can be
downloaded as jpg’s
When I was a kid I was a great fan of Alexandre Dumas and when I was twelve my parents bought me a 24 volume edition of “The Three Musketeers” for Christmas. I did nothing but read for a fortnight. I had hardly time for school or homework and when I had read all 24 books I went to the library and borrowed the rest of his books I hadn’t already read.
Five years later I read them all again in English and I still got all the Norwegian and the English versions on my book shelves.
My love of food and cooking was even then as great as my love of reading and I knew Dumas had written a cook book, but it was not in print back then. I never forgot his novels but his cook book had slipped my mind until I read about it on a blog recently.
A cook book by Dumas may seen an improbability. Yet Alexandre Dumas was an expert cook – his love of food was said to be equalled only by his love of women – and his “Great Dictionary of Cuisine,” written “to be read by worldly people and used by professionals” and published posthumously in 1873, is a masterpiece in its own right.
This abridged version of the “Dictionary” is designed to be both useful and entertaining. There are hundreds of recipes for sauces, soups, meat, fish, eggs, poultry and game well within the scope of an experienced and imaginative cook.
For his “dinner” entry he wrote:
Dinner. A major daily activity, which can be accomplished in worthy fashion only by intelligent people. It is not enough to eat. To dine, there must be diversified, calm conversation. It should sparkle with rubies of the wine between courses, be deliciously suave with the sweetness of dessert, and acquire true profundity with the coffee.
Where ever you are Alexandre, I hope there are delicious food,
great wine and beautiful women in abundance there – Ted 😉
You can buy an abridged version of the book at amazon.com here
A delicious Norwegian recipe found in “Cappelens Kokebok”
(Cappelen’s Kook Book) published in 1991
There are many ways to serve pancakes.
This is one of the nicest ones – Ted
– 
An entertaining recipe found on sparkrecipes.com
Anyone who has read Lord Of The Rings remember Lembas, the waybread so potent that only a mouthful was enough to feed a grown man. Several people have tried to create recipes for lembas, here is one of them.
Recipe in English – 
Oppskrift på norskRecipe posted at:
What do ABBA, The Franklin Mint, Gilligan’s Island, Spam, Wayne Newton, White Castle hamburgers, and the song “You Light Up My Life” have in common? Surprisingly, not one but two things. The first. and most obvious, is the fact that discussing them in public inevitably triggers condescending smiles and derisive giggles. The second is that, in spite of those smiles and giggles, all are (or were) wildly popular.
Of course, these diverse phenomena (and hundreds of others) aren’t big with everyone. If they were, they wouldn’t merit mention in a book called The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures. What sorts of foods/people/cultural icons are worthy of mention in these pages? Put simply, anything that causes shame – things people relish in private, but in most cases wouldn’t be caught dead eating. visiting, viewing, listening to, touching, or rubbing all over their bodies in public.
You can read the whole book on Google books HERE or buy it HERE
“Cooking for Chaps” by Gustav Temple and Clare Gabbett-Mulhallen is published by Kyle Books and available for £12.99 in hardback.
FROM THE BOOK
Why eat like a man when you can cook like a chap?
Gustav Temple and Clare Gabbett-Mulhallen have written a book of stylish, nostalgic, no-nonsense recipes for the man about town. Get ready to cook like a chap
How can a chap, most of whose time is spent twirling his moustachios and selecting which of his silver-topped Malacca canes to take to the opera, find any time to do any cooking? You could be forgiven for asking this question, but the truth is that cooking is, in fact, a most chappish pursuit.
One might have expected a chap’s dining habits to be limited to lunch at his club or being cooked lavish suppers at home by a fleet of servants. But there is more to him than that: for a chap likes to do everything properly. Whether this means wearing the correct type of Marcella bow tie with evening dress or making a perfectly pitched witty remark to a Madagascan prince, a chap will always adhere to the rule book in his mind, in which are listed all the appropriate colours, fabrics, positions and utterances that he considers it proper to adopt for each given circumstance.
And when it comes to cookery, he is equally precise. A chap is far more likely to be able to rustle up a single obscure dish such as Beef Wellington than he is to be seen distressing a bowl of the latest faddish salad vegetable with yet another new type of olive oil.
A chap’s approach to cooking is as traditional, practical, thorough and sensible – with a little dash of the decadent – as is everything else in his life. He looks to the recipes his forefathers used; if he is lucky, he may even have a few of them, handwritten by some some long-deceased retainer of his great uncle.
Text from The Telegraph/men
RecipeReminiscing 