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Vintage Cookbooks - Still Good for Recipe Ideas? - By: blog.RubyLane.com Emergencies and natural disasters have been at the forefront of the news recently. Severe weather can render a community without power for several days at a time, presenting a hardship for all. Economic conditions have made it necessary for Americans to economize in all areas of their lives…including eating more meals at home. My local radio station carries commercials for emergency food storage backpacks and heirloom seed banks. These commercials made me think of my grandma’s cellar, filled with canned fruit and vegetables that she “put up” every year. If times demanded it, would you have the knowledge and resources to provide for your family for an extended period of time? How many people know how to can food today? What would you do if you had severely rationed food supplies? Could you survive if you had to forage for your own food?  A genre of cookbooks sprouted up during World War II to help the homemaker cook nutritious meals under the conditions of rationing. In these books you can find recipes for apple pie made with saltines and spices, but no apples and lots of information about substitutions for flour, sugar and butter. Ladies guild and church cookbooks from the 40’s and 50’s provide a treasure trove of simple and substantial meals from natural ingredients that will satisfy the appetite economically. Women’s magazines from the depression era are also a source of recipes and tips on making meals from next to nothing as the times required that kind of ingenuity. If you had to rely on the land for food, would you know how to prepare game or identify edible greens and mushrooms? There are old cooking folios and booklets from 4-H clubs and state extension departments with educational information about foraging. In this day of fast food and frozen ready to eat meals, it might serve us all well to look to the past for economical meals, canning and preserving instructions and subsistence living information that can be used in the real world today. Grandma had skills and knowledge that all of us could use today. You never know when disaster might strike and being prepared could make the difference between life and death. Even in this day and age vintage cookery books can be useful when preparing a meal. Traditional foods such as game or food produce collected from the land will have many old recipes in vintage cookbooks that may not be so common in more recent cook books. Carolyn Martin |