During quarantine, I have tried to get more creative with cocktail preparation. This is a great recipe for a riff on the French 75. This is a recipe from my friend Joe Liolos (www.instagram.com/iburnedmytoast) for what he calls a “Piney 75.”
Recipe
2 oz gin.
1/2 oz. lemon
1/2 oz. rosemary simple syrup
Sparkling wine
Shake, double strain into a coupe, top with sparkling wine, expressed lemon swath garnish. The gin I used is Empress 1908 and the wine came from Naked Wines.
This is the second installment of my cookbook challenge and the oldest of all the vintage cookbooks I inherited from my grandmother. This book is titled Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners by Elizabeth O. Hiller, published in 1913 by the N.K. Fairbank Company. At that time, the book sold for $1.00. According to the US Inflation Calculator, that equates to just under $26.00 in 2019 funds so clearly this was a cookbook aimed at a somewhat more affluent household of the time.
I am including my YouTube video review of the cookbook at
the end of this post.
My copy of this cookbook is falling to pieces. Both the front and back covers have detached from the book, and it has clearly seen some use. The book is inscribed by my great grandmother, Lillian W. Bollin and dated 1918. She was born in 1863 in Richmond, VA, so at this point would have been in her mid-fifties and living in Columbia, SC.
The author, Elizabeth O. Hiller, was a prolific cookbook author and well-known culinary figure. Among other things, she wrote recipes for the Chicago Tribune and early in her career lost out to Fanny Farmer to be a columnist for Women’s Home Journal. If she has won, I imagine we would know more about her. If you look up her list of publications, however, you will see that she was a busy writer. You can get more information about her at her Wikipedia bio.
Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners is a fascinating cookbook for a number of reasons. First, the recipes are complex and use expensive ingredients – indicating again that the market was a more affluent household. Second, the structure of the cookbook is not just a collection of recipes, rather it is a collection of 52 full meal plans, each geared towards a different Sunday of the year. Finally, it is both a cookbook and what we would call an “advertorial” for a product called Cottolene.
I would love to know how many readers have ever heard of Cottolene. I know that I had no clue what it was until I started to read the cookbook and then did a great deal of online research. In 1868, the N. K. Fairbank company premiered a product made from a combination of cottonseed oil and beef suet. This product, called Cottolene, was touted as a healthy alternative to lard. The product was the end result of what had previously been waste products in two major industries – cotton and meatpacking. From 1868 until 1911, Cottolene was essentially the only product of its type on the market.
In 1911, however, a company called Proctor and Gamble created a product called Crisco (I bet you recognize that one). Crisco was 100% cottonseed oil. What ensued then was a competition to see which product would win over the hearts (and stomachs) of American’s housewives.
Both companies did traditional advertising, but also utilized the “advertorial” concept similar to the one from Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners. They would find a noted cook and/or recipe writer, have them compile a cookbook, then include information about the product. That information generally included testimonials from well-known cooks as well as testimonials from doctors, touting the health benefits of the product over those of lard and butter.
Obviously, Crisco won that PR battle because it’s still here
while Cottolene has faded into the annals of culinary history.
In an online article, Alice Ross does a great job of exploring the history of both Cottolene and Crisco and what she terms the “mysterious disappearance of lard.” You can also get information about Cottolene and Crisco on their respective Wikipedia pages.
The advertising campaign for Cottolene was fascinating. I invited you to use your favorite search engine to find images of early 20th century Cottolene advertising. I think you will be entertained by what you find. I will include a few images at the end of this post as well.
According to the Introduction of the book:
Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners, as you see, is clearly a product of the time. In 1913, the assumption was that women stayed home to take care of the family while husbands went out and worked to support the family. If you can get past some of these types of references in the cookbook, however, you will find an extraordinarily well-crafted series of recipes. The title gives a clue as to the layout of the book. Rather than being a simple collection of recipes, the book is divided into 52 sections each containing a full menu designed for a specific Sunday of the year. The assumption is that Sunday dinners are generally more elaborate than the rest of the week.
For instance, as I am writing this review the next Sunday
will be the 1st Sunday of August. In the cookbook, that menu
consists of the following:
Nova Scotia Canapés
Pan Broiled Fillets of Beef – Sultana Sauce
Carlsbad Potatoes
Peas and Onions French Style
Lettuce, Peppergrass and Onion Salad
Peach Ice Cream
Cocoanut Cake
Coffee
A very complete meal – and that’s one of the least
complicated of the meals in the book.
The author aligns ingredients and recipes to be as seasonal
as possible. In the Introduction, the publishers note:
From the ingredient lists, it seems clear that refrigerated
transport was available up to a point. Many winter recipes include oysters,
which would obviously have to be shipped quickly and on ice to get to the
Midwest safely. Beyond that, most of the ingredients seem to be focused on what
can be found locally and seasonally. During spring and summer months, many
menus include dandelion greens along with instructions how to harvest and clean
them.
Overall, I found this cookbook to be one of the best I have
read in a quite a long while. There are very few recipes repeated, so in the
course of reading this cookbook you will find over 300 intriguing options. I
also love the ‘meal planning’ aspect of this book. The idea of putting together
full meal plans makes it easy to just lift a section and create a fantastic
meal for six hungry people at any time. The meals are not simple to prepare, nor
are they for the novice cook. Some of the techniques are time-consuming and
intricate, but the results are sure to be superb.
If you’re interested in this cookbook, you don’t have to search for an actual vintage copy. I found out that the book was republished in its entirety in 1981 with the same cover art and all of the vintage Cottolene information intact! So check out Amazon for a more recent copy.
As promised in my introduction to the cookbook challenge, I
used a random number generator to pick a page from the cookbook. The page
chosen was page 15, containing the following recipes:
Consommé Duchess
Imperial Sticks
Crab Meat in Timbale Cases
Swedish Timbales
My next post will be a video of my cooking one (or more) of the recipes from that page. Until then, please enjoy the video review below.
Check out my first YouTube video! OK – the bird sounds in the background are a little distracting, I admit . . . but I plan to get a new microphone soon, so my next post (reviewing my first cookbook in the “Cookbook Challenge”) should be a bit more focused. Enjoy!
It’s finally time to unveil a new concept for my website!
Back in 2011 when I began “Table For One, Please” the focus was entirely on single dining at restaurants. I maintained that focus for a few years until a disastrous experience with a web hosting company resulted in the accidental deletion of all of my posts.
Needless to say – I ditched that company and moved to a new
hosting service immediately.
Luckily, I was introduced to the website Wayback Machine. Most of my information had been archived, so I was able to rebuild the site from the ground up. I plugged along fairly well for another few years, but my single dining had pulled back a great deal due to a very lucky experience. After reading my reviews, the publisher of The Local Touristcontacted me and asked me to start writing restaurant reviews for that website.
Most of my dining from that point forward involved
invitations to restaurants, asking me to bring a friend and then write about
the experience. With so much time and energy devoted to The Local Tourist, I
allowed my own site to grow dormant.
During that period of inactivity, I neglected to see that
another disastrous web hosting “accident” had once again deleted my content. At
this point, I took that as a sign from some higher authority that I needed to
re-think my approach to the site.
After pondering options, I suddenly had an epiphany.
The concept of “table for one” encompasses far more than
just dining alone at restaurants. For me, it involves that but also cooking for
one at home as well as the energy of travelling alone. Once I had that
epiphany, I began to brainstorm just how I could merge those concepts into the
site.
One night, after enjoying a “cooking for one” experience at home and while enjoying a “cocktail for one” experience afterwards, I decided to dive down the rabbit hole of Netflix. During my random clicking, I ran across the film Julie and Julia. I had seen it years before, but decided to watch again. It’s an excellent, entertaining film – especially if you are a foodie.
After the film, I went into my kitchen and pulled out my own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking but noticed that I had a fairly large collection of cookbooks, most of which I have never even cracked open. I don’t have the most extensive collection I know (some of my friends have entire rooms filled with cookbooks) but I counted 92 on my shelf – that’s a fairly impressive number.
Inspired by the film, I thought to myself, “What if I were
to do something like Julie Powell did?”
Of course, I couldn’t duplicate the exact process. First,
that would be doing something that had already been done. Second, there are no
other cookbooks that are as iconic as Julia Child’s book. Finally, if I were to
try to cook all the recipes, it would take several lifetimes.
I am a huge fan of the phrase, “What if . . . “ so I started
asking myself that question until I finally got to a “what if” that rang as a
fun and exciting proposition.
What if I were to read and review each cookbook and then cook something representative from each one, then write about it?
The more I thought about this, the more I got excited by the idea. I will still review restaurants from time to time, and I will certainly write about my solo travel adventures when they happen, but to restart my website I have decided to engage in this recent brainchild which I am calling the Cookbook Challenge.
Here are the rules I have established for this Cookbook Challenge, and I invite everyone to keep me honest!
I will start at the left side of my bookshelf and work my way through the books one at a time in the order they are shelved today. I included a photo above so that you can keep me honest.
For each cookbook, I will read and review it.
After reviewing, I will use a random number generator to pull up a page (or pages) in the cookbook.
I will then prepare whatever recipe(s) fall on the random page and post about that, both in writing and by video. In the case of multiple recipes on a page, I will choose the one that most appeals to me. At least in that way, I have a tiny bit of choice instead of being totally randomized.
I think this is going to be a blast!
Keep an eye out for my next post, where I reveal the title of that first cookbook you see all the way to the left side of the shelf in the picture above – the beginning of my new Cookbook Challenge.