Welcome to Aunt Elda's Icebox!

In the most recent attempt to fit our ungainly collection of cookbooks into a single man-sized bookshelf, we found ourselves parting ways with a good number of vintage "compilations".  You know the ones.  Half the size of a sheet of paper, spiral bound and illustrated with great care (if not a terrible amount of skill), these cookbooks were often compiled by church groups, ladies clubs, numerous kinds of "leagues," and targeted fundraising efforts of every stripe.  The good ones are usually marked, dog-eared and spattered with the physical evidence of their frequent use in the kitchen.

Most are invariably filled with recipes for the same casseroles and meaty mainstays, along with whatever odd fruit salads, social beverages and molded-gelatin horrors were in fashion at the time.  With rare exceptions, most of the recipes in these cookbooks are nothing special (I suppose there is the small chance that the Tuna Salad recipe on page 49 is actually the world's best as claimed, but I'll never know).

However, I find that each one does usually contain a few recipes that stand out.  Whether it's their odd ingredients, a unique take on an old dish, or a special bit of historical provenance that comes along with the measurements and instructions, these "diamonds in the rough" are likely the reason we end up owning so many of the damn things in the first place.

So in an attempt to meet ourselves in the middle in regards to our book hoarding, and to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we decided to make it a habit of scanning the few intriguing recipes we find in each cookbook before sending them on their way back out into the world.  And we figured a blog (and it's convenient ability to search and manage recipes by keyword) was the next logical step... and here we are.

So please enjoy this little experiment in culinary history.  If you have similar gems from your own collection that we could post, or decide to take a crack at cooking up anything posted here, please let us know.  Who knows?  Maybe Aunt Elda was on to something, after all...