FOODIE FRIDAYS: My Deep Dive into Vintage Cookbooks: Guest Post by Ellen Byron

Today for Foodie Fridays, I welcome my friend and author Ellen Byron. Ellen Byron’s Cajun Country Mysteries have won multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and multiple Lefty Awards for Best Humorous Mystery. She also writes the Catering Hall Mystery series under the name Maria DiRico. Bayou Book Thief is the first book in her new Vintage Cookbook Mysteries.

ELLEN BYRON: MY DEEP DIVE INTO VINTAGE COOKBOOKS 

I write three mystery series. All contain recipes I create or adapt that are in keeping with the series’ theme. But the journey of the third series, the Vintage Cookbook Mysteries, which was inspired by my own hobby of collecting retro cookbooks, has been particularly fascinating. 

Cookbooks from our past raise so many interesting questions. How do our culinary tastes differ from one decade to another? How is this reflected in the cookbooks of each decade? How do we update a recipe so that it appeals to the current generation? And are there recipes that simply don’t survive their era? 

Writing the Vintage Cookbook Mysteries has also taught me that choosing and adapting the recipes of yore requires its own detective work. Three cases in point: 

• One of my best vintage cookbook finds is a 1928 copy of Photoplay’s Cook Book [sic]- 150 Recipes of the Stars. The celebrities who shared their recipes – or whose publicists shared them – range from silent screen actors to legends like Greta Garbo. In adapting Ms. Garbo’s recipe for “Swedish Salad,” I had to parse the specifics of many ingredients, along with their measurements, to create an edible dish. 

 

• The cookbook Mrs. Appleyard’s Kitchen was enormously popular when it debuted in 1942. But I knew the mild flavor of an eighty-year-old brownie recipe wouldn’t fly with today’s chocolate-loving gourmands, so I increased the amount of the ingredient – by a lot. 

 • A recipe for coconut patties in Candies, a 1939 advertorial cookbook from the Pet Milk Company, calls for shredded coconut. But it was up to me to determine whether the coconut should be sweetened or unsweetened, since it wasn’t specified in the original recipe. 

And then there’s the anthropology of cookbooks. I recently discovered I have three copies of 1958’s Thoughts for Buffets, all bought at the Studio City LAPL Branch’s Friends of the Library sales. Apparently both the cookbook and buffets were the height of dining entertainment in mid-century Studio City. Oh, for time tunnel to take me back to mid-century days of my neighborhood! 

I really should stop collecting this cooking tomes of yore. I have more than I’ll ever need, even if the Vintage Cookbook Mysteries run for a decade or more, which of course I hope they will, lol. But each new-old cookbook offers a tantalizing glimpse into our culinary past… and I simply can’t resist that.

***

Ellen Byron’s Cajun Country Mysteries have won multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and multiple Lefty Awards for Best Humorous Mystery. She also writes the Catering Hall Mystery series under the name Maria DiRico. Bayou Book Thief is the first book in her new Vintage Cookbook Mysteries.