This is a cookbook Todd's mom gave me for Christmas. His great-aunt Trudy won it when she was 13, in 1925, for a recipe for split-pea soup that she has written in the back.

The recipes are interesting, odd and kind of vague (recipes don't specify an oven temperature, just saying "a hot oven" or "moderate oven"). There are lots of ingredients I've never heard of or never used: Porto [sic] Rico molasses, sweetbreads (two recipes for sweetbread and cucumber salad), aspic, tongue, chaud-froid, croquettes, coupes, baskets, creamed vegetables, mutton, mincemeat and puddings. In fact, lots of everything. The recipes are really short, and the book is more than 700 pages. They're written in sort of a backward manner that I find myself using when I'm in a hurry, with lots of steps and important information relegated to a sentence clause. Here's a recipe for curried vegetables:

Cook one cup each potatoes and carrot, and one-half cup turnip, cut in fancy shapes, in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, add one-half cup canned peas, and pour over a sauce made by cooking two tablespoons butter with two slices onion five minutes, removing onion, adding two tablespoons flour, three-fourths teaspoon salt, one-half teaspoon curry powder, one-fourth teaspoon pepper, few grains celery salt, and pouring on gradually one cup scalded milk. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.

Other recipes have ingredients lists, and the best part about the book is where someone has made notes: how to halve a recipe for Cottage Pudding, "Nancy List made for Donna's dinner 8/29/86" next to Snow Pudding I.

Don't know if I'll cook from it, but it's fun to read. I like the recipe style; I imagine it's written for women who knew their way around a kitchen.