We spend a lot of time at Food.Family.Ephemera talking about community cookbooks and their worth when researching women. While the standard community cookbook is compiled by a group of women to raise funds, there are cookbooks, recipe booklets, and the such that are similar to a community cookbook but published for other reasons.
Today's recipe for Crisp, Baked Chicken comes to us from That's an Idea! Ideas for the Homemaker from the Farm Weekly. The Sioux City Journal. Journal Tribune. (no date). The ideas, including recipes, time saving tips and other household how-to's, were provided by local "housewives" and printed by The Sioux City Journal. While this book has no date, my guesstimate based on the tips is that it dates from the late 1940s to 1950s.
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| From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega |
The first page describes where the content for this booklet comes from. Although this is published by a newspaper in Iowa, women who wrote tips list addresses for other states including Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota. Each tip lists the name of the woman who submitted it and her street address.
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| From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega |
This is a great example of how women, even women that we think might not have left much behind, like farm women in rural communities, did participate in their community whether it was providing a favorite recipe to raise money for her church or writing to the local newspaper with a tip she hoped would help other women like herself. This piece is a nice compliment to the federal census or a city directory.
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| From the collection of Gena Philibert-Ortega |
Did the women in your family write a recipe or a tip for a local newspaper?
**I want to thank my friend Paula Hinkel from the Southern California Genealogical Society for gifting this booklet to me. I so appreciate her thinking of me.
