Food Friday: Potato Chip Dip

The recipe for this week's Food Friday is not too remarkable but the book it comes from is.  This recipe is from a cookbook that is a combination family and company book. Notice that the recipe not only includes the author's signature but also her residence.

The recipe is found in the Wurlitzer Centennial Cook Book 1856-1956: A Book of Recipes Covering Three Generations of the Farny and Wurlitzer Family and the Wives of Present Business Associates.  The book includes recipes from their first cookbook as well as a short history of the Farney/Wurlitzer family,the business and their cookbook.

The Wurlitzer Company was originally a company that manufactured instruments. There is someone on Flickr who has digitized some of the first pages of the book that you can look at here.

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Cookbook Bookstores

I'm always on the lookout for resources for my writing and research. Used bookstores are one of the places that I search to find topics that I think might be interesting to write about. When writing about food, used bookstores are the best for helping me find books that document food through history. But even better than a used bookstore is a used cookbook bookstore.

Last week I went to The Cookbook Store in the Kensington neighborhood of San Diego. I was looking for community cookbooks and was not disappointed in the selection offered at this store. Ran by a cookbook collector, this store offered a great diversity of cookbooks.

Specialized bookstores like the one above provide you the opportunity to ask questions of a bookseller whose passion is that genre of books. They are knowledgeable about the history of that genre and can help you learn about where to get certain titles and how much to expect to pay for them. Getting to know a used bookseller can be as valuable as being friends with your local reference librarian.

There's a lot of great bookstores in San Diego and highly recommend checking them out.  You can learn more about them by visiting the website for the San Diego Bookseller Association.

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Food Friday: Catsup

Today's recipe is from The Junior League of Salt Lake City's Heritage Cookbook (1976). Local cookbooks, in many cases, are not just places to find names and advertisements. They can also provide some history of a community. The following recipe for catsup provides a short history about the recipe and the name of a pioneer butcher from the area.

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