Cookbooks: Where retro is trendy again
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When I returned to Pittsburgh last September after a stint working in New York, a friend welcomed me back with a gift: A 1940’s copy of “The Prudence Penny Cookbook” from the newspaper absorbed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1960s, The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.
The cookbook was distributed nationally under the banner of different Hearst-owned newspapers, with recipes compiled by local food writers who wrote under the Prudence Penny pseudonym.
The book is a gem that instructs how to set a table for different occasions, plan a menu and how to render fat. It includes recipes for a multicourse breakfast that starts with strawberries and cream and moves to cornflakes and graham muffins with a side of coffee. A weekday pot roast in tomato sauce is paired with sides of potatoes and buttered peas and finished with a dessert such as fruit jelly. And the photos are fantastic, with captions like “The ring mold is the delight of family and friends, whether of noodles, vegetables or chicken mousse.”
Even at a moment when it seems like every other person has authored a cookbook, old recipes and vintage cookbooks are making a comeback. Waldorf salad, prime rib and baked Alaska listed on restaurant menus
prove that. A look to the past — to the domain of home cooks and bygone-era housewives — is a welcome respite from the past decade’s dominant (male) chef culture that’s in the throes of being dissipated by #metoo.
The vintage cookbook revival also is about the uncertainty of the future. “In fraught or trying times, people return to familiar flavors and experiences, looking to the past for comfort,” said Sarah Billingsley, a former PG columnist, who’s now the executive editor at Chronicle Books in San Francisco. She told Publishers Weekly in March that nostalgia is infiltrating film, music, clothing, and of course, food.
Under her direction, “The Vintage Baker: More Than 50 Recipes From Butterscotch Pecan Curls to Sour Cream Jumbles” by Jesse Sheehan was released last month. It’s full of retrokitchen populism, with recipes that are relatable and likable.
There also is the reissue of Graham Kerr’s “The Galloping Gourmet” (Rizzoli; May 2018). It’s the second in the reboot series from Matt and Ted Lee, brothers who have come together to release a book yearly as part of the nascent The Lee Brothers Classic Library. Their first book of the Classic series was “Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook: A Mouth-Watering Treasury of Afro-American Recipes,” a re-release of Pamela Strobel’s 1969 book.
The Lee brothers live between their Southern roots and their Northeast adulthood and have authored a slew of cookbooks, star in several travel shows and have written for every food and travel publication under the sun. As for the Classic series, expect more reissues. They are “planning on releasing one a year for the rest of our lives,” Ted Lee said in an email.
“Galloping Gourmet” is based on Mr. Kerr’s TV cooking show, which aired from 1969 to ‘71. It was both popular and polarizing.
“The culinary establishment of the time — including Craig Claiborne, James Beard and Michael Field, among others — were almost uniformly appalled at the showmanship and accused him of not being reverential enough about the dishes or technique to be instructive to his audience,” the Lee brothers wrote in the foreword. “And yet Kerr’s saucy way with food and humor would become the norm for the food television genre.”
As to why the Lee brothers decided on this particular book, “With ‘The Graham Kerr Cookbook,’ we had this rare opportunity 50 years later to have the author himself contend with his manuscript and to bring us up to date: What did this mean? What were you thinking then? How do you feel now about this?” they wrote in an email. “We asked Graham a long list of questions about the recipes and dishes, and he answered them longhand, annotations that were laid directly onto the page.”
Beyond Amazon.com and past bookstore shelves, evidence of the retro-cookbook revival is everywhere.
Last month on Taste Cooking, a writer illuminates a source of early California cuisine that’s “decidedly Spanish” in books such as “The California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook” from 1914. Food writer Charlotte Druckman has written about several others in the past year for The Washington Post, including the ‘80s favorite, “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, and the first cookbook from a grand dame, “Entertaining: Martha Stewart” from the sameera.
As for that “Prudence Penny” cookbook, there’s no recipe to please a local such as chipped ham barbecue or city chicken. But undoubtedly the book will jog a Pittsburgher’s memory with pages on how to make cream cheese ball salad or fruit Charlotte. And it may even draw a young cook into fascinating unfamiliar culinary worlds from an era before the sanitizing ubiquity of cronuts and avocado toasts, cheffy chefs and cooking-for-Instagram.