Minnesota Heritage Cookbook: Hand-Me-Down Recipes for the Benefit of the American Cancer Society, Minnesota Division, Inc 1979
At first, I wasn’t sure this was a community cookbook (I was drawn in by the quilted, is that a swastika? cover) because the contributors weren’t listed among the truly diverse recipes but then I got to the end and they had two full, tiny print pages of “contributors, testers, helpers” and a tiny line to add your name if they forgot you.
I never quite understand why community cookbooks wouldn’t credit people on each recipe but it does happen. Surely they aren’t all an amalgamation of so many contributors they’d scarcely know who to credit. Even big-name publishers don’t pay for recipe testing (ask me how I know) so most likely anything that was submitted is how it appears on the page, more or less. But I digress.
This is one of the more varied cookbooks I’ve come across. There are no photographs or illustrations of food and the paper is oddly dark but there are recipes from all over and many different communities–South African, Australian, Mennonite, Jewish, Chinese, Minnesotan, Yugoslavian, Lebanese…the list goes on. There is even a map of rural Minnesota divided up by the groups that settled there.
The sauerbraten recipe caught my eye because it called for ginger snaps like Baltimore’s version, sour beef, but no dumplings. But added cabbage.
I also noticed kreplach, which always makes me think of the joke.
Unlike most community cookbooks, this not a spiral-bound book, and while I was taking pictures of the pages I remember why spiral-bound books are so popular–they lay flat! So much easier to read. This one wanted to both close and lose pages every time I looked at it.
