Posts tagged with recipes in Blog Beyond the Reading Room

Showing 1 - 7 of 7 items
  • Anne Cong-Huyen
On Friday, February 12th, the U-M Library hosted its third annual Douglass Day celebration in honor of Frederick Douglass, 19th century American abolitionist, author, and orator. This year the event highlighted the life, legacy and work of Mary Church Terrell with a lecture from Dr. Shelley Haley followed by transcription, digital art-making, and socializing over baked goods!
A brown rectangular loaf of bread cools on a wire rack on a white kitchen counter.
  • Angel Lena Caranna
Due to newfound free time exclusively spent at home, bread baking has become massively popular as of late. Americans collectively baked enough bread to cause a national yeast shortage. For me, remote work at home led to research on Special Collection’s culinary archive; and, desperate to preserve my last packet of instant dry yeast, I decided to find out how bakers before us made non-yeast bread.
The words “Choice Recipes” with an ornate red capital R
  • Jacqueline L Jacobson
This month’s recipe is a lemon cake from Culinary gems : a collection of choice recipes gathered with care from the treasures of culinary experts, published in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1884.
Lemon was an extremely common flavor for desserts and pastries in the 19th century -- almost the default neutral flavor, the way vanilla is now. Although vanilla was known in Europe as a flavoring by the 16th century (there’s an article on it in Diderot’s Encyclopédie of 1765) and a commercial extract was available in the US from at least 1847, it overtook lemon in cakes and pies only slowly
A plate of chocolate macaroons on a wooden table
  • Jacqueline L Jacobson
Historic American recipes for chocolate baked goods are much less intense than modern ones.19th and early 20th century American recipes for chocolate cakes and cookies, such as this month's recipe from Emma Francis Voris' ca.1893 New Columbian White House Cookery are quite mild.
Picture of a double-crusted mock cherry pie
  • Jacqueline L Jacobson
Americans love pie any time of year, but in November pie is particularly in the spotlight. Apple, mince, pumpkin… every family seems to have its own traditional pie repertoire for Thanksgiving. But since we're heading into cranberry season anyway, here’s something a little different for your festive board: Mock Cherry Pie, made with cranberries and raisins -- a common recipe in our late 19th and early 20th century cookbooks.
Opening lines of an 18th century poem about cider
  • Jacqueline L Jacobson
October is the month for apples, and for apple cider. This month's recipe is for a cider cake, a popular pastry found in many of our 19th century cookbooks.
Cookbook page with recipe for Spice Fingers
  • Jacqueline L Jacobson
This month’s recipe is out of a WWII food conservation pamphlet, A Guide to Wartime Cooking, by Meredith Moulton Redhead and Edith Elliott Swank, part of a box of war-related culinary ephemera.