OK, I changed my mind from yesterday. I'm just going to combine the last few things into one post and wrap up the Shelfie 2020 series on this final day of May.
This last shelf is in our living room and it features cookbooks and food-related books. The Oxford Companion to Food, published in 1999, is a dandy encyclopedia of cooking and food history. As one reviewer on Goodreads sums up: "God I love this book. If you're a food nerd you can simply open it to some random page and you will lose hours." If you're looking for something a little less weighty, one of my other favorite books on this topic is Reay Tannahill's Food in History.
The blue-spined book between the orange- and red-spined books is a nicer copy of A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband, a book I wrote about extensively in 2011 and 2012. I took the ephemera that was tucked away inside the falling-apart copy and put it inside this spiffier volume, hopefully to enthrall future generations of bibliophiles as it is passed down. Here's a rundown of all the posts on this book:
- A little bit of this and that
- "A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband"
- Bettina's Hallowe'en recipes
- Bettina's Thanksgiving in the country (and more)
- More stuff from inside "A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband"
This 1953 edition of The Joy of Cooking, which has sold more than 18 million copies, is one that was removed from the Helen Kate Furness Free Library and subsequently brought home by Mom years ago. It's not the "family" copy. As I mentioned in a November 2018 post, I pruned the circa-1970 family copy of The Joy of Cooking, a decision that I am becoming more regretful about. For more about The Joy of Cooking, I recommend "A Case for Three Copies of the Joy of Cooking" by Alex Beggs, this recent installment of the Omnibus podcast, and "The Obsessive Sport of Shopping for a Vintage 'Joy of Cooking'" by Genevieve Walker.
The bizarre, wonderful and golden-spined Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices is a cookbook I wrote about in March 2018 and February 2020.
About half of those staplebound recipe booklets to the right are from the Pennsylvania Dutch cooking genre. I'm a little wonky about picking one up any time I come across them. There's truly no need to have that many, but I justify it by saying they don't take up much space at all. Here are some posts in which I've discussed them:
- Pennsylvania Dutch recipe for funeral pie (aka raisin pie)
- Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine: Schnitz and knepp recipe on old napkin
- Cooking up some calf's head soup, pawnhaas, tzitterli and streivlin
- Enjoy a couple "Best-Loved Pennsylvania Dutch Recipes"
- Who wants sauerbraten, bacon muffins & tangle britches?
- Some Pennsylvania Dutch recipes and tiny illustrations
- Fruitcake: Lost corners, rabbit holes and recipes
- Pennsylvania Dutch recipes from C.H. Musselman Co.
Finally, Pennsylvania Fairs and Country Festivals by Craig Kennedy includes a chapter on the York Fair, which, just a few days ago, canceled its 2020 event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's an excerpt from its statement:
"(York, PA) The 2020 York State Fair has been canceled due to concerns regarding the coronavirus pandemic. The Fair Board held a meeting on Tuesday, May 26 deciding to cancel the Fair. ... This is the first time the fair has been canceled since the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. We understand that this global pandemic has affected so many individuals and families that are normally involved or attend the fair. The importance of those people surpasses the difficult decision that had to be made. We also believe that while we are unsure of what the end of July will look like in regard to the pandemic, we know that opening the fair while following all guidelines set by local government and the CDC would be insurmountable at this point."
Shelfie Addenda
Speaking of the pandemic, I went into the LNP|LancasterOnline newsroom on West King Street in Lancaster yesterday morning to clear out my desk in preparation for our intended move to another building later this summer. It was my first trip to the newsroom since March 13; I have been working from home since then. In shelfie #25, I mentioned that I thought a book by Valeria Luiselli might still be at my LNP desk. Indeed, it was. So here's my "work shelfie":
And, to wrap it all up and with some help from Mr. Angelino, aka Banjo, on this sunny Sunday morning, here are some of the books that I acquired after starting the shelfie series on March 30. If I do another project like this in 5-to-10 years, perhaps we'll see them again. (The idea of that, though, is a bit exhausting.)
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