Both MBH and I had a long list of errands to run in downtown Boston. He had just ordered a new suit and blazer that needed to be picked up from the tailor and wanted to look at new Pocket PCs. I had the shortribs for the Braised Beef Shortribs I talked about in the last post to pick up from Deluca's Market and most importantly, I had to run by the Brattle Bookshop.
I have a very soft spot in my cookbook collecting heart for mid-Twentieth Century cookbooks. You know, the ones from the late 40's until the mid 70's. I think this stems from long summer visits to my grandmother's house in Cadillac, MI when time I didn't spend in the lake was spent sitting on the sun porch reading. My grandmother wasn't much of a "from scratch" cook other than cookies and pies but give her one of the Pillsbury Bake-off Cookbooks from 1960-something and she would cook up a feast. I would always pack three or four books to read during my visits but inevitably I would devour the books I brought with me in the first week. After a few years, I had read most of the books in her house and the small library down the street that interested me. One rainy afternoon, having nothing to read and being a Sunday, no opportunity to go to the library, out of desperation I turned to my Grandmother's cookbooks. I was fascinated by the pictures of 1940s and 50s housewives in their crinolines and pearls mixing cakes with a hand beater and slicing carrots with their perfect manicured nails. The chapters on how to be a good hostess and how to please your family were like reading science fiction to me, a snapshot of life in a galaxy far, far away. When my grandmother died, my mother took her collection of Pillsbury Bake-off cookbooks (she had every one from the very first bake-off in 1949 until her death in 1982) and her original Betty Crocker but no one wanted her set of Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery.
I didn't find out that no one in the family had the set until a couple years ago and in fact, had forgotten all about the set until during my recent vacation, when I stumbled upon Vols. 1-2 and 7-9 on one of the dollar a book carts in the bargin book courtyard of the Brattle Bookshop. Standing in the sunshine, flipping through someone else's stained copy of Volume 1 brought back powerful memories of sitting in the worn chairs on the sunporch at my grandmother's. I could hear the rain hitting the roof and smell the lake on all the damp swimsuits and towel hanging to dry. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear my grandmother puttering around in the kitchen opening cans of this and boxes of that while making some Grandprize winner's recipe for dinner. It was then that I knew that I had to have the entire set of Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery and I didn't care how long it took me to track down all twelve volumes. I bought those volumes of the set right there and then. Towards the end of my vacation, I went back to the Brattle and found that they had put Vols. 3 - 5 out on the three dollar a book carts. I snagged those as well; leaving only Vols. 6 and 9-12 to locate.
As luck would have it, two weekends ago while MBH and I were at the Brattle for something else on one of our "must have" out print book lists, I noticed on the five dollar a book cart Vols. 9-12. Ever frugal and knowing that the likelihood of anyone else desperately in search for this dated series was slim, I decided to play the odds and wait for them to be marked down to the three or one dollar carts. This weekend, I hit pay dirt. Not only did the Brattle still have Vols. 9-12 BUT they also had Volume 6 and they were all on the one dollar cart. I would have missed them had it not been for MBH's eagle eye. By 3pm on Saturday, I was happily home munching on some homemade bread and eagerly reading about "exotic" Swedish food in Volume 11; content knowing that someone in my family once again owned the entire series of Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery.
