Jul 12
A book of famous Old New Orleans Recipes
This weekend I was at my parent’s house roaming around and I found this old cookbook in the attic named “A book of famous Old New Orleans Recipes.” I like cooking, was married in New Orleans and am a sucker for well designed old books, so this was pretty much the trifecta. After flipping through the pages I noticed that half the recipes required lard so I flipped to the front to see when the book was printed. Let’s see, “Copyright, 1900″. 1900?!
I love the simplicity of these pages with their sans-serif headings and readable measurements and directions. Even with the abbreviated recipes, some personality of the author peeks through the descriptions. (Although there is no author listed for the book anywhere, just a credit for the “Peerless Printing Company” in New Orleans). Compare these pages to modern cookbooks which fit one or two recipes per page and have luxurious color photographs every other page. Don’t get me wrong, I like food porn as much as the next person, but there’s something refreshing about a cookbook that fits 200+ recipes into 55 pages.
Click on thumbnails to see samples, you can also see these scans on my Flickr page.
Though not old, certainly old school, here’s something you all might like for food and design reasons: Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. CI relies on inline black and white drawings to illustrate their recipes and reviews. Tasty.
By the way, would you share your “recipe” for the thumbnail/image browser above? Snappy.
The thumbnail/image magic happens with the Highslide javascript viewer and in my case with a specific version that is integrated with WordPress. It actually looks like they just released a Highslide Editor that makes it easier to use this effect . . .