Posted: 12/19/2011 3:42:04 PM EDT
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The recent thread regarding Greeks returning to WWII recipes reminded me of one item I highly regard as a useful SHTF tool: An old cookbook. Most modern cookbooks contain recipes that use relatively prepared ingredients (frozen pie crusts, canned prepared chicken stock, prepared salsa, etc). Old school recipe books were designed to help housewives feed a large family with limited ingredients. Sounds sorta like SHTF cooking huh?
We inherited a cook book from my mother in law. "The American Woman's Cook Book", edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, Garden City Publishing, 1947. Many of the recipes use basic foods we tend to store for SHTF uses. I'll be honest: I find the recipes a bit plain (with regards to herbs and spice) and a bit salty for my tastes but that is easily fixed. It a treasure trove of almost-lost kitchen how to's.... we can simply skip the sections on selecting the right table linens and how to properly set a table service. Other sections provide useful information that you won't find in many more modern cookbooks. How to thicken soups and stews with flour, cornstarch , other ingredients. How to properly render fats How to pasteurize milk Lists of vitamin contents of most foods (this was pre-label days) making soup stock from leftovers A bunch of soup recipes (some of these basics - like bean and pea soups - are great for SHTF uses) Making breads (yeast breads, salt breads, quick breads) This one should really be of use to those of us with 300 lbs of grain, and mill and a dumb look on ourr faces! Preparing crawfish and crabs frog legs preparing turtles and terrapins preparing wild ducks, guinea fowl, peacock, pheasant, partridge, grouse Pigeons and squab venison, rabbits, hares, squirrels Roast possum 
making gravies and sauces (and NOT by opening a can or pouch!) canning, preserving and jelly making Most of these recipes are long and strong on frugality. "Bake that chicken. Don't throw out that picked over carcass! Save it for tomorrow's soup." Some of the recipes sorts leave you with a WTF?! look on your face: Peanut butter and onion sandwiches. Others definitely harken back to a time when every vegetable was cooked until it was mush. The recipes aren't all great by any means, but there are lots of great recipes that serve as starting points for SHTF food preparation. I'm not talking end of the world eat-on-the-run while we evacuate cooking. I'm talking everyone is unemployed, money if tight, and we have to live off the food in the larder cooking. Hmmmmm... flour, baking powder, dried milk, and some oil can whip up into some baking powder biscuits. And the wild grapes out near the garden could be cooked up with a bit of sugar to make a grape jelly for the biscuits.... Tomorrow I can take the same basic flour, baking powder, salt, sugar and oil and if add an egg from the chcikens in the coop, a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, and slome grated apple off that old tree beside the shed we could have apple flapjacks instead. If you have NO skill in the kitchen a lot of these recipes would definitely border on the inedible. However, if you cook even a modest amount, and can 'interprete' a recipe this is a useful tool. It's not hard to scan the recipe book and simply decide that "No, I am not making Caviar Canapes". However, you might come across a recipe like "cornmeal giddlecakes" and say " hey, I betcha I could substitute powdered milk for fresh in that recipe and end up with something different from the damned fry bread I've eaten ten days running!". You might have 50 odd lbs of beets in the root cellar and are getting mighty tired of boiled beet root. So, if you took a couple of those beets and if you add a few other basic ingredients from the garden and storage you can make Borscht. The variety might be particularly welcome. Most of these 40's era recipes will be overcooked, oversalted and frequently somewhat bland for many modern palates. However, a little kitchen experimentation means you can take the basic recipe, modify seasonings, and end up with something quite palatable. It's simply one more tool in the toolbox. |
| i keep a few older cookbooks on hand for the same reasons you point out. i hate to waste food and alot of the older people really knew how to make outstanding meals with practicaly nothing. its becoming a lost art and its a shame. when i was a kid, the men in the family, 3 generations, would all eat like kings at hunting camp with just a very few store bought items. most of what we had was provided by the forest. the secret to making it really good was the preperation. i remember my grandfather calling men who didnt know how ti cook well, "low bred". |
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Take a look at this: Depression Era Recipes
We got a copy last year as a Christmas gift, haven't tried many of the recipes yet but I gotta say the Boston Brown Bread is to die for. |
| Strangely (since I'm a dude, and when I batched it, cooked one-pan meals for the most part), I collect cookbooks, both originals and reprints from pre-1900. I've got some from the 1880s all the way back to the mid 16th century. I collected them long before I was married to my first wife, who was not a cook at all, or my current wife, who does all of our cooking, at home, from scratch. She very seldom cracks them open, but they are there. I dig the shit out of old books anyway (I have an original 1860s edition of the US Army musketry manual, as well as a lot of other weird old shit like that.), and always figured references on cooking without modern technology, but for making real food, as opposed to camping food, would serve well for MWR in the future. |