Recipes: My Friends and My Own by Louise Perrett, a blank book for saving a recipe collection

 

 For centuries cooks have been saving recipes from friends and family members. My personal collection is an electronic and saved three ways: printed out, on my hard drive and back up drive, and in cloud storage.  In the 20th century it was very common to write the recipes and store them in a card file box. The oldest method, however was to write out each one in a book. 

In 1904 Louise Perrett, an artist and illustrator from Chicago, published Recipes: My Friends and My Own. The first page of each section contains an illustration by Perrett. 

 

 

 The copy in my collection was annotated by Joan Kelly. She did not say where she lived or how old she was when she started filling in the pages, but she did leave a snapshot of her life in food. She included recipes in the Bread, Soup, Fish, Entrée, Meat, Salad, Puddings and Pastry; Custards, Jellies, and Ices; Cakes, and Miscellaneous sections. 

Over the next few months I'll post the pages of her cookbook, transcribing the recipes and giving some of them a try.