Everyone in my family, even my aunts and cousins, wants this Eicher – Myers Family Cookbook. I inherited it from my Mother, I think it is her handwriting. It appears to be from around 1955, so it could be her mother’s cookbook. This does not appear to be The Family Cookbook, it is a family cookbook. It’s mostly dessert recipes.
Since everyone wants a copy, I photographed the entire book and I am presenting it here as a huge 144Mb PDF file. I took these photos with my iPhone 6s 12-megapixel camera, using studio grade lighting and photography equipment.
The recipes are handwritten in cursive, in an address book with tabs from A to Z. There are gaps of dozens of blank pages, which I have not digitized. Recipes are scattered throughout the book, some seem placed at random. But there is a vague scheme here: B for bread; C for corn, cakes and cookies; D for dumplings and oops we need more pages for cakes and cookies; M for meat and muffins; P for Pie and pudding; S for salad, sauce, and shortcakes; and W for walnuts. You can easily see which are the favorite recipes, by the stained pages.
Tucked in between some pages are recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines, brochures, etc. I have tried to preserve this ephemera as I found it, in the order I found it. I carefully unfolded the clippings and put them under glass to keep them flat. You can hardly tell they have been folded for 60 years. I photographed the back sides of these items too. Some were fascinating, like this crudely printed color advertisement for quilt patterns.
I was particularly amused by a lard pamphlet. Apron-clad women are marching in the streets carrying signs declaring their love for lard.
I am considering donating the original manuscript cookbook to the University of Iowa Libraries’ Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts collection. The Library is digitizing dozens of historic cookbooks. I contacted them and they expressed interest in acquiring this and other cookbooks from my Mother’s collection. Perhaps it would be fairest to all my family that everyone has digitized copies of the book but none of us possess it, the original is in a library. But I didn’t want to let this cookbook out of my hands without making a copy for myself and my family first.