moms~cookbooks~canning

A few years back my mom gave me some of her cookbooks..one of them was her very first cookbook that she had gotten before she had even gotten married. In those days you would save little stamps that were on Blue Ribbon products such as tea, coffee, baking powder etc. The company had a catalogue and you could send your stamps to them for products much like today's airmiles. So she had been getting them from her mom and when she had saved enough she ordered this cookbook to put in her hope chest. Now if you have no idea what that is.. let me know.. that would be another topic hehee.. Anyway some of the recipes you can tell are for another era as tehy call for milk that has not been separated yet :) and if you don't know what THAT means you really are from the new generation !!

At the back of this book are some blank pages which my mom kept a sort of journal of notes about recipes and so on. She also kept track of what she canned. What reminded me of the back of the book was yesterday when I finished doing some canning. I should have skipped that whole section of the book though :-D

The following was from a week in 1960. Now you have to understand that she does not have running water or dishwashers and has 4 children under the age of 6. The measurements are in Imperial measures as metric had not been invented yet at least not in our corner of the world. Qts are quarts which is about the same as a litre, pts is pints which is about the same as 1/2 litre, a bag was a very large gunny sack that held about 75-100 pounds and I have no idea how many kilos that is.

15 qts mixed vegetables
30 qts peas
27 qts beans (pork and beans)
2 bags of carrots
1 bag of turnips
30 qts dills
20 qts sweet pickles
30 qts beets
6 pts mustard pickles
6 qts green catsup
75 qts vegetables besides carrots and corn
100 qts pickles
30 qts chickens

You can see how I felt a little inadequate by my picture at the end of this when I read what she did :) Gotta love a mom's guilt from days gone by hehehee