— by Sarah Stewart Taylor

When I started writing a mystery novel set in a fictional Vermont town in 1965, I knew I wanted food and home cooking to be a big part of it. As I started developing my characters and thinking about what kinds of things they would have eaten, I discovered an incredible resource: community cookbooks.

You probably have some of these on your own shelves. Usually spiral-bound, often handwritten or carefully typed and created by church or community groups—and later nursery schools or PTAs—as fundraising projects, they served as a pre-internet way to share recipes. Each participant submitted a favorite recipe, perhaps a casserole that had been in the family for generations, or a special method for making brownies or baked beans. They were usually organized by parts of the meal and sometimes by ingredient. For example, Vermont and New Hampshire cookbooks often have a “Maple” section.

According to a 2012 NPR story, these community cookbooks have a long history in America, dating back to a Civil War-era compilation that raised money for Union soldiers. Often created by religious associations, they also had a connection with the suffrage movement.

Once I started looking, I found community cookbooks dating to the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s everywhere I looked, in friends’ and family members’ kitchens, in thrift stores, used bookstores, and on eBay. They’re fascinating and the more of them I read the more I felt that I was accessing something essential about the people in my book, as well as the home cooks who volunteered their kitchen expertise.

In her introduction to the 1965 edition of A Vermont Cookbook, a collection of recipes from Vermont home cooks produced in White River Junction, Dorothy Miller Calef writes, “A true Vermonter knows how to ‘make do or do without’” and highlights the number of recipes featuring substitutions for missing or expensive ingredients. Indeed, many of these cookbooks showcase the ingenuity of farm wives too far from a grocery store to just run out for some baking powder. In the community cookbooks in my collection, there are a lot of recipes for “Mock Chicken” or “Mock Veal”, as well as cakes and cookies that can be made without eggs or butter. Margarine is ever present.

One of my favorites of these Vermont community cookbooks is Out of Vermont Kitchens, produced by the Trinity Mission of Trinity Church in Rutland and the Women’s Service League of St. Paul’s Church in Burlington. I have the 1947 edition and — likely thanks to its thick paper and sturdy construction — I have seen it in many friends’ and neighbors’ kitchens. The book contains recipes for things like “Beef Tongue and Mushrooms”, “Creole Meatloaf”, and “Ham Loaf”. There are numerous recipes for maple desserts, biscuits, fruit pies, chocolate and fruitcakes, and pickle recipes to preserve the bounty of the garden.

The cooking instructions are clearly intended for an audience very familiar with home cooking and assume a certain knowledge of staple recipes. I love how short some of the recipes in these books are, with directives like, “Make a sponge,” assuming that anyone reading would know how.

The recipes from this period reflect a generation of home cooks who were looking beyond their own communities. From the 1940s on, recipes for curries, chop sueys, and fondues begin to appear. By the 1960s, these cookbooks include many international dishes, some authentic and some . . . not. If some of these recipes are pale versions of the originals and some of the descriptions are not exactly culturally sensitive, they do reveal a curiosity about the world and a desire to learn.

The books also include a lot of “fancy” dishes and I have enjoyed imagining Vermont cooks of the ‘50s and ‘60s making Lobster Thermidor (which appears in a surprising number of books in my collection) and Roast Duckling with Orange Stuffing.

Of course, one of the first things you notice about cookbooks from this era is the prevalence of Jell-O. Jell-O is everywhere, mixed up with vegetables and fruit, and, I’m very sorry to say, meats of all kinds. The idea that Jell-O was a timesaver for housewives was belied by the complexity of many of these recipes.

One of the reasons I love these books is that some of the recipes are handwritten, with little drawings that reveal the personality of their author. Out of Vermont Kitchens contains many little sketches and drawings and a wide variety of handwriting styles. I feel like I have gotten to know the women (until the 1970s editions, it was almost entirely women who contributed recipes) who wrote and illustrated these recipes by following their careful writing and smiling at their playful sketches.

I’ve tried making a lot of the recipes from the community cookbooks now in my collection. Some have been keepers. Some have not. But they’ve helped me to understand who the people in my stories would have been and how they spent their days. And they’ve helped me to understand how growing or procuring food would have figured in the lives of my characters, from young farm wife Sylvie, whose husband’s death is at the center of my new novel Agony Hill, to pillar of the community Alice, who has lived abroad for many years and is now back in her hometown in Vermont.

In the celebrations and acts of love the recipes in these books reflect, I found the core of humanity in my fictional creations.

Here's a favorite recipe from A Vermont Cook Book. It’s from Dorothy Orcutt.

Vermont Nut Bread

½ cup brown sugar