My first recipe swap.

A few weeks ago at the Tanque Verde Swap Meet, I found an old cookbook called All-Day Singin' and Dinner on the Ground.  It's a hymnal and recipe book by Albert E. Brumley, whose legacy can be read about here.  The cookbook is still for sale on their website.  The recipes are evocative of a time when a recipe was vague because one actually had all day, on a weekly basis, to sing and make dinner. (Techniques like "bake in a shallow pan until brown" and "simmer well till cooked and tender" is what originally attracted me to the book.) Nowadays, in between facebooking and picking up dry cleaning, we need to know exactly when we should come back to the kitchen to pull something out of the oven, because it is one of 16 things that must be completed before bedtime.

So, inspired by this recipe book, I am starting a project that nods to these past recipes and reflects within them our present tastes and demands on our time. 

 

Each week or so, I will take one recipe out of this book, but rather than make the original dish, I am going to use it to inspire a contemporary and/or seasonal update that will bridge the gap between past, more deliberate efforts and the present instant gratifications about today's frenetic 30-minute-meal type recipes. The intention is to start a dialogue about our individual approaches to the same recipes, and give us a springboard from which to be creative and adapt recipes for our own, unique tastes and time lines.

Along the way, I will be asking other foodie types if you would like to recipe swap with me.  Tomorrow is the first swap, and I asked rosemarried if over the past week, she would work on her own version of the Persimmon Pudding recipe.  The fun part of the swap is that neither of us know what the other is developing; we will each find out tomorrow as we post on our own blogs and swap links. I had great fun hunting down persimmons and talking to fellow foodies for inspiration, and I think I came up with a simple, elegant recipe in the pudding family that still shows off the persimmon.  I sort of blew it on twitter today tweeting about it, so if you don't want the spoiler, don't look at that feed.

If you'd like to join in, let me know to put you on the list and we can all swap them back and forth on each others' blogs.

Until tomorrow, my dear readers! I am eager to hear everyone's feedback on this idea, so don't be shy with your thoughts below.