Whether you’re cooking at Milwaukee Public Library's Cargill Community Kitchen or preparing something at home, you may need to follow a recipe. Today, it’s easy to quickly look up any kind of recipe online, but before the internet people frequently called Milwaukee Public Library’s Ready Reference for help finding recipes.
Librarians clipped recipes from the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel over the course of more than 20 years to have at the ready. Today, it’s a digitized collection called the Historic Recipe File — a searchable database that holds more than 5,400 recipes.
"Folks were really into the recipes that were published in our daily papers here in Milwaukee, and a lot of them actually were recipes from local restaurants, things that had local relevance to our region," notes library services manager Kristina Gomez.
So if you’re interested in recreating State Fair Cream Puffs at home or want to make Cabbage Crust Spinach Pie, the recipe file is a great place to look.
Gomez notes the file contains recipes clipped between 1960 and 1980. While the list isn't growing, the library made every effort to make the list easy to use and reference. Gomez says, "You can search by a regional cuisine. So, if you wanted to look up what Polish recipes we have, you can find that. You can also just search by ingredient. So, if you have certain ingredients in your pantry and you want to figure out how to make it, you could also search the collection that way."
Of the thousands of recipes she explored, Gomez says what stands out to her the most is the wide range of international options. "I think that surprised me a bit, to be honest," she says. "We, of course, have recipes from German foods [and] Polish food, but also from West African. I saw a recipe for fufu in there—a ton from Eastern Europe, as well as Latin America."
Of course, Gomez adds that there's also, "so many [recipes] with gelatin! I think that, along with the mayo, it's kind of like, OK, what were we doing with gelatin at this time? Lots of meats in Jell-O and things like that, so blast from the past for sure!"
_
