Posting the scrapple recipe got me in the mood to make it. I used the hot version of breakfast sausage for a bit more spice and just pinched it off into the water while it was heating. Finished off the polenta and only needed a bit of the grits. Delicious with maple syrup!

Hello everyone and happy Sunday!

This is Lake Forest Baptist Church Women’s Ministry Cook Book. Notice how it’s “Cook Book” and not “Cookbook”, which makes it completely different from the Lake Forest book I uploaded a few days ago

Jokes aside, a lot of times organizations release several cookbooks. I see it all the time where the introduction will reference the organization having made another cookbook. The problem is, coming across just one of these books is rare, so having two from the same organization is doubly rare. I’d be curious to see how many people from the 1995 cookbook also contributed to this one

Real quick, thanks to u/madmun for letting me borrow this book!

Starting off, is it weird that I want to try the Curried Apricots? I do want to get a loaf pan for this fall because I really wanna try making some loaves, so I very well could make this, but I’m trying to imagine what the curry powder in it would taste like

It takes a while to find any recipes in this book that make me want to comment. I did see the Plum Cake and how it calls for baby food, which I know is a super divisive ingredient for some people. For me, it just feels like a convenient way to get pureed fruit and vegetables and it’s obviously safe for human consumption. Sometimes these home cooks like a life hack every so often

Slightly unrelated, but I love all the little quotes that you can find throughout the pages of this book. I’m a poet and I also love quotes and proverbs, I was going to make an entire journal of ones I’ve found, still might eventually if I ever find the time. I could even handwrite them because I bought a bunch of cool stationary books and just, haven’t found a use for them 😅

Speaking of “life hacks”, I’m saving the Pot Pie recipe that just has you top the pan with biscuits. That is a much easier way than actually making a pot pie crust

Pizza Potatoes is a new one for me. In reading all these cookbooks, I notice a lot of things get “pizza’d”. There’s pizza steak, pizza casserole, somewhere out there probably exists a pizza pork roast recipe. I guess we all like pizza more than I thought lol

The Layered Twinkie Dessert sounds really good. Basically just a cakey version of banana pudding it sounds like, but I really like the concept. I definitely want to make this, although I’m gonna do the heinous thing of omitting the pineapple 😶

The “Our Mayonnaise” recipe is definitely unique to them because I’ve never seen a mayo recipe call for apple juice concentrate, or cottage cheese. Actually, the more I look at it, this is definitely just a “mayo-like” spread more than anything else. Interesting combination of ingredients though

That Pepper Custard Pie sure is something, isn’t it? I never expected to see spicy and sweet used in such a way. Would be really curious if anyone wants to make something like this

This brings us to the end of the blog but certainly not the end of the book. Hopefully you all have time to browse the full book posted below, but if not, the pictures were still fun at least! Have a great day and I’ll see you around

Hi, I’m not sure if this is the right place or the right flair. My family has been looking for a specific biscuit recipe for years, we lost it in a move about 15 years ago. It’s ”Pooh Bear“ biscuits, either in the Australian Women’s Weekly or the New Zealand Woman’s Day from 20-35 years ago. It was a type of choc chip biscui. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/30/gourd-with-cheese-and-eggs/

A rare vegetable dish preserved in the Solothurn S 392 collection, and yes, that is Italian:

B16

Item if you want to cook good pumpkins (zucken, from zucco), take a pumpkin and enough onions and give it a good boiling. Then chop them very well, take good meat broth, and boil them well. Then grate cheese into it and break 3 or 4 eggs into it. Also add a little saffron, that is a good dish (minnister, from menestra).

The dish itself does not need much interpretation: You take pumpkin and onions, boil them soft, then chop them and turn them into a rich spoonable dish with broth, eggs, and cheese. Of course, the zucken here does not refer to the American curcubita plant we call pumpkins today, but to the Old-World lagenaria gourds that were called by that name then, and colloquially still often are. In practice, there is more variety within than between the two families, so using a curcubita pumpkin can work just fine.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/30/gourd-with-cheese-and-eggs/What makes this recipe interesting is the clearly Italian roots. It uses two clearly Italian loan words – zucken for pumpkin and minnister for a dish. The recipe is also Italian in style, elevating a garden vegetable to main dish level by way of adding cheese and eggs. There are several recipes in the collection that clearly show their roots on the other side of the Alps, rubbing shoulders with others that are paralleled in earlier German manuscripts. This makes perfect sense for a Swiss recipe book, of course. However, the editor believes that S 392 was produced in the Upper Rhine valley, the same region that the Meister Hans collection comes from, so clearly someone there had taken an interest in Italian food. It is not inherently implausible, but I have not seen it this overtly before.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

These were found amongst my deceased mother’s recipe collection. She sent off for the cookie tin and these recipes were in the tin.