Cooking With the Junior League

Posted on March 9, 2009 by lmharnisch

My friend Mary McCoy, of This Book Is for You (done with her husband, Brady Potts) and On Bunker Hill, has begun a new blog, Cooking With the Junior League, that will examine regional cooking as reflected in Junior League Cookbooks. Mary plans to spend a year exploring one cookbook a week. First up: Charleston Receipts, published in 1950 by the Junior League of
Charleston, S.C.She writes: “An endeavor of this scope and grandeur requires an auspicious beginning. And there is no Junior League cookbook more grand or auspicious than Charleston Receipts. First published in 1950,
it is the oldest Junior League cookbook still in print, and through its
numerous printings has raised over $1 million for the Junior League of Charleston’s
community projects. It was also a national bestseller in the 1950s, and
references to it still turn up today in the pages of publications as
varied as Gourmet, the Black Issues Book Review, and the New York Times. It was inducted into the Walter S. McIlhenny Hall of Fame for Community Cookbooks in 1990.”

Simple math shows that this will involve 52 Junior League cookbooks, but Mary assures me this is no problem: In addition to her own collection, the Los Angeles Public Library, where she works, has a large number of them. A little rummaging in ProQuest shows that the Los Angeles Junior League issued a cookbook in 1939. Anybody got one handy to share?
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About lmharnisch

I am retired from the Los Angeles Times
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