Food & Gaiman

I made a diary entry about how "unfortunate" I was to create displays about food and Neil Gaiman.  I hope you know I was kidding!  I just realized I never posted the finished products.

I've known since the beginning of the year that I would do a food display for the Thanksgiving season.  I had fun just roaming around our collection pulling books that had to do with food: I pulled fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, and non-fiction.  I couldn't fit all of the cookbooks we have, so I tried to put a good variety.  Praise be to the heavens that the Uni Collection does have what I think is my most favorite food book of all time: The Gallery of Regrettable Food.  When I worked at Pages for All Ages, we used to pour over this book at the Info Desk.  It is one of my all-time ultimate favorites.

I also made some signage for the display, encouraging students to ask for help if they need to find more food books or want to search for them at one of the public libraries.  I had to use a still from Oliver for this...of course.  This is also how I got a photo of Jamie Oliver included.

The Neil Gaiman display also turned out well and included signage.  Since he's the author of the month, I included info about him: vital stats, his work, his social media sites, etc.  It was great fun collecting his books for the display, but a lot of his books are checked out--no shocker there. 

He's one of the biggest advocates for libraries, and for some great personal stories he has about libraries and being a book nerd, check out these links:

• Libraries are Cultural "Seed Corn"
• Reading Agency Lecture

Archival Wonder

As I've mentioned before, I am the grad assistant in the largest high school library in the country.  (Yeah, yeah, I know: awesome sauce for me, and I should stop going on about it!)  Because we are a smaller part of a very large university library, archival work is done here.  Specifically, archival work of Uni objects: lots of newpaper clippings, old photos, items written/produced by Uni alums, etc.  One item that was found a couple of weeks ago is dreamy...super...and tasty.  It's an old cookbook.

Not just ANY old cookbook.  One of THESE old cookbooks:

Yup, that's right, folks.  One of the old style community cookbooks.  I love them.  I love, love, LOVE them.  They tell a story of a time through food.  And the story this old Uni cookbook has is interesting, layered, and well, I'll just say it again: TASTY.

I think the thing I'm most intrigued by is the amount of "ethnic" recipes in the book.  This is testament to the fact that even in the 1960s, when appreciating other cultures was still new to some in this country, Uni was a safe place, an inviting place, for celebrating different heritages and sharing them with others.  In this instance through a school-wide cookbook.

 (Did anyone even know what tofu and lychees were in 1968?)

I think my two favorite recipes have to be "Percolated Coffee" and "Hobo Chocolate."

I also love the descriptions that include "nutritious" and "filling."  These usually pertain to items with a lot of canned goods, which are full of sodium, and using some good ole fashioned ground beef.  Oh, 1968.  I love ya!

One final point: You bet your sweet bippy I'm gonna try some of these out!  Maybe I'll start with this one for cheesecake: