From the Bookshelf

[bluewhisper]

In shuffling through my books I came across the Home Book of Smoke Cooking Meat, Fish and Game, by Jack Sleight and Raymond Hull, from 1971.

It begins:

There has lately occured a powerful upsurge of interest in traditional arts and crafts. ... The art of smoke cookery and smoke curing seemed, a few years ago, to be nearly extinct. Big-scale commercial smoking was being supplanted by new methods of food preparation; some so-called "smoked" foods were prepared without any real application of smoke. Few city-dwellers knew or cared that it was possible to smoke food at home; the few who wanted to try found that published information was scanty, and some of that unreliable.

It goes on the describe the benefits of home smoking. In a section subtitled Economy:

Many commercially smoked foods are expensive. Typical prices recently observed are:
Sliced smoked turkey, 6 ozs for 69¢. = $1.84 per lb. ...

And later, this:

The commercial food processor must necessarily cater to an assumed average customer; but home-smoked food can be prepared exactly to the cook's own taste!

There is a keen pleasure in offering to family and friends better smoked food than they can buy in any store. Even more satisfying is it to produce smoked delicacies that cannot be bought at the food store, at any price.

I'm just starting to leaf through this book so I'll probably be posting more material as I find it. I have a lot of other old books and magazines. I like having the opportunity to look up material not already found online, and put it out for others to find.

 

[bluewhisper]

American Dictionary of Slang, 1962

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• bluewhisper
• Dec 7, 2016

 

[gearjammer]

Cool.

Ed