365 Foreign Dishes

Author(s) unknown, but it was printed for 1908. The concept was to assign one foreign dish for each day of that year (they seem to have omitted February 29th, as 1908 was indeed a leap year). The value in this free, public domain book, is both in the types of foods people ate back then -- and while most people didn't season their foods for foreign appetites, they did eat the main elements of many of these dishes on a regular basis. So, while the Indian/Hindu dishes get a mere nodding of curry powder, and Asian dishes are mostly noted by the addition of rice, there's a fair bit of tongue, tripe and other items most of us don't want to consider today. (Our great grandparents believed in waste not, want not... in all compartments of their lives.) The very first recipe is for Austrian Goulasch (Goulash), wherein the reader is instructed to boil 2 calves' heads in salted water, and go on from there. Paprika is the seasoning (one teaspoon only) which ties this item into Austrian cookery.


Other foreign cuisines seem to be more accurate -- there's a Scottish haggis recipe that seems fairly valid for that culture.


I am thinking that the original book was published in the US, as there are also English and Irish foreign recipes. There are desserts as well as various meat or vegetable dishes. There are salads.


I like this book a lot -- it is a slice of time reflecting both what people here in America were eating, and what they were thinking were foreign foods and how they were made. Of course, quantities of ingredients were not always, or erratically, included, and cooking times were usually vague. ("Until tender" is sometimes as specific as it gets.)