Even better than finding old cookbooks at garage sales and books stores, is finding clippings and handwritten recipes inside those books. Luckily, most of the books I’ve picked up over the years have notes and tidbits hidden inside the pages.

Mexican Fudge handwritten inside of The Betty Furness Westinghouse Cook Book, 1954. I either picked this book up in New Orleans or Austin, I can’t remember.

This NY Times article was tucked inside the Ladies’ Home Journal Cookbook from 1960 that I picked up at a garage sale in Providence. The article, dated Jan. 1, 1970 takes a look back at The 1960’s: Haute Cuisine in America. The author, Craig Claiborne looks back at the trends of the last decade including, French cuisine, the influence of the Kennedy’s in the White House, the abundance of new restaurants in NYC and Julia Child.

“The most astonishing part of the nineteen-sixties on the New York restaurant scene was the awesome debut of restaurants of numerous nationalities.”

The caption below the photo of the beef Wellington notes, “The most sought-after entree towards the end of the nineteen-sixties was the difficult-to-prepare beef Wellington, above. Fondues of all varieties–cheese, meat chocolate–were also popular for dinner parties.

What I found most odd about this clipping was that there were not attached recipes, the previous owner simply folded up the article and tucked it into her cookbook

Even funnier is that the reverse side of the paper is the sports section–hockey headline to be exact: Gilbert Returns to Action as Rangers Take on Black Hawks on Garden Ice. Even in adulthood I can’t seem to escape my childhood of Upstate NY full of food and hockey.