Through Chef Fritz Blank’s anecdotes and stories about how he became Chef Fritz, I settled on recurring themes—the Army, music, German and Austrian cooking, the strong personalities that fed his developing taste for cookery, his love of camaraderie and more—to guide the sections of A Chef & His Library. These particular books deal with his life, his passions and most especially his education as a chef.
The materials are part of a working library, though some important books are missing. Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise for instance, is not included because it sits among two dozen dog-eared books on a Deux Cheminées’ kitchen shelf for all the staff to use.
A specific book such as the American Woman’s Cook Book contains recipes Blank explored and tested as a young boy. Others present variations of recipes that Blank subsequently modified and integrated into his 21st-century kitchen. Some are memory aids for people and times long gone. All are treasures of Fritz Blank.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Over the past thirty years, Chef Fritz has amassed a collection of over 3,000 recipe booklets from churches, utility companies, social groups and manufacturers. Among collectors, the booklets’ vibrant and sometimes kitschy illustrations are strong attractions. Despite the pamphlets’ lowbrow reputations among some culinary scholars, Blank dotes on these pamphlets for their
… Representation of recipes which, like that of ladies’ journals, culinary magazines, and newspaper features, may be one of the best historical sources of information about what American families actually cooked and ate.
Blank calls the collection Victus Populi (Food of the People) because, since the late 18th century, pamphlets like these have taught American homemakers how and what to cook. As promotional items and product premiums, they were not heirlooms, but kitchen tools.
(l to r) The Worcester Salt Cook Book. NY: Worcester Salt Co., n.d.; Meat Curing Made Easy. Chicago, IL: Morton Salt Co., 1935.; Make the Most of Your Meat. Cambridge, MA: Aunt Jenny’s Wartime Better Cook Club, n.d.; Merits of Pure Lard. No publisher, n.d.
Hutchins, John Nathan. Hutchins’ Almanack and
Ephemeris.
New York: H. Gaine, 1795.
Indeed, some booklets in the collection—worn, torn and spattered with ancient ingredients—were obviously used by home cooks aspiring to become patriotic consumers, sophisticated party-throwers, and frugal but skilled home cooks. Booklets instructed readers on using honey and molasses instead of scarce cane sugar during two world wars, laying elegant spreads with canned California olives and iced celery, molding swank gelatin salads, mixing cocktails and placing silverware correctly.
“Take some goat’s flesh, chop it up small and boil it to a strong jelly…” begins a recipe from the young American republic in Victus Populi’s oldest of pamphlets. A typical almanac of its time, Hutchins’ is filled with recipes, practical information and philosophical advice, including dates of eclipses and circuit court days, months in the new French calendar and the “mental and personal qualifications of a wife.”
Oil, gas, and electric stoves, electric skillets, bottled sodas, blenders, crock pots, Le Creuset cookware, canned soup and home freezers were all once innovations whose potentials lay unsuspected by home makers. Manufacturers promoted unfamiliar new appliances and foods by using recipe booklets to assuage housewives’ fear of frying, baking and blending. Mercantile messages get pounded home in pamphlets like How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows and Pet Recipes (which, disappointingly, contains nothing more startling than recipes using evaporated milk).
Because the pamphlets were designed to sell products and not merely to educate, the collection occasionally strikes some odd chords. Do famous chefs really use Campfire marshmallows? Is potato chip salad the most expeditious route to impressing important company? Blank doesn’t let these suspect oddities cast doubt on pamphlets as a whole:
I use Victus Populi all the time. Corporate history, advertising history, regional dishes, failed products, the enduring favorites: these booklets have it all, and together they reveal a heritage of American cooking often better than any cookbook can. Most of their recipes smack of homemade goodness and translate well into contemporary kitchens of the third millennium. After all, would a peanut butter manufacturer publish recipes for peanut butter cookies that taste awful or are hard to make?
(Top, l to r) Neil, Marion Harris. Mrs. Neil’s Cooking Secrets. Cincinnati: Procter and Gamble Co., 1924; Pet Recipes: Pet Milk Cookbook. St. Louis: Pet Milk Co., 1931;
The Sunny Side of Life Book and Recipes. Battle Creek, MI: The Kellogg Co., 1934;
Scott, Anna B. Cook Book. Supplement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 1936;
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. 300 Ways to Serve Eggs. Chicago: Consolidated Book Pubs., Inc., 1940;
(Bottom, l to r) Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Philadelphia: Thomson Printing Co., n.d.; Mapleine Dainties and How to Make Them. Seattle: Crescent Manufacturing Co., n.d.; Recipes, Contadina Brand Tomato Paste. No publisher, n.d.; A Little Book of Useful Facts. New York: Phenix Cheese Co., n.d.; Quick Cheese Tricks Using Kraft’s Cheez Whiz. Chicago, n.d.
Music is Chef Blank's favorite metaphor. As he invokes comparisons of kitchen preparations to conducting a symphony and of chefs to musicians, Blank leaves no trace of doubt about who wields the baton in Deux Chemineés’ kitchen. “We cooks,” he has said,
have a different purpose than do diners at a table: we are the creators and keepers of endpoints. Just as a violinist playing Mozart needs and uses a totally distinct set of sensorial awareness than does an average person sitting in the audience….Chefs should use all five of their senses to compose, create, execute, adjust and titrate as they work. Accordingly, a chef’s memory must be keener and more directed than is the memory of a diner, for that memory holds the key to structuring a great symphony…
Each year Chef Blank’s love of music culminates in a fundraising dinner for the Philadelphia Singers. These Great Composer dinners feature menus that might have been enjoyed by Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Verdi and others. After determining the food preferences and habits of a composer from manuscripts, diaries and personal papers in special collections, Blank then uses his own library, suggesting specific recipes, for instance, of 1780’s Vienna, 1890’s Parma or the Russian and Jewish foods of early 20th-century New York.
Music is Chef Blank's favorite metaphor. As he invokes comparisons of kitchen preparations to conducting a symphony and of chefs to musicians, Blank leaves no trace of doubt about who wields the baton in Deux Chemineés’ kitchen. “We cooks,” he has said,
have a different purpose than do diners at a table: we are the creators and keepers of endpoints. Just as a violinist playing Mozart needs and uses a totally distinct set of sensorial awareness than does an average person sitting in the audience….Chefs should use all five of their senses to compose, create, execute, adjust and titrate as they work. Accordingly, a chef’s memory must be keener and more directed than is the memory of a diner, for that memory holds the key to structuring a great symphony…
Each year Chef Blank’s love of music culminates in a fundraising dinner for the Philadelphia Singers. These Great Composer dinners feature menus that might have been enjoyed by Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Verdi and others. After determining the food preferences and habits of a composer from manuscripts, diaries and personal papers in special collections, Blank then uses his own library, suggesting specific recipes, for instance, of 1780’s Vienna, 1890’s Parma or the Russian and Jewish foods of early 20th-century New York.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
One wall of Blank’s library is anchored by thousands of cookbooks compiled by churches, schools, auxiliaries and clubs in communities across North America. Here are recipes for crab cakes from Maryland, south Louisiana rabbit etouffée, Navajo fry bread and endless congealed and ambrosia salads.
There is also a section devoted to the towns of Blank’s youth, including the swampy developing neighborhood of Pennsauken, New Jersey, nicknamed “Cattail City” where his family lived. Though the chef does not have a voluminous collection of materials about his early days, New Jersey remains a powerful draw.
The Jersey shore is a great interest of mine. Those great old hotels like the Shelbourne and the Traymore fascinated me while my friends went to the steel pier. Unfortunately, I just don’t have much from that era.
Since Atlantic City was too expensive for frequent trips and Wildwood was “too city” for young Blank, he and his friends often visited small town eateries and food shacks. A number of books from these small towns highlight regional specialties like muskrat or seafood, a continuing passion for the chef.
Cooking Favorites of Tuckerton.
NJ: Tuckerton Library Board, 1966.
All cooks have their tools. For some, that means knives and rolling pins. For Philadelphia Chef Fritz Blank, it includes a library of 10,000 cookery books he uses as often as any utensil. Chef Fritz taps his cookery library to create menus that are deeply rooted in the diverse culinary traditions of Europe and America. The music aficionado and former dairy farmer, clinical microbiologist and military officer collects books in all these fields, but his culinary collection has become a Philadelphia institution.
Here scholarly tomes vie with community cookbooks, entire newspaper food sections, menus and recipe pamphlets for shelf space. Even ephemera such as advertising postcards are not beneath notice in Blank’s eclectic and egalitarian library.
All cooks have their tools. For some, that means knives and rolling pins. For Philadelphia Chef Fritz Blank, it includes a library of 10,000 cookery books he uses as often as any utensil. Chef Fritz taps his cookery library to create menus that are deeply rooted in the diverse culinary traditions of Europe and America. The music aficionado and former dairy farmer, clinical microbiologist and military officer collects books in all these fields, but his culinary collection has become a Philadelphia institution.
Here scholarly tomes vie with community cookbooks, entire newspaper food sections, menus and recipe pamphlets for shelf space. Even ephemera such as advertising postcards are not beneath notice in Blank’s eclectic and egalitarian library.
Chef Blank’s gentle obsession with written recipes belies an influence stronger on his cooking than his culinary library: cooking with others who left profound and lasting impressions on his culinary scope and style.
Among the influences on Blank’s cooking was the formidable kitchen presence of his Würtemburger grandmother, Mary Katherina Blank (1859-c. 1954). Fritz’s first cooking memory is, at age three, helping to make his Oma’s potato salad. After more than fifty years, Blank still makes this salad by the gallon for staff meals and special occasions.
Chef Blank’s gentle obsession with written recipes belies an influence stronger on his cooking than his culinary library: cooking with others who left profound and lasting impressions on his culinary scope and style.
Among the influences on Blank’s cooking was the formidable kitchen presence of his Würtemburger grandmother, Mary Katherina Blank (1859-c. 1954). Fritz’s first cooking memory is, at age three, helping to make his Oma’s potato salad. After more than fifty years, Blank still makes this salad by the gallon for staff meals and special occasions.
Fredericton High School
War-Time Recipe Book.
Fredericton, New Brunswick:
McMurray Press, 1942.
Chef Fritz, a former captain in the US Army Medical Service Corps, continues to collect books in all fields of cookery in any language, but he especially seeks those dealing with disaster and wartime for both military and civilian cooks. Items from the Second World War in particular fuel his interest in rationed goods and the lack of ingredients formerly taken for granted, like spices from Japanese-occupied Pacific islands.
Since food and nutrition have long helped define war, blocs of war cooking books make incursions into nearly every library area: some crop up in the canning section, others in baking or in essays and biographies of chefs like August Escoffier and Alexis Soyer. Patriotic pamphlet titles—Delicious Desserts Every Day in Spite of Rationing, Conserves de Guerre, and Make the Most of Your Meat—maintain a permanent outpost in the Victus Populi.
Fredericton High School
War-Time Recipe Book.
Fredericton, New Brunswick:
McMurray Press, 1942.
Chef Fritz, a former captain in the US Army Medical Service Corps, continues to collect books in all fields of cookery in any language, but he especially seeks those dealing with disaster and wartime for both military and civilian cooks. Items from the Second World War in particular fuel his interest in rationed goods and the lack of ingredients formerly taken for granted, like spices from Japanese-occupied Pacific islands.
Since food and nutrition have long helped define war, blocs of war cooking books make incursions into nearly every library area: some crop up in the canning section, others in baking or in essays and biographies of chefs like August Escoffier and Alexis Soyer. Patriotic pamphlet titles—Delicious Desserts Every Day in Spite of Rationing, Conserves de Guerre, and Make the Most of Your Meat—maintain a permanent outpost in the Victus Populi.
Fredericton High School
War-Time Recipe Book.
Fredericton, New Brunswick:
McMurray Press, 1942.
Chef Fritz, a former captain in the US Army Medical Service Corps, continues to collect books in all fields of cookery in any language, but he especially seeks those dealing with disaster and wartime for both military and civilian cooks. Items from the Second World War in particular fuel his interest in rationed goods and the lack of ingredients formerly taken for granted, like spices from Japanese-occupied Pacific islands.
Since food and nutrition have long helped define war, blocs of war cooking books make incursions into nearly every library area: some crop up in the canning section, others in baking or in essays and biographies of chefs like August Escoffier and Alexis Soyer. Patriotic pamphlet titles—Delicious Desserts Every Day in Spite of Rationing, Conserves de Guerre, and Make the Most of Your Meat—maintain a permanent outpost in the Victus Populi.
Blank admits that, as a child, he ruined his mother’s copy of American Woman’s Cook Book through constant recipe testing. This replacement is one of his many editions from 1938-1953.
A Chef and His Library
Born in “East Philadelphia” (Pennsauken, New Jersey), Blank learned to cook at his grandmother Mary Blank’s apron strings, and food has remained a constant in his life. His foray into restaurateuring was inspired by a series of dinners with friends in the early 1970’s. Cooking directly from the 1969 Great Dinners from Life, Blank recreated every menu in the book. His guests’ enthusiastic claims that he should open a restaurant proved his first push from cook to chef. Great Dinners includes international menus such as Brazilian, Belgian and French and gives precise explanations of how and why dishes work, the kinds of scientific framing Blank still serves up when teaching his own recipes at his Philadelphia restaurant Deux Chemineés.
On going projects—stacks and piles of books, menus, articles and scrawled notes—mark most surfaces in the library. Here, a tentative menu for a Verdi tribute dinner; there, experimental formulae for firmer watermelon pickles; over there, a series of notes on gelling agents. Like a symphony maestro, Blank is at the center of this bustling research, comparing recipes in original languages, FedExing hot soup across state lines or taking notes on dishes for staff meals.
New Year at the Savoy 1994/95.
Menu. London, England:
Hotel Savoy, 1994.
If books document the chef’s research obsessions, his menus are a more personal collection. Blank’s friend Charlie Schneider introduced him to menu signing during the 1970’s. At private dinners, Schneider posted handwritten menus he sometimes invited diners to inscribe. Blank’s continuing practice of passing bills of fare around a table has left behind scrawlings of scientists, celebrities, students, and friends on thousands of menus as a culinary diary noting when, where, what and with whom he has eaten over thirty years.
While books are the chef’s manifest obsession, food menus are a strong passion. His practice of passing menus around a table to be signed has built a more personal collection that annotated when, where, what and with whom he has eaten over thirty years. His efforts to secure those menus have not always been above the table. When Blank wants a restaurant’s menu and is rebuffed by cost-conscious staff, he may slyly acquire a copy anyway: “Up the back of my shirt is how I usually do it.”
New Year at the Savoy 1994/95.
Menu. London, England:
Hotel Savoy, 1994.
If books document the chef’s research obsessions, his menus are a more personal collection. Blank’s friend Charlie Schneider introduced him to menu signing during the 1970’s. At private dinners, Schneider posted handwritten menus he sometimes invited diners to inscribe. Blank’s continuing practice of passing bills of fare around a table has left behind scrawlings of scientists, celebrities, students, and friends on thousands of menus as a culinary diary noting when, where, what and with whom he has eaten over thirty years.
While books are the chef’s manifest obsession, food menus are a strong passion. His practice of passing menus around a table to be signed has built a more personal collection that annotated when, where, what and with whom he has eaten over thirty years. His efforts to secure those menus have not always been above the table. When Blank wants a restaurant’s menu and is rebuffed by cost-conscious staff, he may slyly acquire a copy anyway: “Up the back of my shirt is how I usually do it.”
New Year at the Savoy 1994/95.
Menu. London, England:
Hotel Savoy, 1994.
If books document the chef’s research obsessions, his menus are a more personal collection. Blank’s friend Charlie Schneider introduced him to menu signing during the 1970’s. At private dinners, Schneider posted handwritten menus he sometimes invited diners to inscribe. Blank’s continuing practice of passing bills of fare around a table has left behind scrawlings of scientists, celebrities, students, and friends on thousands of menus as a culinary diary noting when, where, what and with whom he has eaten over thirty years.
While books are the chef’s manifest obsession, food menus are a strong passion. His practice of passing menus around a table to be signed has built a more personal collection that annotated when, where, what and with whom he has eaten over thirty years. His efforts to secure those menus have not always been above the table. When Blank wants a restaurant’s menu and is rebuffed by cost-conscious staff, he may slyly acquire a copy anyway: “Up the back of my shirt is how I usually do it.”
It is increasingly rare for Blank to find what he considers well written books of living authors who approach meals from the table rather than from the stove because of shifts in what the populus regards as good writing. “The bulk of modern culinary literature,” says the chef, “is no fun to read. The current crop of writers may be good, but they are so curtailed by editors—who can tell?”
Of favorites who write from the table, three essayists leap from his list; Joseph Wechsberg, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher.
Staff meals at Deux Cheminées seethe with undeniable Germanic undercurrents. Even Blank’s seafood rendition of Philadelphia pepperpot—with turtle, shrimp, oysters and pumpkin—succumbs to spätzle, small dumplings scraped into the simmering pot. Blank’s love of soups and einlagen—their accompaniments of noodles, dumplings, Reibele (grated dough) and meaty, ravioli-like Maultaschen—is stoked by some twelve dozen German and Austrian cookbooks.
The Neuestes Kochbuch’s battery of homey soups—crab, chocolate, beer, liver, cherry, snail and wine soups—calls for broad bowls, big spoons and courageous appetites.
Handwritten cookery books are unparalleled documents of real use that describe how ingredients and techniques change over time. For Chef Fritz, these manuscripts and older printed books often provide a foundation for building modern recipes. His rendition of an 18th-century recipe for seed cake strewn with caraway seeds is based on a number of sources, some of which use candied seeds known as comfits.
Glasse, Hannah. The Complete Confectioner; or, the Whole Art of Confectionery Made Plain and Easy.
London: Printed for J. Cooke, c. 1747.
The above copy of one of England’s best historical pastry books, The Complete Confectioner, is one of a dozen titles in Blank’s library that once belonged to American cookbook author and teacher James Beard.
Handwritten cookery books are unparalleled documents of real use that describe how ingredients and techniques change over time. For Chef Fritz, these manuscripts and older printed books often provide a foundation for building modern recipes. His rendition of an 18th-century recipe for seed cake strewn with caraway seeds is based on a number of sources, some of which use candied seeds known as comfits.
Glasse, Hannah. The Complete Confectioner; or, the Whole Art of Confectionery Made Plain and Easy.
London: Printed for J. Cooke, c. 1747.
The above copy of one of England’s best historical pastry books, The Complete Confectioner, is one of a dozen titles in Blank’s library that once belonged to American cookbook author and teacher James Beard.
Handwritten cookery books are unparalleled documents of real use that describe how ingredients and techniques change over time. For Chef Fritz, these manuscripts and older printed books often provide a foundation for building modern recipes. His rendition of an 18th-century recipe for seed cake strewn with caraway seeds is based on a number of sources, some of which use candied seeds known as comfits.
Glasse, Hannah. The Complete Confectioner; or, the Whole Art of Confectionery Made Plain and Easy.
London: Printed for J. Cooke, c. 1747.
The above copy of one of England’s best historical pastry books, The Complete Confectioner, is one of a dozen titles in Blank’s library that once belonged to American cookbook author and teacher James Beard.
Handwritten cookery books are unparalleled documents of real use that describe how ingredients and techniques change over time. For Chef Fritz, these manuscripts and older printed books often provide a foundation for building modern recipes. His rendition of an 18th-century recipe for seed cake strewn with caraway seeds is based on a number of sources, some of which use candied seeds known as comfits.
Glasse, Hannah. The Complete Confectioner; or, the Whole Art of Confectionery Made Plain and Easy.
London: Printed for J. Cooke, c. 1747.
The above copy of one of England’s best historical pastry books, The Complete Confectioner, is one of a dozen titles in Blank’s library that once belonged to American cookbook author and teacher James Beard.
Interpreting older recipes requires a keen understanding of ingredients. Many dishes cannot be recreated exactly in modern kitchens; once common ingredients may be unavailable or are now known to be toxic. Sometimes, taste preferences have changed, leaving modern eaters to balk at presentations such as highly sweetened meats or cock’s blood in ale.
Excerpted from: Anonymous. A Collection of Recipes. England: c. 1730
At other times, the names and nature of ingredients have changed. A cake recipe calling for multiple ground nutmegs, for instance, might seem excessive unless modern cooks understand that in the past nutmegs could be years old by the time they reached market. When so much of a spice’s aromatic compounds were dissipated, cooks sometimes compensated by increasing its bulk in recipes.
Older books’ detailed descriptions and illustrations for once widely available foodstuffs are important resources for translating recipes into modern kitchens. The Grocers’ Hand-Book gives additional glimpses into Philadelphia’s 19th century sugar refining heyday, including discussions of occupational hazards such as skin-burrowing sugar mites.
Lo scalo’s litany of dishes unveils an ecclesiastical gourmandism rarely seen today. As chief steward to the Aldobrandini, a family of Roman politicians and prelates, Lancellotti oversaw immense banquets that Ippolito Aldobrandino (later Pope Clement VIII) and his nephew Pietro hosted for visiting dignitaries.
Interpreting older recipes requires a keen understanding of ingredients. Many dishes cannot be recreated exactly in modern kitchens; once common ingredients may be unavailable or are now known to be toxic. Sometimes, taste preferences have changed, leaving modern eaters to balk at presentations such as highly sweetened meats or cock’s blood in ale.
Excerpted from: Anonymous. A Collection of Recipes. England: c. 1730
At other times, the names and nature of ingredients have changed. A cake recipe calling for multiple ground nutmegs, for instance, might seem excessive unless modern cooks understand that in the past nutmegs could be years old by the time they reached market. When so much of a spice’s aromatic compounds were dissipated, cooks sometimes compensated by increasing its bulk in recipes.
Older books’ detailed descriptions and illustrations for once widely available foodstuffs are important resources for translating recipes into modern kitchens. The Grocers’ Hand-Book gives additional glimpses into Philadelphia’s 19th century sugar refining heyday, including discussions of occupational hazards such as skin-burrowing sugar mites.
Lo scalo’s litany of dishes unveils an ecclesiastical gourmandism rarely seen today. As chief steward to the Aldobrandini, a family of Roman politicians and prelates, Lancellotti oversaw immense banquets that Ippolito Aldobrandino (later Pope Clement VIII) and his nephew Pietro hosted for visiting dignitaries.
Interpreting older recipes requires a keen understanding of ingredients. Many dishes cannot be recreated exactly in modern kitchens; once common ingredients may be unavailable or are now known to be toxic. Sometimes, taste preferences have changed, leaving modern eaters to balk at presentations such as highly sweetened meats or cock’s blood in ale.
Excerpted from: Anonymous. A Collection of Recipes. England: c. 1730
At other times, the names and nature of ingredients have changed. A cake recipe calling for multiple ground nutmegs, for instance, might seem excessive unless modern cooks understand that in the past nutmegs could be years old by the time they reached market. When so much of a spice’s aromatic compounds were dissipated, cooks sometimes compensated by increasing its bulk in recipes.
Older books’ detailed descriptions and illustrations for once widely available foodstuffs are important resources for translating recipes into modern kitchens. The Grocers’ Hand-Book gives additional glimpses into Philadelphia’s 19th century sugar refining heyday, including discussions of occupational hazards such as skin-burrowing sugar mites.
Lo scalo’s litany of dishes unveils an ecclesiastical gourmandism rarely seen today. As chief steward to the Aldobrandini, a family of Roman politicians and prelates, Lancellotti oversaw immense banquets that Ippolito Aldobrandino (later Pope Clement VIII) and his nephew Pietro hosted for visiting dignitaries.
Interpreting older recipes requires a keen understanding of ingredients. Many dishes cannot be recreated exactly in modern kitchens; once common ingredients may be unavailable or are now known to be toxic. Sometimes, taste preferences have changed, leaving modern eaters to balk at presentations such as highly sweetened meats or cock’s blood in ale.
Excerpted from: Anonymous. A Collection of Recipes. England: c. 1730
At other times, the names and nature of ingredients have changed. A cake recipe calling for multiple ground nutmegs, for instance, might seem excessive unless modern cooks understand that in the past nutmegs could be years old by the time they reached market. When so much of a spice’s aromatic compounds were dissipated, cooks sometimes compensated by increasing its bulk in recipes.
Older books’ detailed descriptions and illustrations for once widely available foodstuffs are important resources for translating recipes into modern kitchens. The Grocers’ Hand-Book gives additional glimpses into Philadelphia’s 19th century sugar refining heyday, including discussions of occupational hazards such as skin-burrowing sugar mites.
Lo scalo’s litany of dishes unveils an ecclesiastical gourmandism rarely seen today. As chief steward to the Aldobrandini, a family of Roman politicians and prelates, Lancellotti oversaw immense banquets that Ippolito Aldobrandino (later Pope Clement VIII) and his nephew Pietro hosted for visiting dignitaries.
Louis Szathmary at the James Beard House.
Photograph. New York, NY, 1972.
“I luff you like a brother.”
Louis I. Szathmary (1919-1996)
Blank still delights in impishly imitating the cooking advice of his late Hungarian friend, Chef Louis Szathmary. As he takes on a heavy accent and furrows his brow in stern disapproval, the chef wags a chastising finger. “Freetz,” he precisely intones, “I luff you like a brother, but you don’t know sheet about cookink potatoes. Don’t vorry,” the eyebrows relax, “I vill show you how!”
Through their ribald faxes and daily telephone conversations, it seemed each had found an earthy doppelganger. Both were former professionals and military officers who ran successful restaurants. Both loved the foods of central Europe. And both maintained massive cookbook collections plundered for facts, recipes and inspiration. Szathmary’s exacting expectations, his books, and his letters to Fritz are an enduring legacy of instructions that began years ago.
Szathmary wrote several cookbooks. His recipe for roast goose has undergone a particularly thorough reading by Blank. Despite all the ink, the dish appears virtually unchanged every winter on Deux Cheminées’ menu. Szathmary’s thumbprint on Blank’s cooking is reflected in a sizable collection of Hungarian cookbooks.
Louis Szathmary at the James Beard House.
Photograph. New York, NY, 1972.
“I luff you like a brother.”
Louis I. Szathmary (1919-1996)
Blank still delights in impishly imitating the cooking advice of his late Hungarian friend, Chef Louis Szathmary. As he takes on a heavy accent and furrows his brow in stern disapproval, the chef wags a chastising finger. “Freetz,” he precisely intones, “I luff you like a brother, but you don’t know sheet about cookink potatoes. Don’t vorry,” the eyebrows relax, “I vill show you how!”
Through their ribald faxes and daily telephone conversations, it seemed each had found an earthy doppelganger. Both were former professionals and military officers who ran successful restaurants. Both loved the foods of central Europe. And both maintained massive cookbook collections plundered for facts, recipes and inspiration. Szathmary’s exacting expectations, his books, and his letters to Fritz are an enduring legacy of instructions that began years ago.
Szathmary wrote several cookbooks. His recipe for roast goose has undergone a particularly thorough reading by Blank. Despite all the ink, the dish appears virtually unchanged every winter on Deux Cheminées’ menu. Szathmary’s thumbprint on Blank’s cooking is reflected in a sizable collection of Hungarian cookbooks.
Louis Szathmary at the James Beard House.
Photograph. New York, NY, 1972.
“I luff you like a brother.”
Louis I. Szathmary (1919-1996)
Blank still delights in impishly imitating the cooking advice of his late Hungarian friend, Chef Louis Szathmary. As he takes on a heavy accent and furrows his brow in stern disapproval, the chef wags a chastising finger. “Freetz,” he precisely intones, “I luff you like a brother, but you don’t know sheet about cookink potatoes. Don’t vorry,” the eyebrows relax, “I vill show you how!”
Through their ribald faxes and daily telephone conversations, it seemed each had found an earthy doppelganger. Both were former professionals and military officers who ran successful restaurants. Both loved the foods of central Europe. And both maintained massive cookbook collections plundered for facts, recipes and inspiration. Szathmary’s exacting expectations, his books, and his letters to Fritz are an enduring legacy of instructions that began years ago.
Szathmary wrote several cookbooks. His recipe for roast goose has undergone a particularly thorough reading by Blank. Despite all the ink, the dish appears virtually unchanged every winter on Deux Cheminées’ menu. Szathmary’s thumbprint on Blank’s cooking is reflected in a sizable collection of Hungarian cookbooks.
Louis Szathmary at the James Beard House.
Photograph. New York, NY, 1972.
“I luff you like a brother.”
Louis I. Szathmary (1919-1996)
Blank still delights in impishly imitating the cooking advice of his late Hungarian friend, Chef Louis Szathmary. As he takes on a heavy accent and furrows his brow in stern disapproval, the chef wags a chastising finger. “Freetz,” he precisely intones, “I luff you like a brother, but you don’t know sheet about cookink potatoes. Don’t vorry,” the eyebrows relax, “I vill show you how!”
Through their ribald faxes and daily telephone conversations, it seemed each had found an earthy doppelganger. Both were former professionals and military officers who ran successful restaurants. Both loved the foods of central Europe. And both maintained massive cookbook collections plundered for facts, recipes and inspiration. Szathmary’s exacting expectations, his books, and his letters to Fritz are an enduring legacy of instructions that began years ago.
Szathmary wrote several cookbooks. His recipe for roast goose has undergone a particularly thorough reading by Blank. Despite all the ink, the dish appears virtually unchanged every winter on Deux Cheminées’ menu. Szathmary’s thumbprint on Blank’s cooking is reflected in a sizable collection of Hungarian cookbooks.
Clusius’ Latin dissertation on Hungarian mushrooms, originally published in 1601, separates over one hundred species into edible and nonedible fungi. Botanists of the time tended to describe few species and commingled safe and poisonous ones. Clusius, who detested the smell and taste of mushrooms, nonetheless gives examples of Hungarian preparations.
Wechsberg, Joseph. Blue Trout and Black Truffles:
The Peregrinations an Epicure.
Chicago: Academy Chicago
Publishers, 1985. On loan from Matthew Rowley.
“My dear Heinrich,” the Hofrat said, with a magnificent sweep of his hand, and accentuating every single syllable, “You might just as well have offered me a veal cutlet.”
Joseph Wechsberg (1907-1983)
Wechsberg’s Tafelspitz for the Hofrat is a particular favorite of Blank’s for its depiction of a European world all but gone, a world in which meals are prepared, served and consumed at every point by seasoned connoisseurs. In this short story, Wechsberg contends that traveling Viennese aficionados of the beef cut tafelspitz once carried charts with them to instruct foreign butchers on exactingly specific cuts that do not exist outside the Viennese tradition.
Blank maintains fat dossiers on thousands of food topics. His encyclopedic file on tafelspitz bulges with notes, clippings and manuscripts.
Wechsberg, Joseph. Blue Trout and Black Truffles:
The Peregrinations an Epicure.
Chicago: Academy Chicago
Publishers, 1985. On loan from Matthew Rowley.
“My dear Heinrich,” the Hofrat said, with a magnificent sweep of his hand, and accentuating every single syllable, “You might just as well have offered me a veal cutlet.”
Joseph Wechsberg (1907-1983)
Wechsberg’s Tafelspitz for the Hofrat is a particular favorite of Blank’s for its depiction of a European world all but gone, a world in which meals are prepared, served and consumed at every point by seasoned connoisseurs. In this short story, Wechsberg contends that traveling Viennese aficionados of the beef cut tafelspitz once carried charts with them to instruct foreign butchers on exactingly specific cuts that do not exist outside the Viennese tradition.
Blank maintains fat dossiers on thousands of food topics. His encyclopedic file on tafelspitz bulges with notes, clippings and manuscripts.
Though petty larceny does not drive most menu acquisitions for Blank, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has left its mark on his collection. Bundles of its menus arrived sporadically through the mid-1990’s from the Somerset State Correction Institute where a former Deux Cheminées dishwasher who knew the chef’s collection had been assigned to kitchen detail as a prisoner.
Weaver, William Woys. Sauerkraut Yankees.
Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Shapenote Singing
Once popular among Pennsylvania German communities, shapenote singing is an experimental form of music developed in the 19th century and characterized by lesser emphasis on harmonized melodies. Complementing the meals and recipes in Sauerkraut Yankees, a shapenote serenade could be just the thing to round out a re-creation of a proper 19th-century Pennsylvanische meal.
Gioachino Rossini
For over one hundred years, chefs have taken Auguste Escoffier’s (1846-1935) writings as the first and last word on culinary technique. Here, the renowned chef gives instructions for Tournedos Rossini, popularly regarded as the creation of composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).
Giuseppe Verdi
Occasionally, a Great Composer dish fails to seduce 21st-century palates—the 2002 Sicilian salad of calves’ feet and cucumber pickles was a little too authentic for Verdi aficionados. When Blank once asked Louis Szathmary just how authentic one needed to be when recreating historic menus, the Hungarian chef declared, “Chust up to the point of indichestibility!”
Mozart and Beethoven
Like many older books, Hagger’s title varies even within the same volume. Blank believes it to be the only known recipe book in circulation during Mozart’s lifetime written by a professional Austrian cook. Although it is an indispensable guide for interpreting menus that honor both Mozart and Beethoven, the book raises some unresolved questions. “If this is the new Salzburg cookbook,”Blank queries, “what was the old it was reacting against since there was, famously, no plain old Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch?”
Weaver, William Woys. Sauerkraut Yankees.
Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Shapenote Singing
Once popular among Pennsylvania German communities, shapenote singing is an experimental form of music developed in the 19th century and characterized by lesser emphasis on harmonized melodies. Complementing the meals and recipes in Sauerkraut Yankees, a shapenote serenade could be just the thing to round out a re-creation of a proper 19th-century Pennsylvanische meal.
Gioachino Rossini
For over one hundred years, chefs have taken Auguste Escoffier’s (1846-1935) writings as the first and last word on culinary technique. Here, the renowned chef gives instructions for Tournedos Rossini, popularly regarded as the creation of composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).
Giuseppe Verdi
Occasionally, a Great Composer dish fails to seduce 21st-century palates—the 2002 Sicilian salad of calves’ feet and cucumber pickles was a little too authentic for Verdi aficionados. When Blank once asked Louis Szathmary just how authentic one needed to be when recreating historic menus, the Hungarian chef declared, “Chust up to the point of indichestibility!”
Mozart and Beethoven
Like many older books, Hagger’s title varies even within the same volume. Blank believes it to be the only known recipe book in circulation during Mozart’s lifetime written by a professional Austrian cook. Although it is an indispensable guide for interpreting menus that honor both Mozart and Beethoven, the book raises some unresolved questions. “If this is the new Salzburg cookbook,”Blank queries, “what was the old it was reacting against since there was, famously, no plain old Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch?”
Weaver, William Woys. Sauerkraut Yankees.
Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Shapenote Singing
Once popular among Pennsylvania German communities, shapenote singing is an experimental form of music developed in the 19th century and characterized by lesser emphasis on harmonized melodies. Complementing the meals and recipes in Sauerkraut Yankees, a shapenote serenade could be just the thing to round out a re-creation of a proper 19th-century Pennsylvanische meal.
Gioachino Rossini
For over one hundred years, chefs have taken Auguste Escoffier’s (1846-1935) writings as the first and last word on culinary technique. Here, the renowned chef gives instructions for Tournedos Rossini, popularly regarded as the creation of composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).
Giuseppe Verdi
Occasionally, a Great Composer dish fails to seduce 21st-century palates—the 2002 Sicilian salad of calves’ feet and cucumber pickles was a little too authentic for Verdi aficionados. When Blank once asked Louis Szathmary just how authentic one needed to be when recreating historic menus, the Hungarian chef declared, “Chust up to the point of indichestibility!”
Mozart and Beethoven
Like many older books, Hagger’s title varies even within the same volume. Blank believes it to be the only known recipe book in circulation during Mozart’s lifetime written by a professional Austrian cook. Although it is an indispensable guide for interpreting menus that honor both Mozart and Beethoven, the book raises some unresolved questions. “If this is the new Salzburg cookbook,”Blank queries, “what was the old it was reacting against since there was, famously, no plain old Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch?”
Weaver, William Woys. Sauerkraut Yankees.
Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Shapenote Singing
Once popular among Pennsylvania German communities, shapenote singing is an experimental form of music developed in the 19th century and characterized by lesser emphasis on harmonized melodies. Complementing the meals and recipes in Sauerkraut Yankees, a shapenote serenade could be just the thing to round out a re-creation of a proper 19th-century Pennsylvanische meal.
Gioachino Rossini
For over one hundred years, chefs have taken Auguste Escoffier’s (1846-1935) writings as the first and last word on culinary technique. Here, the renowned chef gives instructions for Tournedos Rossini, popularly regarded as the creation of composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).
Giuseppe Verdi
Occasionally, a Great Composer dish fails to seduce 21st-century palates—the 2002 Sicilian salad of calves’ feet and cucumber pickles was a little too authentic for Verdi aficionados. When Blank once asked Louis Szathmary just how authentic one needed to be when recreating historic menus, the Hungarian chef declared, “Chust up to the point of indichestibility!”
Mozart and Beethoven
Like many older books, Hagger’s title varies even within the same volume. Blank believes it to be the only known recipe book in circulation during Mozart’s lifetime written by a professional Austrian cook. Although it is an indispensable guide for interpreting menus that honor both Mozart and Beethoven, the book raises some unresolved questions. “If this is the new Salzburg cookbook,”Blank queries, “what was the old it was reacting against since there was, famously, no plain old Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch?”
Weaver, William Woys. Sauerkraut Yankees.
Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Shapenote Singing
Once popular among Pennsylvania German communities, shapenote singing is an experimental form of music developed in the 19th century and characterized by lesser emphasis on harmonized melodies. Complementing the meals and recipes in Sauerkraut Yankees, a shapenote serenade could be just the thing to round out a re-creation of a proper 19th-century Pennsylvanische meal.
Gioachino Rossini
For over one hundred years, chefs have taken Auguste Escoffier’s (1846-1935) writings as the first and last word on culinary technique. Here, the renowned chef gives instructions for Tournedos Rossini, popularly regarded as the creation of composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868).
Giuseppe Verdi
Occasionally, a Great Composer dish fails to seduce 21st-century palates—the 2002 Sicilian salad of calves’ feet and cucumber pickles was a little too authentic for Verdi aficionados. When Blank once asked Louis Szathmary just how authentic one needed to be when recreating historic menus, the Hungarian chef declared, “Chust up to the point of indichestibility!”
Mozart and Beethoven
Like many older books, Hagger’s title varies even within the same volume. Blank believes it to be the only known recipe book in circulation during Mozart’s lifetime written by a professional Austrian cook. Although it is an indispensable guide for interpreting menus that honor both Mozart and Beethoven, the book raises some unresolved questions. “If this is the new Salzburg cookbook,”Blank queries, “what was the old it was reacting against since there was, famously, no plain old Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch?”
Prato’s Die Süddeutsche Küche helped Blank settle a dispute with Chef Louis Szathmary about a dinner honoring Ludwig van Beethoven. At issue was whether the small squares of a thin, baked soufflé floated in broth and known as Schöberln were eaten during Beethoven’s lifetime (1770-1827). The 1719 Neues Saltzburgisches Koch-Buch does not mention them, but Prato gives recipes. In the end, the chefs included Schöberln. They assumed that lack of a recipe does not confirm absence of use, that food traditions before the modern era were slow to change and that recipes in common use were not included in cookbooks until years after their introduction.
Ministère Federal de l’Agriculture. Conserves de Guerre:
Fruits and Legumes.
Ottawa, Canada.
As war threatened in the 1930’s, the home-delivery spice merchant W.T. Rawleigh maneuvered to stockpile exotic foodstuffs from around the world in North American warehouses. Like many governments, companies, and organizations, Rawleigh published guides for homemakers to cope with restricted or unavailable products. Americans have not used such guides on a large scale in almost sixty years.
During the Second World War, dehydrated, condensed, canned and frozen foods became a way of life for the armed forces as well as for wives and mothers who worked in factories and were no longer full-time homemakers. In thousands of booklets published during the war, manufacturers’ associations promoted prepared foods in general as well as specific products such as “war lard.”
How to be Easy on Your Ration Book.
Johnstown, NY: Charles Knox
Gelatine Company, 1943.
Ministère Federal de l’Agriculture. Conserves de Guerre:
Fruits and Legumes.
Ottawa, Canada.
As war threatened in the 1930’s, the home-delivery spice merchant W.T. Rawleigh maneuvered to stockpile exotic foodstuffs from around the world in North American warehouses. Like many governments, companies, and organizations, Rawleigh published guides for homemakers to cope with restricted or unavailable products. Americans have not used such guides on a large scale in almost sixty years.
During the Second World War, dehydrated, condensed, canned and frozen foods became a way of life for the armed forces as well as for wives and mothers who worked in factories and were no longer full-time homemakers. In thousands of booklets published during the war, manufacturers’ associations promoted prepared foods in general as well as specific products such as “war lard.”
How to be Easy on Your Ration Book.
Johnstown, NY: Charles Knox
Gelatine Company, 1943.
Ministère Federal de l’Agriculture. Conserves de Guerre:
Fruits and Legumes.
Ottawa, Canada.
As war threatened in the 1930’s, the home-delivery spice merchant W.T. Rawleigh maneuvered to stockpile exotic foodstuffs from around the world in North American warehouses. Like many governments, companies, and organizations, Rawleigh published guides for homemakers to cope with restricted or unavailable products. Americans have not used such guides on a large scale in almost sixty years.
During the Second World War, dehydrated, condensed, canned and frozen foods became a way of life for the armed forces as well as for wives and mothers who worked in factories and were no longer full-time homemakers. In thousands of booklets published during the war, manufacturers’ associations promoted prepared foods in general as well as specific products such as “war lard.”
How to be Easy on Your Ration Book.
Johnstown, NY: Charles Knox
Gelatine Company, 1943.
Ministère Federal de l’Agriculture. Conserves de Guerre:
Fruits and Legumes.
Ottawa, Canada.
As war threatened in the 1930’s, the home-delivery spice merchant W.T. Rawleigh maneuvered to stockpile exotic foodstuffs from around the world in North American warehouses. Like many governments, companies, and organizations, Rawleigh published guides for homemakers to cope with restricted or unavailable products. Americans have not used such guides on a large scale in almost sixty years.
During the Second World War, dehydrated, condensed, canned and frozen foods became a way of life for the armed forces as well as for wives and mothers who worked in factories and were no longer full-time homemakers. In thousands of booklets published during the war, manufacturers’ associations promoted prepared foods in general as well as specific products such as “war lard.”
How to be Easy on Your Ration Book.
Johnstown, NY: Charles Knox
Gelatine Company, 1943.
MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) are the current field standard in military food, though not the only things troops eat. With access to a kitchen, soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix eat from metal trays, while officers at Portsmouth’s naval hospital once indulged in alcohol, an ancient maritime tradition.
Fort Dix Meal Tray.
The venerable recipe of creamed beef on toast has long been the butt of jokes among US armed forces who dubbed it “Shit on a Shingle” (also known as “SOS,” “chipped beef” or, by Blank’s mother, “dried beef gravy”). A version occasionally surfaces at Deux Cheminées staff meals. Despite the ingredient change, staff have upheld the nickname…
An Army mess sergeant gave knives to Captain Blank in exchange for slaughtering two pigs raised near Fort Lewis, Washington, 1966.
MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) are the current field standard in military food, though not the only things troops eat. With access to a kitchen, soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix eat from metal trays, while officers at Portsmouth’s naval hospital once indulged in alcohol, an ancient maritime tradition.
Fort Dix Meal Tray.
The venerable recipe of creamed beef on toast has long been the butt of jokes among US armed forces who dubbed it “Shit on a Shingle” (also known as “SOS,” “chipped beef” or, by Blank’s mother, “dried beef gravy”). A version occasionally surfaces at Deux Cheminées staff meals. Despite the ingredient change, staff have upheld the nickname…
An Army mess sergeant gave knives to Captain Blank in exchange for slaughtering two pigs raised near Fort Lewis, Washington, 1966.
MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) are the current field standard in military food, though not the only things troops eat. With access to a kitchen, soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix eat from metal trays, while officers at Portsmouth’s naval hospital once indulged in alcohol, an ancient maritime tradition.
Fort Dix Meal Tray.
The venerable recipe of creamed beef on toast has long been the butt of jokes among US armed forces who dubbed it “Shit on a Shingle” (also known as “SOS,” “chipped beef” or, by Blank’s mother, “dried beef gravy”). A version occasionally surfaces at Deux Cheminées staff meals. Despite the ingredient change, staff have upheld the nickname…
An Army mess sergeant gave knives to Captain Blank in exchange for slaughtering two pigs raised near Fort Lewis, Washington, 1966.
MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) are the current field standard in military food, though not the only things troops eat. With access to a kitchen, soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix eat from metal trays, while officers at Portsmouth’s naval hospital once indulged in alcohol, an ancient maritime tradition.
Fort Dix Meal Tray.
The venerable recipe of creamed beef on toast has long been the butt of jokes among US armed forces who dubbed it “Shit on a Shingle” (also known as “SOS,” “chipped beef” or, by Blank’s mother, “dried beef gravy”). A version occasionally surfaces at Deux Cheminées staff meals. Despite the ingredient change, staff have upheld the nickname…
An Army mess sergeant gave knives to Captain Blank in exchange for slaughtering two pigs raised near Fort Lewis, Washington, 1966.
Praktische Konditorei-Kunst was a popular early twentieth-century guide for pastry students and chefs who supplied baked goods to Konditorei, those tearooms and cafés specializing in pastry arts. The importance of this sixth edition lies in its nearly complete set of cake decoration templates and perforated parchment guides, the original supplements that rarely withstood decades of use in professional kitchens.
A well-used handwritten recipe for Pfeffernüsse—a traditional German holiday cookie—from 1892 also finds a home in Blank's collection.
Praktische Konditorei-Kunst was a popular early twentieth-century guide for pastry students and chefs who supplied baked goods to Konditorei, those tearooms and cafés specializing in pastry arts. The importance of this sixth edition lies in its nearly complete set of cake decoration templates and perforated parchment guides, the original supplements that rarely withstood decades of use in professional kitchens.
A well-used handwritten recipe for Pfeffernüsse—a traditional German holiday cookie—from 1892 also finds a home in Blank's collection.
“Howie’s Cream Cheese Cookies.”
Holograph recipe in metal card file.
Though their forms have changed since the 18th century, handwritten recipes and household books remain mines of information about how women cooked and where they may have learned recipes. The boiled coffee notes are from the lectures of Sarah Tyson Rorer (1849-1937), a Philadelphia cookbook author and principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School.
“Howie’s Cream Cheese Cookies.”
Holograph recipe in metal card file.
Though their forms have changed since the 18th century, handwritten recipes and household books remain mines of information about how women cooked and where they may have learned recipes. The boiled coffee notes are from the lectures of Sarah Tyson Rorer (1849-1937), a Philadelphia cookbook author and principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School.
Julie Dannenbaum. Photograph.
Courtesy of Julie Dannenbaum.
“I Won’t Spit in My Fat as Some Chefs Do.”
Julie Dannenbaum on determining cooking temperature.
In the 1970’s Chef Blank occasionally attended cooking classes of Philadelphia kitchen maven Julie Dannenbaum. She impressed the then-microbiologist by the natural ease with which she used equipment and ingredients and by a teaching style that emphasized the demonstration of technique over handing out recipes. Blank tips his toque to Dannenbaum’s ongoing influence at Deux Cheminées with his Crêpes au Chocolat à la Julie.
Julie Dannenbaum. Photograph.
Courtesy of Julie Dannenbaum.
“I Won’t Spit in My Fat as Some Chefs Do.”
Julie Dannenbaum on determining cooking temperature.
In the 1970’s Chef Blank occasionally attended cooking classes of Philadelphia kitchen maven Julie Dannenbaum. She impressed the then-microbiologist by the natural ease with which she used equipment and ingredients and by a teaching style that emphasized the demonstration of technique over handing out recipes. Blank tips his toque to Dannenbaum’s ongoing influence at Deux Cheminées with his Crêpes au Chocolat à la Julie.
Longtime librarian Elsie Cundy registers new acquisitions in a thick handwritten ledger. She then pastes one of Sseven personalized bookplates on each of the 10,000 books.
Visitors to the library often ask about the hundreds of College Inn broth cans supporting book-laden shelves. Why broth cans? “Because,” a poker-faced Blank says, “they are cheaper than tomato juice cans.”
Longtime librarian Elsie Cundy registers new acquisitions in a thick handwritten ledger. She then pastes one of Sseven personalized bookplates on each of the 10,000 books.
Visitors to the library often ask about the hundreds of College Inn broth cans supporting book-laden shelves. Why broth cans? “Because,” a poker-faced Blank says, “they are cheaper than tomato juice cans.”
In his autobiographical stories, Ludwig Bemelmans often disguises New York’s Ritz-Carlton as a series of fictitious hotels in whose kitchens and banquet halls he adroitly caricatures guests and coworkers. Although The Best of Times is characterized by Bemelmans’ usual sense of the ludicrous, it also portrays a hungry and despondent Europe harrowed by the unprecedented cruelty of World War II.
In 1999, Blank sent out a call for menus marking the turn of the millennium to complement his collection of holiday menus. Pouring in from hotels, airlines, restaurants and private homes, the largely personal and intimate menus commemorate how people from around the world celebrated with breakfasts, brunches, dinners and cocktail parties.
In 1999, Blank sent out a call for menus marking the turn of the millennium to complement his collection of holiday menus. Pouring in from hotels, airlines, restaurants and private homes, the largely personal and intimate menus commemorate how people from around the world celebrated with breakfasts, brunches, dinners and cocktail parties.
Blank’s library includes thousands of culinary knickknacks and packaging examples. Not surprisingly, bovine themes arise again in cheese books and ephemera.
Blank’s library includes thousands of culinary knickknacks and packaging examples. Not surprisingly, bovine themes arise again in cheese books and ephemera.
Tidy, indexed, and complete, the German manuscript, at left, from 1910 is also barely legible. It is unusual among handwritten cookbooks in that its pages are filled, cover to cover, by the same hand. More often, these household cookbooks falter at some point, leaving large sections completely blank. Translators are welcome to study it by appointment in the chef’s library.
“Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.”
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
The doyenne of American food writers, M.F.K. Fisher wrote essays that reveal how her independence and sense of place sustained her through six decades of changing countries and husbands.
Chef Fritz does not entirely disparage today’s writers. Throughout the year self-published newsletters land on his desk with essays examining every conceivable food topic.
(Left to right) Mathiesen, Johan (ed.). Word of Mouth, No. 11. Portland, OR: 1996;
Behr, Edward (ed.). The Art of Eating, No. 39. Peacham, VT: 1996;
Thorne, John and Matt Lewis (eds.). Simple Cooking, N0. 59. Northampton, MA: 1998;
Oliver, S. L. (ed.). Food History News, Vol. IX, No. IV. Isleboro, ME: 1998; and
Goldberg, Dan (ed.). The Curmudgeon’s Home Companion, Vol. 9, No. 5. Yountville, CA: 2001.
“Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.”
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
The doyenne of American food writers, M.F.K. Fisher wrote essays that reveal how her independence and sense of place sustained her through six decades of changing countries and husbands.
Chef Fritz does not entirely disparage today’s writers. Throughout the year self-published newsletters land on his desk with essays examining every conceivable food topic.
(Left to right) Mathiesen, Johan (ed.). Word of Mouth, No. 11. Portland, OR: 1996;
Behr, Edward (ed.). The Art of Eating, No. 39. Peacham, VT: 1996;
Thorne, John and Matt Lewis (eds.). Simple Cooking, N0. 59. Northampton, MA: 1998;
Oliver, S. L. (ed.). Food History News, Vol. IX, No. IV. Isleboro, ME: 1998; and
Goldberg, Dan (ed.). The Curmudgeon’s Home Companion, Vol. 9, No. 5. Yountville, CA: 2001.
Abbreviated pocket menus have proliferated wherever tourists and travelers congregate. Recently, these menus have been insinuating themselves into Blank’s collection as acquaintances return with samples from their travels across the United States.
Mardi-Gras at Shepheard’s.
Menu. Cairo, Egypt:
Shepheard’s Hotel, 1924.
Few menus printed on silk survive from the 19th and 20th centuries, but they were once common souvenirs in more expensive hotels and restaurants. The chef's collection also includes other examples of early 20th-century menus.
Mardi-Gras at Shepheard’s.
Menu. Cairo, Egypt:
Shepheard’s Hotel, 1924.
Few menus printed on silk survive from the 19th and 20th centuries, but they were once common souvenirs in more expensive hotels and restaurants. The chef's collection also includes other examples of early 20th-century menus.
Mardi-Gras at Shepheard’s.
Menu. Cairo, Egypt:
Shepheard’s Hotel, 1924.
Few menus printed on silk survive from the 19th and 20th centuries, but they were once common souvenirs in more expensive hotels and restaurants. The chef's collection also includes other examples of early 20th-century menus.
Mardi-Gras at Shepheard’s.
Menu. Cairo, Egypt:
Shepheard’s Hotel, 1924.
Few menus printed on silk survive from the 19th and 20th centuries, but they were once common souvenirs in more expensive hotels and restaurants. The chef's collection also includes other examples of early 20th-century menus.
Mardi-Gras at Shepheard’s.
Menu. Cairo, Egypt:
Shepheard’s Hotel, 1924.
Few menus printed on silk survive from the 19th and 20th centuries, but they were once common souvenirs in more expensive hotels and restaurants. The chef's collection also includes other examples of early 20th-century menus.
Mardi-Gras at Shepheard’s.
Menu. Cairo, Egypt:
Shepheard’s Hotel, 1924.
Few menus printed on silk survive from the 19th and 20th centuries, but they were once common souvenirs in more expensive hotels and restaurants. The chef's collection also includes other examples of early 20th-century menus.
It is not surprising that Blank, a card-carrying member of the Spam Fan Club, has an affinity for charcuterie, whether as sausages, pates, terrines, cold cuts or other, more esoteric, preparations.
Four plates from Ashauer, August. Das deutsche Wurst—und Fleischerhandwerk.
Munich: Verlag Ernst Reinhardt, 1951.
Fritz Blank with the prize-winning
Brown Swiss “first calf heifer,”
Flo at Delaware Valley College.
Photograph. Doylestown, PA, ca. 1961.
The library’s small herd of cows has been growing since Chef Fritz’s undergraduate days as a dairy farmer. Since then, cows have held a special place in the chef’s heart and form a continuing decorative motif throughout his library and home.
Fritz Blank with the prize-winning
Brown Swiss “first calf heifer,”
Flo at Delaware Valley College.
Photograph. Doylestown, PA, ca. 1961.
The library’s small herd of cows has been growing since Chef Fritz’s undergraduate days as a dairy farmer. Since then, cows have held a special place in the chef’s heart and form a continuing decorative motif throughout his library and home.
Fritz Blank with the prize-winning
Brown Swiss “first calf heifer,”
Flo at Delaware Valley College.
Photograph. Doylestown, PA, ca. 1961.
The library’s small herd of cows has been growing since Chef Fritz’s undergraduate days as a dairy farmer. Since then, cows have held a special place in the chef’s heart and form a continuing decorative motif throughout his library and home.
Fritz Blank with the prize-winning
Brown Swiss “first calf heifer,”
Flo at Delaware Valley College.
Photograph. Doylestown, PA, ca. 1961.
The library’s small herd of cows has been growing since Chef Fritz’s undergraduate days as a dairy farmer. Since then, cows have held a special place in the chef’s heart and form a continuing decorative motif throughout his library and home.
Fritz Blank with the prize-winning
Brown Swiss “first calf heifer,”
Flo at Delaware Valley College.
Photograph. Doylestown, PA, ca. 1961.
The library’s small herd of cows has been growing since Chef Fritz’s undergraduate days as a dairy farmer. Since then, cows have held a special place in the chef’s heart and form a continuing decorative motif throughout his library and home.
Papier-mache model of a cow.
Selected bibliography
Rick NicholsFritz Blank: What a delicious journeyPhiladelphia InquirerPhiladelphia: September 18, 2014
Rick Nichols, Inquirer Food ColumnistA visit from much-missed Fritz BlankPhiladelphia Inquirer, Arts and Entertainment SectionPhiladelphia: Sunday, November 15, 2009
Samuel YoungChef Fritz and His City: My Education in the Master's KitchenSante Fe: Terra Nova Books, 2013
Contributors
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While I sometimes thought of A Chef & His Library as my own exhibit, it bears the imprint of many others, chief of whom is Chef Fritz Blank, who gave me unfettered access to his library. His insight, generosity, and hospitality broadened not only my knowledge, but my girth as well. Except where explicitly noted, all the materials in this exhibit are drawn from Chef Blank’s personal library.
My colleague Michael Ryan, Director of the Annenberg Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania bears the onus of allowing me to mount this exhibit. He redeemed himself by offering help at every turn and for introducing me to his colleague Ellen DeMarinis, an immeasurable help in preparing this exhibit. The support and technical assistance of Greg Bear and Andrea Gottschalk at Penn finally brought A Chef & His Library to fruition.
Special thanks goes to the late Phyllis Bray Bober of Bryn Mawr College. Professor Bober’s insightful reading and input framed my understanding of Vittorio Lancellotti and curbed my blazing penchant for wordplay. At the Culinary Archives and Museum of Johnson and Wales University, Barbara Kuck’s unstinting support was a great help. Thanks also to Susan Drinan and Jeffrey Ray of the Atwater Kent Museum, to Barbara Ketcham Wheaton of Radcliffe College, to Jane Pap at Please Touch Museum and to Ronni Lundy for their input, inspiration and clarifications.
The founders of Stichting Gastronomische Bibliotheek in Amsterdam—Johannes van Dam, Joop Witteveen and Bart Cuperus—tolerated all my charcuterie and book-collecting inquiries in good humor. Over the course of the September 11th tragedies, they fed me well in Amsterdam and opened their homes and combined monumental cookbook collection to me, forever shattering a reputation the Dutch hold for aloofness.
The collected and contradictory wisdom about cookbook collectors from their dealers—Daniel Longone, Dirk Meuleman, Matt Sartwell, Bonnie Slotnick and Nach Waxman—was enlightening and amusing.
I must also extend a special thanks to the kitchen and wait staff of Deux Cheminées restaurant who suffered my presence for months before, one by one, beginning to ask “just what the hell are you doing here?”
And, finally, heartfelt thanks to Timothy “Hans” Furnish, who knew all along what I was doing.
Matthew B. Rowley
Curator
June 5, 2002
A Chef’s Curator
Matthew Rowley, MHA, lives and writes in Philadelphia. He sits on the board of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture and had been known to polish off an entire platter of Arthur Bryant’s beef & fries with extra burnt ends in one sitting.
Chef Fritz Blank was born and reared in rural south Jersey among victory gardens, chicken coops and duck pens. Fresh seafood and small game such as rabbit and muskrat were a regular part of family meals prepared by his German grandmother. Her kitchen influences are some of Blank's earliest memories and continue to shape his cooking today at his Philadelphia restaurant Deux Cheminées.
Before becoming a chef, Blank earned degrees in dairy husbandry, dairy science, medical technology and clinical microbiology. He worked as an analytical chemist at the USDA Agricultural Research Center at Beltsville Maryland until accepting a commission in the US Army Medical Service Corps where Captain Blank functioned as a Clinical Laboratory Officer for five years. After leaving the military, Blank earned and completed a Masters degree in Clinical Microbiology at Thomas Jefferson University, and was the Associate Microbiologist at The Wilmington Medical Center. He later functioned for five years as Chief Microbiologist at Crozer-Chester Medical and Regional Burn Center, until opening Deux Cheminées in 1979.
Chef Blank is a frequent contributor to the Oxford (UK) Symposium on Food & Cookery and to the annual International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy in Erice, Sicily. While Blank no longer makes silage, cows keep a special place in his heart and form a continuing decorative motif in his culinary library of over 10,000 volumes.
