I love these old cook books

[oldrustycars]

Cass County Recipes
Cass County, Illinois. My mothers family is from there. I found part of an old cookbook from there on line. I love the recipes...use 25 cents of ground beef. Use "suet"...i don't know what that is. So many recipes calling for lard. i love these old country cookbooks.

 

[kadesma]

Cass County Recipes
Cass County, Illinois. My mothers family is from there. I found part of an old cookbook from there on line. I love the recipes...use 25 cents of ground beef. Use "suet"...i don't know what that is. So many recipes calling for lard. i love these old country cookbooks.

They are fun to look through. Some of the things take forever to prepare. Makes you wonder what time dinner was put on the table.Suet I believe is just another word for a fat.Hopefully someone will give us a heads up about it.
kadesma

 

[Silversage]

Some beef fat is soft and mushy. Some is stiff and hard. THe hard stuff is called suet.

When you cover a piece of meat in suet before roasting, the suet melts slowly and bastes the roast throughout the roasting process.

 

[justplainbill]

Suet is a hard beef fat. 25 cents worth of ground beef sounds like 1/2 pound although back in 1930 it may well have been a whole pound.

 

[Constance]

Suet is a hard beef fat. 25 cents worth of ground beef sounds like 1/2 pound although back in 1930 it may well have been a whole pound.

Right on, Bill. I remember my dad saying a beer was a nickel back then.

 

[Kathleen]

Family Recipes from long ago

When I had my starter marriage, both grandmothers were still alive. For a wedding gift, my family had different people give recipes for *me* to write in a blank book. Some of these recipes had instructions like "Take a lump of sweet butter the size of a hen's egg." Another was called Scripture Cake, which gave directions such as "One cup of Nahum 3:12, chopped," which is figs. Most of the people who gave recipes are long gone. And I grumbled writing them down, but now I have them and have kept up with recipes from younger and newer family and friends. I'm so glad that I have this cookbook, because making any of the recipes gives me opportunity to reminese about the person. In fact, if there were an emergency, it would be the first thing I grabbed right after ensuring all living beings in the house were safe.

~Kathleen

P.S. I'm not 100% sure, but think that "sweet butter" is unsalted butter.

 

[Claire]

A few times when I was young, my parents bought a half beef (hmm, not the right word, half a cow? A steer?). The first time we did it, Mom bought only the meat. The second and third times she did it, she said she wanted all the fat, all the bones. OK, bones are easy, she made tons of stock. BUT the fat? She rendered it. My heavens (I'm not swearing, but place expletives in here), we lived in an apartment in military housing in Germany, and it smelled awful. I mean truly terrible. That is to say the process of doing it until it got to a form where it was sort of like butter (not like pieces of fat, the solids we strained from the liquid, then froze the liquid, which I think turned solid in the fridge anyway, it's been a long time). I have to say, the process really, really, really smelled bad. But the result was something the consistency of, say, bacon fat, butter, or margarine. And when she cooked with it, it was delicious. But there were a few days there when you wondered if we were doing something edible. My husband says his mother rendered beef fat as well, and he also remembers it smelling terrible!

 

[justplainbill]

"~Kathleen

P.S. I'm not 100% sure, but think that "sweet butter" is unsalted butter. "

Sweet butter is unsalted but unfortunately some sweet butters seem not to be as sweet as others. I've had sweet butter in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany that tasted like sweet cream; it went very well on bread with jam.