"Mable Hoffman" news and stories

I like to make sure that I offer up a good balance of new and old cookbooks in this (mostly) daily post. I love to flip through all the glossy new cookbooks that are hitting shelves these days, but sometimes I find myself turning to the old, the known and the comforting. Today's book, Crepe Cookery, isn't a volume I grew up with, but as it's one of those light-weight, magazine-sized editions that was once sold in grocery stores, it feels familiar and as if it was something that was always at hand.

Written by Mable Hoffman (who also wrote Crockery Cookery, our April 1st Cookbook of the Day) and printed in 1976, this cookbook was the first exposure that a lot of people had to making crepes at home (if they weren't ambitious enough to make them from Mastering the Art of French Cooking). It offers helpful, step-by-step pictures on how cook crepes using either the upside down (dipping the crepe pan into the batter) or right side up (ladling the batter into the pan) methods. There are also lots of pictures demonstrating the varied ways you can fill, fold and serve your crepes.

There are five all-purpose crepe batter recipes in this book, as well as recipes that incorporate graham crackers, mashed potato, wheat germ, beer, yogurt, cornmeal and chocolate. She also devotes 15 pages to the various pans you can use to cook crepes, how to season them if purchasing a new one and their pluses and minuses. It's a surprisingly relevant section, considering that the book is more than 30 years old.

If you like making crepes, or are looking for a good introductory book to help you learn, this might just be a good book for you. There are multiple copies selling on Amazon for a penny (plus shipping), so it won't cost you much to check it out if you're intrigued. c

Source

I am a big fan of cooking in a slow cooker. I mentioned in this post that I have four slow cookers in graduated sizes for when I want to cook a little bit or a lot. I love that I can pop something into the pot and set it to cook overnight while I sleep (I often do this with chicken stock or a turkey breast).

I love this little cookbook called Crockery Cookery (there's something very pleasant about saying that out loud), written by Mable Hoffman. It was first published in 1975, when the slow cooking trend first started to sweep the nation. It contains recipes, tips, tricks and a guide to all slow cookers that were available in 1975 (not particularly helpful these days, but an interesting blast from the past).

My copy has a receipt in it from a Salvation Army Thrift Shop from 1983, marking the recipe for Turkey Tetrazzini. It uses canned mushrooms, but other than that calls for fresh veggies and good ingredients, showing me that not all recipes from the seventies are a wasteland of processed ingredients and horrible chemicals.

Source