John Floren

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Posted 2024/10/10

Scanning the Michigan Centennial Cookbook

Throughout my childhood there were two cookbooks that ruled the kitchen: the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book, and the Michigan Centennial Cookbook. Everybody in America knows and owns the former, but the latter? I doubt more than a thousand copies exist. The BHG cookbook was our go-to, but for some things Mom reached for the Michigan book.

It’s nothing particularly notable, really, just another one of many thousands of community cookbooks put together by clubs and churches across the country. It was published in 1983 in Michigan City, North Dakota to celebrate the city’s centennial. Michigan City’s 1980 census population of 502 was the highest ever recorded. My dad’s family had left for Washington by the 1960s, but relatives must have sent along some copies.

Inspired by a recent blog post by Katie Livingston, I took another look at the book the last time I visited my parents, and then managed to find a copy on eBay for myself. I did a quick scan and OCR, and you can download the resulting PDF below:

The Michigan Centennial Cookbook PDF

The recipes were collected from local women and apparently published more or less verbatim. There’s a frustrating tendency to treat what we’d expect to be a full list of ingredients as merely the first set of things to be mixed together, with additional ingredients listed in the directions; consider this recipe for rolls which apparently uses no flour:

Others assume a familiarity with other recipes, such as this one which instructs you to “mix like pie crust” and “roll out as thin as lefse”:

There’s a tendency on the Internet to mock Midwestern food. I do it myself, teasing my sister (who now lives in North Dakota) not to put too much pepper in the hotdish (“are you trying ta kill us, missy?”). I’m not going to do it here, though. These recipes were developed using the limited selection of groceries available in a small Midwestern town in the early and mid 1900s, and of course whatever you could grow in the garden. If Doris got a wild hair after reading National Geographic and wanted to try a Moroccan dish, she couldn’t just grab a jar of harissa from the local import shop, she had to see what she could come up with using chili flakes and minced garlic.

Why did Donna Kallestad offer up a recipe for “burgoki”, or “bulgogi” as a modern Korean food fan would call it? This is where I disagree with Ms. Livingston’s otherwise lovely post, her implication that for a Midwesterner to dare make some version of Asian or Mexican food is voyeuristic or exploitative. I don’t know Donna, of course, but I might speculate that her husband served in Korea, developed a taste for some of the local dishes, and on his return Mrs. Kallestad did her best to approximate the meal with the ingredients she had available. Or maybe during the 70s, her daughter’s college roommate was a Korean exchange student who passed along the recipe. Or she just clipped it from an old magazine. Who knows, but I like the first story best.

Finally, I’d like to note that there are some recipes which sadly cannot be replicated, as the first step of the directions is impossible for most of the world: