Jim Fobel's Old-Fashioned Baking Book: Recipes from an American Childhood

by Jim Fobel

Bakers everywhere will treasure the unfailingly delicious recipes. One of the Best Cookbooks of the Year. ―The James Beard Foundation

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have had this cookbook for years. Haven’t made all the recipes by far but enjoy all his stories he includes. The recipes give enough detail and the ones I have tried have turned out fine.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent cookbook for those that like stories with their recipes like I do. I did however take off one star for Mr Fobel's failure to supply adjustments for the pan sizes more commonly used now than 50-60 or more years ago. Baking is a much more precise science than say, making soup or a pot of stew, and for someone like myself that is more of a cook than a baker, having to try to adjust the recipe to use a 9x13" rather than an 11.75 x 7.5" pan is both frustrating, and often disastrous. Other than that, the recipes are wonderful.

[Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

My most beating up cookbook.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sweet baked goods lover's dream, with zillions of recipes for pies, cookies, cakes, and breads - both quick and yeasted. The names of many of the recipes are wonderful: "1933 Glory Cake with Paradise Filling", "Golden Crunch Cake", "Mystery Cake of 1932" (developed during the worst of the Depression so it contains zero eggs and very little butter, yet apparently the "rich, moist texture of the cake is most likely due to its use of tomato, a novel ingredient for a cake"), "Aunt Charlotte's Best Apricot Pie", and "Dream Cookies". And then there are normal names like "sugar cookies", "oatmeal cookies", "hermits", "peach pie" ("Quite simply, this is the best peach pie I've ever eaten."), "apple brown betty", etc. etc.

In spite of the fact that the book was published in 1987, before many North American had embraced the notion of measuring by weight, there is a very handy - and extensive - table of equivalents with volumes and weights - fantastic! Particularly handy are the equivalents for how many cups a "medium mashed banana" or "large chopped banana", as well as several other typically used fresh fruits (berries, nectarines, peaches, etc.), create. Unfortunately, the weights for these typical fruits are omitted. However, weights (but no cup measures) are included for fresh and dried apricots, apples, pears, and oranges.

My grandmother, Hilma Alina, baked both a cake and a pie every day of the week, and on Fridays she made bread all day long, enough to last her large family for the entire week. Saturdays were reserved for making her special nisua, a fragrant cardamom-flavored Finnish bread, and on Sundays she entertained a house full of visitors from noon until night. A formidable cook and baker, she presided at every meal at the immense dining-room table in the house on Spruce Street in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, where she and my grandfather, George Wahlstrom, had settled. [...] My grandfather never failed to get up at the end of every meal to kiss my grandmother and to say to her, "Ali, you outdid yourself; the food was superb." [Introduction, p.8-9]
~ ~ ~ ~
[M]y grandmother and her daughters did not follow recipes to the letter. Invariably, they made alterations — a pinch of this, something else omitted, twice as much of some of the flavorings. Sometimes they noted these changes, but usually they did not. I had learned by watching my mother cook and bake, so I knew that when she measured the teaspoon of vanilla called for in the recipe, she really put in two. I knew that she folded the whipped cream into her lemon chiffon pie because I had seen her do it so many times, yet there is no mention of folding in the original recipe. [...] [M]ost of the recipes lacked all or part of the necessary instructions. Since grandmother had taught her daughters in painstaking detail the variety of procedures comprising the art of baking, they found no need to write them down. The techniques were passed on from one to the other and, eventually, to me. [...] I have been buoyed by the conviction that these carefully collected and cherished family recipes should not remain part of a crumbling file, but should be shared with others. [...] It has been greatly rewarding to tease from the yellowed cards and notebook pages and faded handwriting the secrets of grandmother's blackberry cake or Aunt Irma's sour cream twists or mother's peach coffee cake and to savor again the extraordinary desserts I so loved as a child. [Introduction, page 11]

Oddly, in the several pages of yeasted breads, there is no recipe included for everyday sandwich bread, aside from the description in the introduction to Yeast Breads chapter of Jim Fobel's mother mixing yeast, "flour, milk, and melted butter" to make a sponge, then kneading in more flour to make the actual dough. (Perhaps the inimitable ladies of Jim Fobel's childhood didn't think it necessary to have a recipe card for ordinary bread that they could probably make in their sleep. Perhaps that would be like having a recipe card for "boiled eggs", or "tea", or "coffee".)

Immediately Bookmarked:
⇒ Pecan Layer Cake, p. 29
⇒ Aunt Charlotte's Best Apricot Pie, p. 70
⇒ Peach Pie, p. 72
⇒ Sticky Caramel-Pecan Rolls, p. 114
⇒ Sugar-coated Date Twists, "sugar-coated twisted rolls [...] have an unexpectedly crisp topping", p. 117
⇒ Nisua (Finnish Cardamom Bread), p. 130
⇒ Grandma's Oatmeal Cookies, p. 140
⇒ Pecan Lace Cookies, p. 147
⇒ Aunt Irma's Sugar Cookies, p. 155

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been my go-to baking book since I was a teen in the 90s. The pie recipes, in particular, are amazing. I get regular requests for the apple pie, and the addition of almond extract to blackberry pie was a revelation. The cake recipes tend to be heavy and quite buttery (to be expected of an old-fashioned book) so they require a bit more open-mindedness today when most store-bought cakes rely heavily on shortening and highly processed ingredients.

If you didn’t have a great-grandma on a farm to pass down recipes to you, this book will help fill that gap. I did, but I still turn to this book (don’t tell my family).

[Sacha Urban]

Best no fail baking book! Great personal stories with each recipe

[Gillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another real favourite - I love the stories that go with the recipes, all of which are beautiful and genuinely old-fashioned; the sort of thing I can remember my grandmother baking when I was small, which is possibly why I enjoy it so much.

[Maureen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this at a used book store while on vacation and enjoyed it but have not cooked from it at all. I enjoyed his family stories and would have liked more but all in all it's a nice book. A serious baker might want to keep it but I won't.