THE DORCAS CIRCLE COOK BOOK, 1933

ISSUES COOK BOOK (from the Clearwater Tribune of Friday, December 8, 1933)

"The Dorcas Circle of the local Christian church has issued 100 copies of a special cook book, or book of recipes for special culinary items. The book is of the loose-leaf type and contains in the neighborhood of 80 recipes, each one of which was furnished by an Orofino housewife and bears her name at the bottom. Each recipe is for a special dish considered to be par excellence. There are 40 pages in the book, including title page and index. They will be sold at 75 cents each and most of them had been sold in advance. Mrs. C. O. Portfors, to whom the books were delivered, asks that those who have signified a desire for one of the books to call and get them. She has done considerable work and of course spent considerable time in connection with getting them out and feels proud of the result. The Tribune did the printing."

It's just a little black leather loose leaf "Snap-It" memo notebook – the kind a man might have carried in his shirt pocket. I found it in a box of clippings and recipe booklets that had been stored in the basement of my mother's house. I didn't recall having seen it before. It didn't look like a treasure, but the yellowed pages said differently. A title page announced "The Dorcas Circle Cook Book, Orofino, Idaho, 1933," and it was recognizable at once as a group fundraising cook book. Flipping through the pages, I saw many familiar names – women who were of mature years when I was a child in the '50s – Oud, Tucker, Kimball, Stalnaker, Wunderlich, Soderberg, Merrill, etc. Both my mother (Mrs. Dorothy Walrath) and my grandmother (Mrs. C.O. Portfors, mentioned in the news clipping above) had contributed recipes. Beyond that, the booklet included blank pages where my mother had pasted some clipped recipes. Her copy also included some lined pages on which she had written a number of recipes by hand. It was surely one of Mother's first efforts to organize the recipes that caught her attention. Quite a treasure indeed!

So – I knew about the Dorcas Circle Cook Book. And then, to my utter delight, I chanced to come across the clipping quoted above which provided more information. I was transcribing some letters written by my great-Aunt Bertha. Now Bertha, my dad's aunt and Grandma Ina's sister, lived on a farm above Orofino, while my mother's family were "town folk" in the same era. Of course, the "hometown weekly" newspaper, the Clearwater Tribune, served the general area, and Bertha was responsible to submit the Gilbert farm community "news items" (gossip). She would then clip the Gilbert column from the paper and enclose it in her letters to her sisters in Drain, Oregon. Eventually a second cousin sent eight of Aunt Bertha's 1930's-era letters to me with enclosures intact, and on the backside of a clipping, I found the above item about the Dorcas Circle Cook Book. Well, the little cookbook just seemed to come to life when I read that clipping.

Yes, I will share some of those vintage recipes with you from time to time. KW

[The photo is of my mother and her first husband, Fairly Walrath, at the time of their engagement, December 1928.]