Reasonable recipes

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

Reasonable Recipes is a 1940 recipe collection attributed to Sifta Sam, published by Mann & Co. Ltd Palmer, and evidently tied to a branded salt product woven into its recipes. The surviving material offers a single numbered page of a much larger sequence, running from recipe number 96 to 101, which suggests the full book contained a substantial run of numbered recipes (the catalog notes 83 anchored food records). The visible page mixes vegetable side dishes, quick breads, preserves, and hearty meat dishes, giving a sense of an everyday household cookbook aimed at economical, filling meals. Dishes like Casseroled Sheep's Hearts and Beef or Mutton Hash point to a practical, waste-conscious approach to cooking that made use of offal and inexpensive cuts. The presence of Al Cooking Salt, mentioned repeatedly across the recipes, indicates the book likely served a promotional function for this branded ingredient, a common practice in commercially sponsored cookbooks of the era. Modern readers will find this a useful, if fragmentary, window into home cooking of the period, though the surviving record is limited to a single section and cannot represent the book's full scope or organization.

The book appears to have been organized as a continuously numbered sequence of recipes, since the single surviving section spans Recipe No. 96 through Recipe No. 101. This numbering suggests the full text likely proceeded recipe by recipe without strong thematic grouping evident from this material alone, mixing vegetables, baked goods, condiments, and meat dishes on the same page. Only one section (section 2) survives in the mechanically gated summaries, so the overall structure of the complete book, including any front matter, chapter divisions, or index, cannot be determined from what is available.