Our favorite recipes (Wilshire Ward LDS, 1957)

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

Our Favorite Recipes is a 1957 community cookbook compiled by Maude Frances Smeath Weight for the Wilshire Ward of the LDS Church in Los Angeles, produced as a ward welfare project. Like many mid-century church and club cookbooks, it blends homemaking inspiration, practical domestic advice, and hundreds of contributed recipes into a single volume meant for fundraising and everyday kitchen use. Readers will find inspirational verse and prose about marriage and homemaking alongside recipes for punches, quick breads, yeast rolls, cakes, candies, cookies, casseroles, meats, pies, salads, and vegetables. The book captures the convenience-driven cooking style of its era, leaning heavily on canned soups, gelatin, shortening, and packaged mixes like Bisquick, while still preserving older techniques such as hand-kneaded bread and slow-braised meats. Several recipes are attributed to named contributors, including a number credited to Mamie Eisenhower, reflecting the celebrity-recipe trend of the period. The final pages offer household cleaning tips, substitution charts, and local business advertisements, underscoring the book's community and welfare origins. For modern readers, it offers a window into 1950s American domestic life as filtered through a Latter-day Saint congregation in Los Angeles, valuable both as a culinary record and as a social artifact of its time and place.

The book opens with inspirational prose, poetry, and prayers about homemaking before moving into recipe sections organized by course and category: beverages, quick breads, yeast breads and rolls, pancakes and breakfast items, sandwiches, cakes, candies, appetizers, cookies, desserts, seafood, household hints, casseroles and pasta dishes, meats, pies, preserves, poultry, puddings, salads and dressings, soups and vegetables, and finally vegetable dishes, cooking hints, and measurement conversion tables. Household advice and cleaning tips are interspersed between recipe sections rather than gathered in one place, most notably in section 4. The book concludes with reference tables for ingredient substitutions and equivalencies, followed by advertisements and business listings tied to the Wilshire Ward community.