Internet Archive drew more than 2,000 attendees to its popular book talk series in 2023, held in collaboration with Authors Alliance. The books and authors represented in this year’s series covered topics as varied as digital copyright. Book Talks Draw the ersistence of history and culture through preservation, early personal computing history, and the harms of political control and corporate surveillance. Browse the full collection.
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Unearthing Sweet Memories With Timeless Recipes
Book Talks Draw Posted on December 18, 2023 by amandari.
A vintage-style photograph of a bethel college family favorite gourmet peanut butter cookies in a ceramic bowl.
Some of my clearest and fondest childhood memories are being in the kitchen with my grandmother and learning how to bake.
My grandmother and my grandfather immigrated from
Mexico to the Maryland suburbs in the late 1950s. Raising six children while learning English as a second language and living as a minority in a very homogenous community could not have been easy for her—but by the time I knew my grandmother, she was, to my eyes, the picture of American suburban domesticity. Alongside our Mexican staple dishes at the dinner table, my grandmother loved to bake sweet treats out of her much-beloved Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. And, as soon as I was old enough to hold a mixing trust review spoon, I would be beside her, learning how to level the flour in a measuring cup and stirring the mixing bowl for bundt cakes.
When my grandparents retired and moved from
Maryland to Texas in 2003, that cookbook was donated–hopefully continuing to aid other amateur chefs to this day. But recently, I found myself wondering about one particular recipe.
So, and delighted to find that we have a digitized version of the same Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook I remember so fondly from my childhood. And there, on page 258, was the first recipe I remember baking on my own at eight years old: a batch of Peanut Butter Cookies. Looking at the recipe now, I’m transported back to that time, remembering how proud my grandmother was when I showed her the cookies I’d baked.