In assembling the Milwaukee Library Recipe Archive, somebody had to cut out all these recipes and paste them on index cards and somebody else, decades later, had to photograph or scan the cards. If you want a digitized version, you’ll have to do the transcribing yourself.
We stumbled on a remarkable and little-known (judging from the Google search results) resource for mid century recipes: The Historical Recipe Archive of the Milwaukee Public Library. The home page pretty much says it:
“For over 20 years, from the 1960s until the 1980s, librarians at the Milwaukee Public Library clipped hundreds of recipes from the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. These recipes were heavily used at Ready Reference to answer telephone questions relating to various recipes. Before recipes were readily available on the internet, someone in the Milwaukee area looking for a particular recipe or cooking technique would call Ready Reference.
“These clipped recipes form the nucleus of the Historic Recipe File digital collection. Many of Milwaukee’s favorite foods appear in the recipes in this collection. This collection provides a fascinating glimpse into the local and ethnic foods that were popular in Milwaukee from as long as 50 years ago.
“This digital collection is a work in progress and additional recipes will continue to appear here as they are converted into digital files. If you have questions about the recipes in this collection, please contact MPL’s Business & Technology Department at (414) 286-3051.
Of course, we immediately did a search for “tongue”.
“A special thanks to Amy Burkart-Paulson, Kelley Darrah, and Nicholas Roche for their invaluable help with this project.”
Click the “browse” button and you will immediately hit pay dirt: recipes that start with numbers, followed by recipes which begin with quote marks. Who wouldn’t want to know more about 10-Minute Chicken Polynesian or “Tell Your Neighbor” Cake?
It would be interesting to browse by date but you can’t do that, only by keyword. But that’s a tiny quibble, especially since the recipes include the date they first appeared in the footnote.
There are over 5,000 recipes so we are going to be here for a while. Enjoy!
