This week's book -- 450 Original Receipts for Good Things to Eat from the housewives of Lake Geneva, WI -- is a beautifully bound hardcover, so professional-looking that I initially thought it was a cheesy reprint of an older book. But it's the real thing: a fundraising cookbook from 1911, which the library acquired in 1991. Food stains on the pages and handwritten recipes in the back make it clear this book was put to good use during the 80 years in between. I even found a newspaper clipping so old it had stained the pages next to it. (One side of the clipping has recipes for Swiss Steak, Frozen Tomato Salad and Parsnip Balls. The other side has part of an article with the headline "ACIDS IN STOMACH CAUSE INDIGESTION.")

It's not hard to get my head around Post-WWII recipes. Even if they're bizarre, they use methods and ingredients I understand and I don't have to translate them into modern-day terms. But this book was something else entirely. For one thing, there was the sudden realization that all of these dishes were cooked with wood- or coal-burning stoves and ovens. It was the advertisements that gave it away, first one asking readers "WHY NOT COOK BY ELECTRICITY? THE ONLY WAY!" (olde tyme ads were always yelling at people, it seems), then another from a lumber company reminding us, in the desperate tones of the doomed, that if we want that "Van Dyke brown" on our baked goods, we should use maple cuttings. That's when, duh, I realized none of the recipes had any temperatures and the baking times were rather loose. There are references to baking in a "quick oven" or a "hot oven," but that's as specific as it gets.

Then there are the measurements, which seem standardized for the most part, but also include items like "butter the size of a hickory nut" or "two coffee cups of bread crumbs." How big is a hickory nut? And isn't it kind of refreshing that no one drank Venti coffees in Lake Geneva circa 1911?

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about this cookbook is how not weird the food is. It's kind of scary that the dishes people were making in the 1950s through '70s are less recognizable than the food people were eating nearly 100 years ago. Sure, there is a lot of canned seafood (including canned lobster!), a recipe for Sour Mutton ("A fine way to use left over pieces of mutton") and a cookie called Rocks, but for the most part the recipes are for simple, classic dishes made with just a few ingredients. It's kind of inspiring really, to find out during this time of rising food prices and economic uncertainty that you can make about twenty different meals with a can of salmon, some bread crumbs and an egg.

The advertisements are actually more amusing than the recipes, like the germaphobe Gold Medal flour ad asserting its product "is not touched by the hands of man" before it reaches you, the housewife. Does that just mean everyone wears gloves? Because if people are cooking over coal stoves, I don't think robots are involved in the manufacturing process at all.

Or this cheeky ad for...socks? Sex sells, even in 1911. Even in a cookbook. Put out by a church.

The final pages of the cookbook are devoted to household hints, which yield more insights into what life was like when this book came out. A chart of vegetable cooking times is a depressing reminder of why so many American kids hate vegetables -- because not that long ago, boiling green beans for one hour and spinach for two was totally normal. You know what else was normal back then? Washing your husband's snot-soaked handkerchiefs. Ugh.

It was difficult to choose a recipe this week because many of them just seemed very normal and classic, like something pulled from The Joy of Cooking, but I finally settled on Cherry Pudding, because it's cherry season in Southern California and the guy who sells fruit on my street has had big bags of them for the past week. The recipe sounds like a bread pudding, but while I was assembling it, I felt like there wasn't enough bread to soak up the egg and milk. (I chose a dark, sweet anise-flavored bread from Trader Joe's.) I wanted to stay true to the recipe though, so I made it as directed, except I made the mistake of halving and pitting the cherries, since I don't own a cherry pitter. This led to a lot of excess juice once I cut into it. And the unbalance bread-to-custard ratio meant there were lots of eggy bits floating around in the pool of cherry juice. Or failure juice, as I like to think of it. So while this dessert looks nice and smells lovely, it needs a bit of tweaking. I did have some warmed up and topped with plain yogurt for breakfast this morning and it was yummy, so there's hope for it yet.

Here's the recipe as it appears in the book, with my notes.

Cherry Pudding

1 pint bread [I'd use twice that, or 4 cups cubed bread]
1 quart boiling milk
Butter, size of an egg [I used 1/4 cup]
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar [I used 1 1/4 cups, since my bread was sweet]
3 eggs, beaten light
A little cinnamon [1/8 teaspoon]
1 quart stoned cherries

Soak bread in hot milk; while hot, add the butter, salt, sugar. When cool, stir in eggs, cinnamon, cherries. Pour into a buttered pudding dish [I used a 2.5-quart casserole dish] and bake in a quick oven [350 degrees F] about three-quarters of an hour.