The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places

The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places – Nancy Kennedy, editor (1950, 1955) This is the first volume (and revised volume) of my very favorite-ever national (USA) restaurant guidebook, later to be known as the “Ford Times Cookbook.” My parents had this one, and I was obsessed with it as a kid. It's a collection of brief restaurant listings from around the country that were first published in Ford Times magazine, a post-war publication, I guess (I've never seen one) encouraging auto travel. This collection is arranged by region and state. Each restaurant listing contains a recipe from the menu (many are odd and dated), but most significantly, an artist's rendition of the place, sometimes exterior, sometime inside. The style of the art is all over the place and fascinating—from naturalistic color painting, to ink sketch, to stylized magazine style illustration, to just plain weird, impressionistic renderings—it's somewhat of a compendium of this kind of thing. My favorites are the nostalgic, formal paintings that you could imagine hanging in the establishment itself. Some of these restaurants are still around, and some gone, of course, but I try to visit the existing ones, or the site, when traveling, which I've occasionally documented in a blog called Restaurant Time Tunnel. I included the 1950 and 1955 editions here because they have the same cover (if you can find the original dust jacket, it folds out to a cool restaurant map of the US), and mostly the same content, though there are a few omissions and additions in that later revised edition. When they published these, I think they were surprised at it's popularity, and later came out with additional volumes, which I'll review later.