Before her unfortunate death, Myrtle/Olive and husband Jack McCullough hosted many a memorable dinner party at their home, and surely quite a few of Myrtle's time-tested recipes were served. The Myrtle Reed Cookbook was published posthumously in 1916 and seems to combine all the Olive Green books into one volume. It's an old school cookbook, so many of the recipes may look familiar, but there is a passion for food and humor to the narrative that makes the thought of Myrtle's suicide even sadder. The cookbook is available for free on Kindle and Project Gutenberg, or you can buy a print copy for about $10, depending on the edition. Here's Myrtle's excellent and classic Fruit Cobbler, as we start getting into summer peaches, plums, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb, etc., season:
Fill a deep buttered baking-dish with fresh or stewed fruit— apples, peaches, apricots, rhubarb, plums, or gooseberries being commonly used— and cover with a crust made as follows: Sift together two cupfuls of flour and two teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Rub into it half a cupful of butter and add one egg beaten with a cupful of milk. Spread over the fruit which has been previously sweetened to taste and bake until the crust is done. Serve either hot or cold with cream or any preferred sauce.
Cheap tea contains sawdust, dried and powdered hay, grass-seed, and departed but unlamented insects.
Moral—buy good tea, or go without.
Moral—buy good tea, or go without.
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The breakfast selected as a type consists of fruit, a cereal, salt fish, or salt meat, or eggs, or omelets, hot bread of some kind, and pancakes or waffles, or coffee cake, one dish from each group, and coffee. Six dishes in all, which may be less if desired, but never more. All six form a breakfast sufficiently hearty for a stone mason or a piano mover; one or two give a breakfast light enough to tempt those who eat no breakfast at all.
Myrtle Reed
