The Red Book

A HISTORICAL WESTCHESTER COOKBOOK

By Bliss Burrel Fager -Admin of Westchester Foodies and owner of Blissful Table

I want to talk about the Golden Apple Collection Cookbook, a.k.a."the red book", for a minute. And the best place to share this story is in Westchester Foodies, because I don’t know how much more Westchester this can get.

To tell the story I have to take you back a number of decades. When I was a kid, my mom seemed to do everything and be everything everywhere all at once. And anything she ever committed to was always at the top level of beautiful and thought through. An important note, my mom is still my guiding force of all that could be done in a given period of time, so “never hold back” became a motto to live by. So sometime in the mid 1980s, she was involved with the White Plains Auxiliary and became the chairwoman of what would become a very thick book of 300+ pages of recipes and historical mentions of this county contributed by both individuals and restaurants.

Over a number of years she, with the help of many others compiled all of the content and tested every recipe one by one. I still remember being somewhere around the age of eight, it was a night of testing the pea soup recipe and I was horrified about the green gloop in a bowl which was served to me. In fairness, it was delicious, but to a kid it was very green. For years, my mom had incorporated into our family dinners the work it took to ensure that the instructions were right and these recipes were the very best they could be.

It was a masterclass of balancing work and being a mom while always making it look effortless. In 1988 this book was published, all proceeds going to the White Plains Hospital, and I can’t tell you how many copies printed. Hundreds, thousands I’m not sure but they sold and sold again, and now you can only find the red book on secondary sites, such as eBay, but I believe you can still borrow a copy from the library. We have in our personal collection I think seven books still in pristine order that are being held to give to the future generations existing and still to come in my family. But the book I work with is a little broken and tattered, with many of the pages stained from culinary triumphs of years past. It lives in my kitchen, in an accessible place that can be pulled from easily and often. Some of the recipes in there were contributed by my grandmothers, or by other grandmothers and then adopted by my family as core instructions of what to make when you need something special.

This book to me is my Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in the number of times it’s referenced, and Lynn a.k.a. Mom, is my Julia Child. Included in the photos below are a few recipes that I go to again and again and have been making since I was a little girl who was figuring out all along that I loved the art of food, most of all.

Adding to the note of the peanut kiss recipe, you can easily substitute butter for vegetable shortening, and also do yourself a favor and add a little extra peanut butter into the cookie mix. Trust me on this. Thanks for reading along and listening to the story about the Golden Apple Collection. Maybe a few of you even have a copy of this red book sitting on your shelf, or even better, maybe a few of you know some of these recipes by heart because they came from your family to these printed pages. I hope you enjoy and make some of the recipes, perhaps with your loved ones, or just because. It’s always worth taking the time. Posting with love. 🧡

Link to the Peanut Butter Kiss Cookie post here >> https://www.facebook.com/share/p/c6w4HrhJ2PPXevvL/?