Eating from the Archives 2024: the Cookies edition

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Join us on Thursday, April 25, from 1-3 pm in LIB 307 to get your carb and sugar buzz on!

This year’s Eating From the Archives event will feature recipes from the Christine Heller papers. Christine was a botanist and nutritionist and her papers include a lot (boxes and boxes and boxes) of recipe cards containing recipes she collected from a wide variety of sources. We digitized 100+ of the cookie recipes so there’s plenty to choose from!

Christine Heller aboard ship, photographing botanical specimens.

Here’s the deal: Make 1 or more of the recipes. Bring those cookies in Thursday April 25 between 12:30 pm and 1 pm, please also bring a printout of the recipe card so people can see the ingredients. (If you can’t print it out, just get in touch with us in advance and we’ll have one ready for you). We’ll supply the tables, the napkins, the plates. We’ll have some special guests who will taste-test the various items and give us their thoughts on them. And then we all get to dig in!

Here’s the recipes. Remember that Christine was a nutritionist? These tend to skew to the healthy, or what may have been considered healthy at the time the recipes were created. A whole lot of wheat germ and chopped dates scattered throughout these recipes. And not much chocolate, which we frankly regard as a major drawback. (Carob is NOT an adequate substitute! DAMHIK) The recipes are in alphabetical order by the name of the cookie as written on the card. There’s some additional keywords after most in case you’re looking for gluten free, or cookies with nuts, etc., so you can keyword search through the list too. And please note: not all of these recipes have complete instructions. You have been warned. You may want to read the recipe thoroughly before getting started. Here’s the other thing: we honestly don’t know if all of these have actually been made. Or that inclusion in Christine Heller’s collection is any guarantee of yumminess (given a few of them, we’re pretty sure there’s no guarantees of tastiness at all.)

The links below take you to images of the recipe cards. Some are handwritten. If you have any problem reading the cursive, get in touch: we have some cursive reading experts around here and we’ll be happy to try and help!

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