The World's Best Recipes
Older cookbooks often had interesting illustrations in lieu of photos. Obviously this was partially due to the limitations of printing technology at the time, but I'd also like to think that drawings of food tend to be more charming and leave more to the imagination of the reader/cook, allowing room for personal expression (or mistakes - god forbid!) in preparation and presentation.
This would be an unthinkable approach in today's kitchens, where Martha Stewart's pale ghost wafts through the wallpaper to scold the homemaker at the slightest deviation from her studio lit and painstakingly arranged food-plastics. I mean, how can you compare? You can't, and that's her intention.
In my childhood (the 1970s), cookbooks with photos were increasingly common but even then it was apparent that the photos - printed with sickly greens and radar reds - were only grotesque approximations of the real dishes. All the food spreads I see in magazines now are as airbrushed and photoshopped as a Playboy centerfold.
These drawings are from a book called The World's Best Recipes, written by Marvin Small and illustrated by Annabelle Forsch. I found almost zero information about Forsch anywhere online. There is this obit of her husband from The New York Times... but nothing else, not even other examples of her other work, if she did any at all. The drawings she made for this book are great, though - charming and beautifully composed.
The book was first published in 1955 - I assume that's when the drawings were created? - but this is the 9th printing from 1963, from Pocket Books of Canada, LTD.
