'This recipe from 50 or 60 years ago tasted current, like the upscale comfort food that has become such a big thing,' she said.

But other dishes would be right at home in any hipster cafe in Brooklyn, like bratwurst and sweet-and-sour lentils, created by a German immigrant, Henry Thiele, a famous restaurateur in the Pacific Northwest who was admired by none other than a young James Beard. She has no formal training as a chef, but with help from her mom and others, each dish was tested in a home kitchen.Ī few of the lost recipes sound archaic today or involve obscure ingredients, like one for roast venison with currant port sauce from New York's long-defunct Planters Hotel. Once she had an original recipe in hand, she scaled it down from restaurant-size portions to family-size. Saxena not only pored over old guidebooks to see what restaurants were recommended as worthwhile for diners to seek out on their travels, but she also tracked down descendants of chefs and restaurant owners to get their stories. And how a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona, opened an upscale restaurant called The Tack Room so that its guests - who came to Arizona to escape cold weather - could enjoy fancy meals like veal with chanter- elle mushrooms after a long day of riding horses. Saxena describes, for example, how tiki culture, a fake, kooky mashup of South Pacific motifs, reigned supreme at the Kahiki Supper Club in Columbus, Ohio. Many recipes offer a window into travel trends and pop culture. Other dishes in the book were beloved by regular folk, like chicken soup and mac-and-cheese from Horn & Hardart's, the famed automat. There are recipes from establishments like Paoli's Restaurant (Italian) in San Francisco, Ruby Chow's (Chinese) in Seattle, and iconic delis like Wolfie's Rascal House in Miami.Ĭelebrity culture gets its turn in the book, too, with recipes from Chasen's, a West Hollywood joint that hosted the likes of Liz Taylor and Ronald Reagan, and The Pump Room in Chicago, which Frank Sinatra referenced in a song.

'The things people are driven to eat are influenced by the economy, politics, immigration trends and all kinds of other things.'Ī recurring theme in the book, out this month from Page Street Publishing, is how immigrant chefs took ethnic food mainstream. 'A good restaurant, a restaurant that becomes famous or that a community cares about - it has to do with food, but it has to do with so much more,' said cookbook author Jaya Saxena, a writer for The Daily Dot. It also chronicles the evolution of American food culture, telling stories of how and why certain dishes and restaurants became popular when they did. But the book is more than a collection of recipes. A new cookbook called The Book of Lost Recipes remembers classic dishes from long-gone hotels, iconic restaurants and roadside eateries in the USA of yesteryear.

Recipes lost to time