Favorite Recipes. Compiled and Edited by Saint Matthew’s Guild of Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church.
Fairbanks, Alaska: [The Church; Printed by Tanana Publishing(?)], 1944.
Ring-bound octavo-size book (23 x 15.25 cm.), [ii], 160, [ii] pages. Advertisements. Table of contents. List of advertisers. Printer suggested from advertisement on page [128]. ~ Evident FIRST EDITION. A church cookbook with more than two hundred recipes, many of them attributed. Among entries warranting notice: Black-Eyed Pea Soup, (Dried) Pear Bread, Bohemian Kolaches, Norwegian Horns, Okanagan Salad, Raw Turnip Salad, Green Rice Ring, Codfish Baked with Cheese, Alaskan Cranberry Pork Chops, Corned Moose Meat, Carrot Beef Loaf, Barbecued Lima Beans, Hominy Pie, Raisin Tarts, Pumpkin Cake, Potato Cake (with walnuts), Swedish Pepper Cookies, Apricot Mousse, Cranberry Ice, Salmonberry Preserve. ~ Favorite Recipes honors the fortieth anniversary of its congregation’s founding, for Saint Matthew’s Episcopal was one of three churches organized in 1904 (alongside First Presbyterian and the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception) in the wake of the great Fairbanks Gold Rush of 1902. Episcopalians claim a sort of precedence owing to reports of a service held by visitors from Circle (a mining town northeast of Fairbanks) in 1903 in the Fairbanks Saloon. Another assertion of priority concerns St. Matthew’s Hospital – built of logs like the Church, on land adjacent – which administered, perhaps also as early as 1904, to prospectors and trappers, old-timers and chechacos of every nationality encountered on the trails, among them Canadians, Finns, Russians, Italians, Norwegians, Australians, and others (as recorded by a witness, one Deaconess Clara Carter, in The Alaska Churchman, no. 1 [June 1906]). A source of pride was a small church belfry holding a bell cast in Troy, New York in 1905, and inscribed with words of the first local bishop: “O ye Frost and Cold, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him forever.” Members of Saint Matthew’s also started the first lending library (in a room at the rear of the church), initiated the first kindergarten, and organized the first troop of Boy Scouts in Fairbanks. ~ Shortly after publication of Favorite Recipes, in 1947, the log church burned, but the altar, communion rail, lectern – carved from Alaskan birch – as well as the 1905 bell were saved, eventually to be installed in a new woodframe structure dedicated on Christmas Eve, 1948. The congregation celebrated its centenary in 2004 and flourishes still. ~ Three-hole punched and plastic-ring bound, with original beige cover illustrated in a style reminiscent of Jugendstil woodcuts; lightly soiled front loosened from rings, as are several leaves. Still good or a bit better. Scarce. [OCLC locates two copies; in neither Brown nor Cagle].
Price: $50.00