The Depression Era Cookbook
Meal stretchers and from‑scratch recipes from the hard times, each one with its story, what it cost in 1933, and what it costs per serving today.
Independent publisher
Practical books you can actually use.
Cookbooks, home skills and identification guides — written to be checked, not just read. Every title has a free companion you can download here without paying, registering, or leaving an email address.
Practical non-fiction for people who intend to do the thing: cook the dish, learn the skill, identify the object in their hand.
Every book is built on one rule — nothing gets asserted that a reader can’t verify. If a claim can’t be tested at a kitchen table, or checked against a published figure, it doesn’t go in the book. That is also why the prices, weights and timings in our titles are written to be looked up rather than taken on trust.
Nine titles, published on Amazon in the United States.
In the kitchen Around the house Old things, identified Paperwork, in plain English Kept and handed down
Cookbooks for a real weeknight: ordinary ingredients, honest timings, and the numbers printed where you need them.
Meal stretchers and from‑scratch recipes from the hard times, each one with its story, what it cost in 1933, and what it costs per serving today.
Kidney‑friendly home cooking with the sodium, potassium and phosphorus figures printed on every recipe, so they can be taken to the person who actually advises you.
Bread machine recipes written for a working week: ordinary supermarket ingredients, the right cycle for each loaf, and what to do when the crumb comes out wrong.
Over a hundred dishes from a whole continent, each called by the name the people who cook it use, with the steps most beginner books quietly leave out.
Skills and remedies that used to be passed down at the kitchen table, written out properly so they can be passed down again.
Seven rooms of forgotten home skills — mending, preserving, fixing, growing — taught properly, one skill to a page, to learn and to pass down.
A visual manual of household herbal preparations from the Spanish‑speaking kitchen: what goes in each one, how it is made, and what is actually known about it.
Field guides for telling a genuine piece from something merely old — photographs to compare against, and tests you can run yourself.
U.S. coins, and the line between a genuine mint error and ordinary post‑mint damage — with close‑up photographs and technical diagrams, printed in full color.
The documents nobody explains, walked through one step at a time, with the questions worth asking before you sign.
A plain‑English walk through what a living trust is, what paperwork it involves, and which questions to put to a lawyer before signing anything.
Illustrated books made to be given and kept: the pictures printed large enough to actually look at, and every original credited so it can be found.
Sixty moments of the American story for the semiquincentennial, each printed with the painting, photograph or document it is remembered by — 136 pictures in full color, every one credited with a free link to the original.
New titles appear here as they are published.
Every recent book comes with printable material that would have made the book unwieldy: checklists, planners, charts — and in one case the whole picture archive behind a book. It is free, it stays free, and it is one click away — no purchase, no account, no email required.
Each name is a line of books rather than a person: one subject, one method, one voice. Author pages go up as each line grows.
Found a mistake in one of the books? A measurement that doesn’t work, a figure that looks wrong, a step that skips something? Say so — that is how the next edition gets better.
What we can’t do: tell you what your coin is worth, what you should eat, or what to put in your will. Those answers come from someone looking at your actual situation, not from a publisher reading an email.