Twelfth edition with dust-jacket
Rien Fertel, freelance oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance discussed the Times Picayune’s Creole Cook Book and Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans edited by Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker in the Oxford American (The Southern Magazine of Good Writing) in an article titled: Past & Repast today.
Like his article says, more than sixteen editions have been published.
According to the first edition (1900):
Soon will the last of the olden negro cooks of antebellum days have passed away and their places will not be supplied, for in New Orleans, as in other cities of the South, there is “a new colored woman” as well as a new white.
AND
… to preserve to future generations the many excellent and matchless recipes of our New Orleans cuisine, to gather these up from the lips of the old Creole negro cooks and the grand old housekeepers who still survive, ere they, too, pass away, and Creole cookery, with all its delightful combinations and possibilities, will have become a lost art, is, in a measure, the object of this book.
The University of Kentucky Press has re-issued Jennie Benedict’s Blue Ribbon Cook Book. The recipe for her famous Benedictine spread, conspicuously absent from previous editions, appears in the re-issue.
I compared a fourth printing (2001) of Melting Pot Memories (MPM) with Kancigor’s latest book Cooking Jewish (CJ). The copyright page of CJ lists the years 1997, 2003 and 2007. I speculated that CJ was a mainstream publisher’s (Workman) version of the privately published MPM. 