A new cookbook called “The Book of Lost Recipes” remembers classic dishes from long-gone hotels, iconic restaurants and roadside eateries of yesteryear. But the book is more than a collection of recipes. It also chronicles the evolution of American food culture, telling stories of how and why certain dishes and restaurants became popular when they did.
“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. “The things people are driven to eat are influenced by the economy, politics, immigration trends and all kinds of other things.”
A recurring theme in the book, out this month from Page Street Publishing, is how immigrant chefs took ethnic food mainstream. There are recipes from establishments like Paoli’s Restaurant (Italian) in San Francisco, Ruby Chow’s (Chinese) in Seattle, and iconic Jewish delis like Ashkenaz’s in Chicago and Wolfie’s Rascal House in Miami.
Celebrity 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. Other dishes in the book were beloved by regular folk, like chicken soup and mac-and-cheese from Horn & Hardart’s, the famed automat.