Welcome To the Ladies Auxiliary

I’ve always loved what we at The Sister Project refer to as “Ladies Auxiliary” cookbooks–the collections of best recipes collected, bound and sold together to raise money for worthy causes ranging from churches and charities to the Junior League. I’m not much of a joiner, so you’re unlikely to ever find me in one of these organizations–but I can sniff out their publications in a yard sale or thrift shop in a flash.

We’re going to be showing more of these forgotten treasures–as well as wonderful personal recipe collections we’ve unearthed–over the coming weeks. If cooking is a sisterhood, these lovingly compiled groups of ladies’ best recipes deserve to be remembered and retried, even if, at the end of the day, we appreciate them more for the history they contain than for their culinary gems. We hope you’ll enjoy these, and let us know of your favorite cooking and sisterhood artifacts.

HAVE YOU EVER heard of the Sisters of Pythia? I hadn’t, until encountering this lovely piece of ephemera on eBay a few months ago. The cover graphic, with its slightly ominous silhouette and an anonymous artist identified only as “HBP,” was so enticing I had to see more.

The book has no publication date, but an ad inside placed by one E.P. Sands, candidate for Sewickley Borough Tax Collector, lets us know that the book emerged sometime before September, 1929 (interestingly, just before Black Monday, and the beginning of the Great Depression). The sisterhood behind the book, as you can see, is the quaintly-named Amythist Temple No. 3 of the Pythian Sisters. This women’s auxiliary to the Knights of Pythia was founded 1888 in Indiana, and from the little I’ve been able to glean, the Sewickley sisters who wrote this little treasure are long gone.

But their disappearance can’t dampen my enthusiasm for their “Cosmopolitan Recipes”–who can resist a definition of “cosmopolitan” that includes “New England Corn Muffins” as well as “Tamale Loaf en Casserole”?
Maybe it’s appropriate that the sisters had such an encompassing world view; after all, Pythia was the name given to the priestesses who provided voice to the Oracle at Delphi, communicating, it was believed, directly with the god Apollo to share his predictions for the ancient world. (Of course, no mere mortal was allowed to speak to the Pythia–priests tended her and interpreted her utterings for the public.)

The Greek influence isn’t so evident in the Sisters’ purple pamphlet, though there is a discussion of Russian versus English modes in table service, chicken salad for 100, and at least two recipes for chow-chow. Personally, I’m planning to try the pound cake cookies.

If we can take the book’s foreword at face value, these ladies put no small bit of importance on what they prepared and served in their homes. Even if the idea that homemaking is “the real masterpiece of every woman” makes you want to blow soup out of your nose, they do have a point in their exaltation of home cooking. “Character, virtue and all moral qualities are powerfully affected by soups, meats, and palatable desserts.” Well–amen, sisters!

(If you want to learn more about the Sisters of Pythia, part of the exhaustive [and exhausting] history of their founding is available for your reading pleasure, thanks to Google Books.)

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