The White House Cookbook: Vintage Meat Cuts Images 1

I’m always flipping through old thrift store books for images. Sometimes our local library has wonderful book sales and there are some pretty cool oldies. I do my best to research the copyright expiration in hopes of confirming the work as public domain so that I can share the images for reproduction. Recently I came across this very grungy old cookbook found at the recycle area at the dump for a quarter. The White House Cookbook of 1887 by Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette.Barely clinging to its spine, it is tucked full of coupons, clippings, and handwritten recipes. Digging further, I found pressed flowers and clover. Clearly this was someone’s treasured homemaking sourcebook as well as their scrapbook. I have to keep it tied together with twine. In the front of the book are pages of information on cuts of meats with fabulous illustrations. If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sorry, I’m sure you won’t find this charming in the least. But I couldn’t help but think how wonderful these images would look on a bib apron.These would also be great printed to printable fabric sheets and appliquéd to a pillow for your kitchen seating area, or onto T-shirt transfer sheets and ironed on to muslin for making decorative dish towels. You can get a little crazy and embroider the image once you’ve transferred it. Or, print to paper and trim out to Mod Podge to canvases for kitchen decor, and so on.

Click to enlarge and save the scans of these book pages.The pages show through a bit from the other sides (which I don’t mind much at all,) and aside from hours of Photoshop work, that’s how they’ll remain for my versions, but I am also including a set of images that have been outlined in Adobe Illustrator as vector graphics that you can manipulate in your own software. Click on that image for a PDF download file.There’s much more than history and recipes in this book, so click HERE for more information on The White House Cookbook, or HERE to download your own PDF version of the entire book!