Somehow I’ve become the kind of person who buys vintage cookbooks.
In the spring, shortly after the COVID shutdown began, I bought a cookbook from 1912 published in conjunction with Washington, DC’s Heurich Brewery. At the end of July, I bought another cookbook through eBay, this one a Peanuts-themed Chex cereal cookbook published in 1991.
The cookbook arrived in the mail on Saturday in very good condition. I looked through it — twelve recipes — and realized that I was unlikely to ever make anything from it. Well, maybe Monkey Mush (ie., a banana pudding). The recipes are a bit limited, and I don’t usually eat Chex cereal.
As I looked through the cookbook, I paid attention to the Peanuts artwork. And the more I looked at it, the more I wondered who had drawn the Peanuts illustrations.
Take, for instance, the illustration of Linus and Charlie Brown above. It’s not Charles Schulz. They look mostly right, but even a cursory perusal of The Complete Peanuts 1991-1992 shows that the characters in the cookbook are sketchier than Schulz’s work. Whoever did the artwork did a creditable job aping Schulz’s style.
Still, even though I don’t know who drew it, nor am I likely to ever make anything from it, it’s a nice piece of Peanuts ephemera to have.