Episode 10: Sleepy Yule Recipes

Recipe for Sleep

Recipe for Sleep is a podcast where I read you old cookbooks until you fall asleep, and for the rest of this holiday season we have a special theme. There is something so quiet and soothing about the idea of cozying up under a blanket on a dark night, reading silently with people you love, each in your own world but together.

As I was looking through all the old cookbooks, trying to find the perfect, seasonally themed one to read you to sleep, I found “Books and My Food”. A curious cookbook written by a pair of friends in 1904. There are 365 recipes, one for each day of the year, coupled with a literary quote, primarily from English authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. The recipes are barely recipes at all, and they read a little like poems.

We’ll spend the next few weeks in our own little English “jolabokaflod,” the Icelandic tradition of exchanging books on Christmas eve, and then spending the rest of the evening reading them.

So, turn the lights out, put away anything you were doing, and snuggle deep into your sweet covers.

There is a particularly long, meandering introduction in this book, so if you’re the sort that wants to get right to snoozing to recipes, you’ll find they begin at around minute six.

And if you’d like to read the original text, you’ll find it here: Books and My Food: Literary Quotations and Original Recipes for Every Day of the Year.