Episode 12: More Literary Yule Recipes for the Longest Nights

Recipe for Sleep

Recipe for Sleep is a podcast where we dust off very old cookbooks and let them lull us to dreamland. I’m Erin Brindley, a chef and storyteller, and I’ve got a library full of old recipe books from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and in this podcast I read them to you to give your mind an easy, sweet place to spend some time. And if you fall asleep mid-recipe, all the better. Tonight we’re tucking back in to 1906’s Books and My Food (With Literary Quotations and Original Recipes for Every Day in the Year).

I chose this book to get us through all the holiday season, (although I think it would take us all of January too to get through the whole thing,) because each recipe is coupled with a literary quote from an English author. It’s not always Dickens, but sometimes it is, and it’s just right for cold days and long nights. We left off in April last week, but I’m going to skip ahead to November. The recipes are cozier, and because we’re releasing this episode the week of the Winter Solstice, it feels right to hear about all the rich dishes and spiced wines.

Let’s open the worn cover of “Books and My Food,” and flip through the butter stained pages so we can begin in the middle.

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.