Being a fan of old cookbooks, I am always on the hunt to find new items to add to my collection. One day I was googling around and found this recipe for Michigan Tech Wives Brownies which intrigued me because it mentioned a cookbook. Down the rabbit hole I went.....and sure enough, I found that there was an organization called the Michigan Tech Wives Club that became popular after the war and the influx of GI Bill students. As an MTU student, I had heard stories of young families living in quonset huts on the east end of campus. Evidently the MTU Wives Club were very active and organized the first nursery school on campus, called the Michigan Tech Cooperative Nursery. It was located in the barracks behind the Institute of Mineral Research. I'm in Houghton this week, so I went to the MTU Archives to see what I could find out about the group, but they didn't have much. I kept looking on line for the cookbook to buy somewhere, and I couldn't find it for sale, I was lucky enough to find that someone had scanned it in. So here it is, for your reference Happiness Is....A Tech Wives Cookbook. Ironically, the Michigan Tech Wives Brownies recipe wasn't in there. I suspected it wouldn't be.....the last reference of the MTU Wives Club that I could see anywhere was in the late 1960s MTU Winter Carnival Pictorials (the wives liked to enter into the skits competition) and the recipe calls for mini chocolate chips, which I am pretty sure are a relatively new invention. This book was published in December 1967. I don't even remember mini chocolate chips being around in Houghton when I went to MTU myself in the 1980s. In fact, it was hard to get peanut butter chips up here back then for my favorite chocolate cookie recipe. Whenever I could find them at Jim's Food Mart, the only grocery store in town back then, I'd buy as many as I could, or I would bring them up from downstate. There are others in the book that look tasty I'd like to try, although there wasn't any local recipes like pasties or chow chow in it.
The inscription in the front cover is really touching...
Even though MTU is much different now and the MTU husbands are just as likely to be cooking as the MTU wives, I love the fact that these ladies got together and made this book. I'd love to see another MTU cookbook.....maybe this will be my next venture. I couldn't find a picture of the MTU Wives Club, but this photo of MTU's Winter Carnival Queen Candidates evokes the same vibe for me
 |
| MTU Winter Carnival Queen Candidates 1965 |
1 comment:
Thank you for this! I'm doing a little novel research on Tech in the 1960s and learned about the existence of this cookbook--and now I have access to it! THANK YOU!
Post a Comment