Recipes come and go, and there are a few that seem to last through the ages. Others are fads, embraced for a few years, and then forgotten. When I was a mom in the early nineties, a recipe for Amish bread flew from neighbor to neighbor, along with a container of live yeasty culture with instructions how to maintain it for loaf after loaf in your own kitchen, and how to grow more to pass on to the next neighbor. The baked product was a lovely textured, mildly sweet bread.

Beef Stroganoff, a Hungarian dish with noodles, beef, sour cream and paprika, was an every day staple in Europe, I believe. There was little difficulty finding it in many restaurants and kitchens some 40 years ago in the US, but its visibility seems to have waned.

Several cakes, probably still around, but unknown to many were immensely popular in the 1960s. Devil's Food is a dark chocolate cake with rich chocolate frosting. German Chocolate cake is a milder, lightly spiced chocolate with milk chocolate frosting. The filling between the layers was a candy-like concoction of nuts and shredded coconut.

Old cookbooks are a great source for forgotten, but wonderful foods and how to prepare them.