When last I peeked in on Bunker Hill’s First Congregational Church, its membership was planning a halfway house for reformed prostitutes and marching to protest Los Angeles’s crib district, a hub of semi-legal prostitution in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Now, it’s 1907, and things have been busy for First Congregational. For starters, they moved from the Hill in the early 1900s to 841 S. Hope Street.
But more exciting, the church’s Women’s Work Society has compiled a cookbook, Our Favorite Recipes, a remarkable collection of regional period recipes. Even more exciting, it’s been digitized at Archive.org, along with a number of other Los Angeles cookbooks from the early 20th century.
Perhaps we’ll celebrate this collection with a helping of Harriet Burd’s Congregational Pudding:
1 cup molasses
1 cup chopped suet
1 cup cold water
3 cups graham flour
1 teaspoon soda
Flavor with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and vanilla. Steam three hours in a three-pound lard bucket covered.
Or, on second thought, maybe we won’t.