Alice Blau Adler COOKBOOK

     The culinary and foodways traditions of the Chicago-based Adler family comprised a changing mixture of Viennese and American concepts and recipes. As with most families, the real day-to-day food habits and preferences remained generally undocumented. Both Richard and Alice retained tastes that they had originally formed in childhood, for instance, a strong preference for rye bread over the airy and comparatively tasteless white bread sold in American supermarkets; a liking for wurstln (sausages, hot dogs, and related foods) that had been part of their Viennese foodways heritage; anda disdain for American (e.g., French’s brand) yellow mustard, which they disparaged as “diarrhea mustard.” Additionally, various celebratory foods, including fruit-filled dumplings and several key Austrian cakes/tortes and cookies/kipferln, were long retained as appropriate dishes for holiday times and special occasions. 

     Sometime – probably relatively early in her life, perhaps around the time she moved from Austria to Switzerland – Alice Blau began to accumulate some hand-written copies of key recipes. Although she kept the old recipes in a notebook along with “new” ones that she picked up from friends as time passed, the oldest were not recorded in her own handwriting; it is still not clear if the oldest Viennese recipes were first written down by her own mother, or perhaps by Richard’s mother Therese. The original copies of these are now browned and crumbling, but written in a beautiful and careful handwriting, all in German. 

     At some point, perhaps in the late 1950s or early 1960s, Alice Blau Adler began to organize her most important or significant old recipes. She compiled them into a 6"x9" three-ring binder, with numbered pages and an index. The first section of pages in this Blau-Adler cookbook are in German, and include some Austrian or Viennese variants of vernacular cooking terminology. Many of these recipes in German appear to be direct copies of the same handwritten recipes that were first compiled, as noted above, by either Jenny Blau or Therese Adler. As she progressed on the compiled cookbook, Alice added her own additional recipes, either written out in her own handwriting or manually typed onto the 6"x9" pages. Many recipes reflect Alice’s need to speed up the preparation of complex Viennese dishes, since her busy career as a practicing physician left her little time for cookery as an end in itself. 

     We hope that the recipes reproduced here will inspire the descendants of Alice Blau Adler to periodically re-create some family favorites — from Linzertorte, vanillakipferln, liptauer, and Malakofftorte, to 4th-of-July Pound Cake, and more.