The holidays bring up at least a few opportunities to pull cookbooks off shelves in order to find the perfect recipe for an occasion.   These collections of cooking directions are often dog-eared and bulging from the newspaper and magazine clippings that act as addendums to the original text.  Pencil marks cross out parts of recipes that don’t work as well or offer substitutions based on what was in the pantry when the dish was last attempted. 
 
 Cookbooks are already outstanding primary sources of their time periods, but can become even better, more individualized documents when analyzed complete with these alterations.  And if anyone will wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment it is Erin E. Moulton.  Erin is a genealogist and researcher as well as an author and presenter. She joined me earlier this Fall to take a deeper look at the Out of Vermont Kitchens cookbook to see what it can tell us about the people and times that produced it.