Description
Protestant Womens' Group of Camp Sendai, Published 1951. Hardcover, 166 pp.; 22 cm; dated October 1951 on title page, printed by Choichi Sasaki, Sendai; 4 black-and-white photographic plates; index.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Acceptable condition, no dust jacket. Boards covered in red cotton printed with a kokeshi doll pattern, no lettering; cloth soiled and stained, fraying and nicking along edges and at corner tips, moderate shelf wear. Front hinge broken: pastedown split at gutter with paper loss and an old tape remnant, faint pencil line on front pastedown. Text block nearly detached from the case and held only by the sewing. Sewing has pulled apart between pp. 28-29, where the gutter is open to the spine, but the two halves remain joined by the blue binding tape that carries the signature threads; signatures still attached to one another and no loose leaves, all pages present. Pages toned, with moderate spotting and soiling throughout and heavier kitchen staining to several leaves (pp. 28-29 and 124-125 among them). Frontispiece has offset onto the thin title leaf. Otherwise unmarked. Community cookbook compiled by the wives of American servicemen at Camp Sendai (Camp Schimmelpfennig), the largest U.S. Army post north of Tokyo during the Occupation, established in September 1945 and held until 1957. Dated October 1951, a year into the Korean War, when Sendai served as a rear base. Title page lists the group's officers, two chaplains as Bible teachers, and some sixty co-workers; contributors are credited by name and often hometown (Walterboro, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and so on), so the book doubles as a roster of the post's families. Contents follow the American church-cookbook model (breads, cakes, cookies, meats, casseroles, salads, pickles) with a section of Japanese dishes, among them sukiyaki and tempura, and a Standing Operating Procedure of measures and substitutions for cooks working with Army commissary supplies. Two group photographs by a U.S. Army photographer: the Protestant Womens' Group and Chaplains of Camp Sendai, and the cooking class of Miyagi High School, Sendai, which taught the Japanese recipes. Cloth is printed with kokeshi, the turned wooden dolls of the Sendai region. No copy located in WorldCat, and none offered elsewhere. A document of Occupation-era domestic life and of the exchange between American military families and their Japanese hosts.