Bookshelf - "A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes" (1971) by the Pittsburgh Pirates

32 pp. paperback

33 recipes from the wives of players, coaches and management

The year 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Pirates' fourth World Series championship. 

Those Pirates have been referred to as the team that changed baseball, because they were the first championship team to be fully integrated. Half of the players on the roster were either African American or Latin American.

In 1971 the club also published A Treasure Chest of Pirate Recipes, the slim volume pictured above. This cookbook has quickly become one of my favourites. Even though it contains fewer than three dozen recipes, they definitely reflect the multicultural makeup of the ballclub.

There are fancy appetizers and desserts, lots of soulful comfort food from popular American and Latin American cuisine, and some scary Jello-based salads too.

Over the course of the next 12 months I'll be preparing a bunch of these recipes and posting the results here. The lineup includes dishes from the kitchens of the Stargell, Ellis, Clemente, Blass, Oliver, Sanguillen and Grant families, and many more. Check out the food that fuelled the Pirates fifty years ago.