Are We Having Funds?

Want to raise more money from your charity’s fund-aising cookbook? The McIlhenny Co. will make contributions to the three national and six regional winners of its sixth annual Tabasco Community Cookbook Contest. To be eligible, the fund-raising cookbook must be published by a nonprofit organization in 1994 or 1995. It will be judged on layout and design, title, theme, story line, reflection of regional culinary traditions, recipe content and the organization’s fund-raising efforts.

For an entry form, send a self-addressed, stamped, business-size envelope to: Community Cookbook Awards, Hunter MacKenzie, 41 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10010-2202. The deadline for entries is Oct. 2.

California Hardbody

The East Coast is richer in seafood than California, but it doesn’t have our Dungeness crab. The Dugeness has one of the highest ratios of meat to body weight of all crabs: 23%. For comparison, a king crab is 21% meat and the Atlantic blue crab is only 15%.

Czeching Out

A lot of us are into Mediterranean cuisine these days, but not Penfield Press of Iowa City, Iowa. Sixteen years ago it published the cutely named “The Czech Book,” which it followed up by listing in their catalogue three more Czech cookbooks, three on Polish cuisine and a series of Scandinavian volumes (“Notably Norwegian,” “Superbly Swedish,” “Delectably Danish,” “Fantastically Finnish”). It’s starting to move into Ukrainian territory as well.

Most of the books Penfield carries are more broadly cultural--maps, dictionaries, craft books, a hiking guide to Poland, a book on Finnish genealogical research--but it’s clearly the center for Northern European cookbooks. For a catalogue call (800) 728-9998 or (319) 337-9998; fax (319) 351-6846.