I have a lot of my great-grandmother's recipes, including many that she cut from the newspaper and meticulously filed by category in six card files along with recipes she came up with herself and got from friends. This little booklet, "Unusual Winter Recipes" by Harriet Cooke of the Buffalo Evening News, I found with some other miscellaneous stuff in a suitcase we had in the garage for years before the imminent move forced us to open it. There are plenty of interesting recipes in the pamphlet--though what makes them "unusual" is not clear--but the very first one caught my eye for some reason and I made it last night. In this case, "unusual" probably means "meatless" because traditional Philadelphia Pepper Pot generally includes tripe and/or veal. The White Stock called for in this recipe is traditionally made with veal bones, but not having any of those on hand I just used a mixture of chicken and vegetable broths. The soup turned out really well; it's extremely rich, and that was even using much less butter than it specified. I subbed in olive oil to cook the veggies, left out the salt, and increased the onions a bit because I was worried about blandness, but it's quite flavorful. The other nice thing is that it's incredibly cheap: out of curiosity I added up the cost of the ingredients and they totaled $2.81, or about $0.70 per serving. (Click on the image to enlarge.) The soup also goes very well with the bread I made on Sunday.