Pluggers by Rick McKee for November 06, 2023

Why wouldn’t you?

Comfort food, done right!

You can’t argue with good old fashioned comfort food-especially if it’s done the Betty Crocker way!

… grease-stained as it is. There’s a Fanny Farmer in with the inherited collection, too.

“First catch your fish.” The best part of old cookbooks is knowing the best (or at least best loved) recipes by the way the pages are stained and discoloured.

The covers have fallen off of our Good Housekeeping Cookbook, but it still has the best recipes for pies.

Yep, only I don’t think my wife got it as a wedding present ! !

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it ;-)

I still have Mom’s 1946 printing of the “American Woman’s Cook Book.” The recipes, many of them, are rather pedestrian, but the foodie photos, particularly the color ones, are impressive in their romanticized hyper-perfection.

I’m still using the one my Mom was given when she married my Dad in 1931. best recipes for homemade candy and the only one I’ve found for an edible fruitcake.

I still have my late wife’s cookbooks, including Better Homes and Gardens (1979 printing) and Betty Crocker (1981). They’re both full of notes of various adjustments she made to many of the recipes. I don’t use either of them, since it’s only been me and my cat here for the last eight years or so. The kitchen bookshelf has a lot of other recipe pamphlets and I don’t use those, either.

I got one in 1970 but bought my sister this one after my other sister threw it out!

How about the Hershey’s 1934 Chocolate Cookbook?

Mine is Betty Crocker that was given to me for my 16th birthday in 1966. My cookbook collection is somewhere around 100 at this point.

The old books. But especially the index cards and small pages written in my mother’s cursive handwriting.

I have my mom’s and mother-in-law’s old cookbooks from the 30’s and 40’s and a stack of those old local cookbooks from the 60’s and 70’s. They are the best. The ones from the 30’s and 40’s have great recipes for venison and small game in them.

Yes, but I think it’s getting hard to find some of the ingredients!

We use Betty. Betty knows everything.

Over the years, the various churches in my Midwest hometown took turns raising funds by producing cookbooks. The ones from the 30’s and 40’s had lots of ways to cook using local produce, game and fish and focused a lot on eggs and butter. The ones from the 50’s and 60’s relied more on some “bought” ingredients [e.g., tomato sauce, canned soup, cake mix] and Jell-O. It is amazing what people would put in Jell-O and call a salad. By the 70’s, the recipes mostly sounded like they came from the back of a box mix or can. No one had time to “cook from scratch” anymore.

My wife has Better Homes and Gardens “New Cook Book” © 1981 that she uses certain recipes from. It is in pieces (chunks) as the spine is ‘broken’.

Betty Crocker, Joy of Cooking, Fanny Farmer and Julia Child. We haven’t felt the need for anything more.

I was in Powell’s Bookstore in Portland. Browsing the cookbooks, a current edition of Betty Crocker Cookbook was around $20. A well used edition with copious notes in the margin was over $100!

Great art. As soon as I saw the book I thought to myself: I have that book! It was Mom’s!" Some fabulous recipes in there, simple and tasty.

Still use my 1988 Betty Crocker cookbook I bought when I got divorced. Have repaired it many times since the newer ones don’t have my favorite recipes in them.

Still using cookbooks I got in 1963, good then and still good today.

I still have the Betty Crocker book, but I also have a Mennonite cookbook I got as a wedding present (the first time around). The last two pages show how to cook for a barn-raising.

I have the 1953 Better Homes and Gardens cookbook my Dad gave my mother for Christmas shortly after they were married. She requested it.

I found a mint 1860 cook book from Lexington VA in my mom’s stuff

Ring Binder Betty Crocker. Bought by saving coupons.

Amen

My mom’s parents immigrated from Sweden and I loved my grandmother’s “Swedish pancakes”. I asked for the recipe and she told me its in the BH&G cookbook under “crepes”.

BTW she made authentic Swedish meatballs but no one in the family ever got her recipe.

Mine is 1975 vintage, but I still sometimes use my mother’s from 1947. Both were wedding presents, too.

So Pluggers have to look up the recipes they’ve been making for 60 years?

Great cook book….

The New McCall’s Cook Book, 1963-1973. Page 122 has THE best Pineapple Up-side down cake recipe EVER. The instructions is to bake in cast iron- the best way to bake this cake.

If you’re going to own one cookbook, that’s an excellent choice. Joy Of Cooking would be another.

Without the pages of heartfelt explanation about why this recipe changed the authors life for the better.

Mom’s is the 1950’s something version we are still using so I guess we count.

Two thoughts: no tofu,no kale.

Good times!

I have that exact cookbook that MY mom got for a wedding present in late 50’s . Quite a few missing pages and I had to fix up the ones that are there but I treasure this book.

It still works… why change?

The recipe calls for plenty of elbow grease.

Is the 1974 Family Circle cookbook* close enough? My BHG cookbook is the “new” one from 1989.

*The first cookbook I bought after I graduated from college.

I have cookbooks that belonged to my grandmothers.

YEP! Still a mighty fine cookbook ♥

DANG! I think my Mom had this one back in the day.

The two cook books I have used most over the years are Betty Crocker and the Meta Givens Encyclopedia of Cooking copyright 1955.Both have lots of tips about basic household things in addition to recipes— how to choose the right cuts of meat, freshest produce, how to set a table, etc. Givens includes recipes for game, too.

But, hands down the cook book I used the most was Impromptu Cooking. It didn’t have recipes. It was a guide of how to cook things and what goes with what. One of my guy roommates swore he couldn’t learn to cook. He read Impromptu Cooking and the next thing we knew, he was making beef Stroganoff from scratch.

I used to have my mother’s betty crocker one. Another thing that got left behind 20 years ago.

Absolutely nothing wrong with the classics. I was raised on the 50s version of that book.

I’m still using the Better Homes and Garden cookbook my mom got for a wedding present, but it’s older than that. My parents got married in 1953. =)

I bought a 90’s facsimile of a 50’s edition of that book, then I bought a new one about 3 years ago. Very good recipes and to use as reference material. Have quite a collection of classic general cook books, Joy of Cooking, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Fannie Farmer, L.L. Bean, Double Day, as well as regional, ethnic, game and cowboy cooking. mostly bought in Goodwill or Ebay. Must have more than 100 just phisically, and more than two thousand in ebook form, some of which I even paid for. And all started when I wanted to know what to do with my venison.

Food doesn’t change that much. Since recipes cannot be copyrighted, they are recycled endlessly with paragraphs on “the history of squash” tacked on to try to make them seem novel.

We have an assortment of cookbooks – an entire bookshelf full. The one I use the most is a 1963 printing (bought in the early 1970s in 2 book paperback set) of “the Joy of Cooking”. I bought it for myself (every time I make hard boiled eggs I have to check again how long to cook them). I do have a Betty Crocker cookbook from back then which gets used a lot. Several Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks. A cookbook written by an Italian couple who had a restaurant in Boston. Two Jewish cookbooks (we are mixed ethnicity). A couple of Colonial Williamsburg cookbooks – also used a lot. Not sure what other cookbooks have also ended up on the shelf.