Key word being OLD. I have a new one and an old one and the old one is great. The new one is not nearly as good as the old one.
Three other great old cookbooks to pick up are “The Joy of Cooking”, “Better Homes and Gardens” and “Fannie Farmer Cookbook”. Look for copyright dates from the 1940’s or earlier on old cookbooks. They are far better than the everyday cookbooks out there today for simple everyday meals made from scratch.
My Better Homes and Garden’s cookbook is from 1949 and is a 3 ring binder style book. This style of cookbook made it easy for home cooks to add their own receipes to the cookbook, so often these cookbooks will have lots of extra recipes in them as well.
Garage sales, especially in retirement communities, are great places to pick up old cookbooks. They are usually really cheap too.
After my last post I got the idea to go look through the box of my mother’s old cookbooks, that I had saved after she died. I plan on passing them on to my daughters when they get married or move out on their own.
I looked to see if my mother had any extra recipes in her Better Homes and Garden’s cook book and found some beautifully typed up pages added in to many of the sections. The pages were all cut to mimic the actual pages in the cookbook,and were so perfectly matched to the original pages in the cookbook, that you never would have known they were there until you actually looked through each section of recipes. The dividers for each section are thick and stiff like a pressboard file, and larger than the recipe pages in the cookbook, so you can’t just flip through this cookbook, by fanning the pages.
My mother had many of her recipes in her head, by the time I was old enough to help cook, so she rarely consulted a cook book. In her senior years my sisters and I had asked her to write down some of her cake recipes that we remembered from our youth, but she couldn’t remember them and didn’t remember where she had gotten them, or if they were written down anywhere.
Needless to say, once I realized that there were her typed up pages hidden in the cook book, I immediately turned to the cake section and lo and behold, there were the cake recipes I remembered from my child hood. I will get them all typed up on my computer and share them on this thread as I get them completed.