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sylviatexas1

Vintage Cookbooks, Old-Time Recipes, Kitchen History

sylviatexas1
9 years ago

The "What Do You Have Too Much Of" thread veered off into cookbooks (I veered it, sorry), which I think need their own thread.

I love reading old cookbooks;
they're like diaries or journals of the way people lived "at home" at different eras.

Cookbooks are kitchen history;
More than hemlines or make-up or tv or movies, the way people eat is the way they live, & cookbooks reveal how people ate at home.

Cookbooks tell you what things were in short supply & what things were the latest rage.

Like the "make it do" recipes of Depression times & the WWII recipes that took into account the rationing of sugar & fat & the scarcity of other ingredients, cookbooks from the '50s, '60's, & '70's reveal a lot about American meals during those times.

(don't know about the '80's & later because I wasn't paying attention!)

but in the '70's, I was a young married woman working in an insurance office in downtown Dallas, & I brought things to our "spreads", & I cooked dinner every night-meat/potatoes/green vegetables/salad/dinner rolls/iced tea/dessert-because that's what my then-husband was used to & what he demanded.

don't know how he escaped from that marriage alive;
I could have poisoned him on any evening-
& it would have been an accident!

so I remember crock pot cookbooks & microwave cookbooks & Stouffer's frozen spinach souffles & corn souffles!

& I always took a "party loaf" to the office get-togethers:
you'd buy a whole, uncut loaf of bakery bread & cut it into layers, like a cake.

Then you put different fillings like tuna salad, pimento cheese, cream cheese, etc, between the layers, secured the layers with wooden skewers, & put it in the fridge overnight so it would kind of set.

& you had to have a good serrated knife that would cut through the layers without smooshing them & sliding them off!

What kinds of cookbooks/cooking do you remember?

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