Monday, February 21, 2011

Tried and True Recipes

I love to cook. My husband will tell you that I may love to cook, but I am not very friendly as a cook. NO ONE is allowed in the kitchen while I am working. Though I have a nice spacious kitchen now, this axium comes from growing up in an old victorian home with a very narrow kitchen. If there was more than one person in the kitchen there were bound to be bumps, bruises and spills.

I have owned a great many cookbooks but I always seem to go back to my favorite, my mother's Better Homes and Gardens "New Cookbook". This is the book I used as I learned to cook. It is still the one I go to most often.
I believe this is the 1959-60 edition.

Some of the pages are in such bad shape, but amazingly most of the "must" have recipes are still readable! Though looking at this page I am not sure which recipe was the go to recipe on this page that caused all the repeated use. There are several pages throughout the book that look like this.
It is Sunday morning, time for a yummy breakfast. So, I pulled out mom's book to find the coffee cake recipe. It tastes great but my baking powder is dead. I've got to remember to put this on my shopping list!


As I was putting away my book, I thought I would compare my mom's edition with that of my grandmother's edition (1939). Here are a few pictures of her book.


The cover is falling apart just like mom's and pages are mussed up, but I have very few memories of my grandmother using ANY recipes. It was all in her head by the time I followed her around in the kitchen. I guess by the time the pages are falling out you should have that recipe memorized.

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