Remember the very first cookbook you ever used to follow a recipe?
Maybe for you, as for me, it was a genuine 1957 first edition of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls (a pretty presumptuous title considering no one had even heard of women’s lib back then!).
I don’t think that book could have cost more than a dollar or two, but I used it from the age of 10 clear up until I headed off to college. Honest. The fudge recipe was that easy and, after so many years, all mine! And there were all those other simple and delicious recipes I could use (and did!) to impress, manipulate or coerce eight younger siblings into all kinds of situations and accomplishments.
The pages were splattered, and the cover duct-taped together long before it eventually vanished from my life…along with cherished copies of The Secret Garden, The Girl Scout Handbook and my Betsy-Tacy books. I have no idea where.
Maybe for you, as for my best girlfriend growing up, it was a copy of your mother’s Joy of Cooking or your grandma’s Fanny Farmer Cookbook that started you on your path as home cook or foodie.
Remember how you never knew what would come out of those old volumes? Fantastic cakes and recipes, sure, but they were also crammed full of memories and yellowed scraps of newspaper clippings: recipes, obits, wedding announcements, prayers, faded old photos. Unbelievable.
I see a lot of cookbooks now that I’m part of the Taste of Home family. In future blogs, I’ll be sharing some of the most interesting ones that come across our desk with you…along with our own best new efforts!
But no matter how many I page through, experiment with or collect, I don’t believe any will ever have quite the same hold on my heart…or incite quite the same eagerness to try it out that that first cookbook did.
Maybe you can still remember your own first cookbook…maybe even the first recipe you tried. Think back a minute…then share your recollections—or recipes—with us, won’t you?
P.S. Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls is still available today in an authentic reproduction brought back by popular demand!
Mary_H
Managing Editor
“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”
-Laurie Colwin