Cookbooks

[autowasherfreak]

I like to collect cookbooks even though I rarely use them. I enjoy reading them and looking at the pictures especially in the older cookbooks from the 40's to the 70's.

I have one cookbook that belonged to my mother which was prepared and published by the Boden Ladies Aid. It has ads in it from local businesses which I find very interesting even though there are no pictures just text.

I know this cookbook has be very old because of the phone numbers from the ads. The phone numbers are anywhere from 2 to 4 digits long and some have a letter in them, would this have been in the 50's or earlier.

The book means a lot to me my mother, grandmother, and great aunt all who has passed away have recipes in it with along with their names.

Here is the ad for what I knew as being just a grocery store when I was growing up, no appliances in it at that time.

Other ads mention Universal Appliances and Roper Appliances.

 

[58limited]

I have my grandma's cook book from the early 1940s ( title page has copyright (printing) dates from 1938 to 1944). My aunt inherited it and had it rebound. My mom inherited it from her and I from my mom. It is The American Woman's Cook Book. I like that it shows how to properly set a table for meals from simple to formal, has a detailed glossary of cooking terms, and several color plates.

Carnation, producer of Irradiated Carnation Milk, is a featured advertiser. What was irradiated milk? Modern irradiation come to my mind, such as exposing military rations, MREs, to gamma radiation to kill all micro-organisms so that the food can be stored indefinitely at room temperature. Was irradiated milk the same? I didn't know they had that process back in the early 40s.

 

[gyrafoam]

Hard to tell how old it is by the telephone numbers alone. Some communities were still using alpha-numerics well into the 1960's.In Atlanta, I think it must have been about 1964 or so when my parent's number became a "255" and dropped the letters, but people still kept referring to the old "exchanges" just because they had become accustomed to them.
I think four-digit numbers would have been the norm well through the 1950's in rural settings when you had to pick up the telephone and ask the operator to connect you to such and such a number.
In the cities two letter/five digit numbers were already common.

 

[xraytech]

The NNX(Named Number Exchanges) I do believe started in the late 40's and in my area they were still used until the mid-late 60's.

I have a cook book that belonged to my great aunt from our church, it is St. Michael's R.C Church Altar Society Cook Book and on the cover it has a black and white picture of the front of the church with the spring flowers in full bloom and a 59 Plymouth Fury parked out front. it was published in 60 or 61 and all the phone numbers were all LU-7 and WH-7 in all the adds for the local businesses from our small town and the next town over instead of the exchanges 587 and 947.

I also have a Dormeyer Electric Mix Treasures cook book which has the best cakes all made with Spry Shortening since they were a contributor to the book, copyright of 1947. I also have the Golden Anniversary Cookbook for Wesson Oil and SnowDrift Shortening with a 1950 copyright. I also love grandma's Montgomery Ward's Signature Freezer book which has the best fruit pie filling recipes along with freezing guides for all of my home grown produce.

 

[autowasherfreak]

What is Spry???

One of the ingredients that I see in several recipes is spry, is it a butter, margarine, or shortening of some sort?

 

[xraytech]

Jim,

Spry was a brand of shortening, in it's heyday in th 40's and 50's it was as popular if not more so than Crisco, Snow Drift was aloso another brand of shortening and was made by Wesson Oil.

Sam

 

[autowasherfreak]

Thanks Sam, I wanted to make the recipe, but I didn't know what it was, and guessed it was a shortening of some kind.

 

[tolivac]

Glad I am not alone-have some of my Moms cookbooks-and get others from yard sales and bookstores.Laureuse Gastromin-not sure of the spelling-these are a warehouse of food and cooking info-gotten a few of these from used bookstores-and a new one from Barnes and Noble.Sometimes I may use recipes from them.Also have some blender cookbooks.some of those old shakes and smoothie recipes still taste good today!

 

[autowasherfreak]

I would say that about 50 percent of my cookbooks came from my mother and grandmother, and the rest from friends, and yard sales. My grandmother on my father's side was teaching me how to cook when I was about 8 years old. One day she was teaching me how to make a homemade cherry pie with freshly picked and pitted cherries. After the pies were done she complained that she wasn't feeling well and thought she was going to faint. I called my mom at work and then called an ambulance, little did I know but she was having a stroke. Her cookbooks are really special to me and I cherish each and every one of them

 

[jamiel]

Solid Crisco begat Crisco Oil and Fluffo (colored shortening) (Procter & Gamble/Smuckers)
Spry stood alone (Lever Brothers)
Wesson Oil begat Snowdrift (AndersonClayton...popular in the south)
Swift came up with Swiftning (which was vegetable + animal fat)