I love old cookbooks
I found a gem this weekend—a cookbook put together by the Margaret McCandless Society sometime before 1920. It’s filled with hand-written notes and slips of paper with recipes written on them. It’s amazing how much cookery has changed in a century. So many ingredients that were taken for granted back then are just puzzling today—pickled pork and walnut catsup anyone? And some of the flavors definitely strike me as odd—there’s a black bean soup that includes two tablespoons of cinnamon and a tablespoon of cloves.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and I see julekake every time I drop the google search box 
I bet I learned of it here!
cookbook from the early 1800’s.
Most of the recipes contain some combination of
butter, cream, sugar & whiskey!
All are written in pen & ink. 
I sold almost all of them when I moved to Montana. But kept one favorite published in 1942. I thought I had lost it when sort of while I was homeless. I had several publication of this large cookbook as they published a knew one every year it seemed. I gave a copy to my mom for a birthday decades ago. The last time I visited my mom before the pandemic that killed her, she was too old and feeble to cook and I asked if I could have the copy I had given her and she was glad to give it back along with another more widely known and sought after one from the same era. So after carting these two large books through the airports, A week after I got home a friend called and told me they had my original copy so now I have two of the same publication of the one book.
The one I still use is:
(Both my copies are 1942 ed.)
My mom offered two copies of the more popular:
(Both of mine are 1946 ed.)
I have an old canning pamphlet from Ball Jars and some others from Kerr and Mason.
I use them for certain mental block days or for my killer pie crust that everyone likes and assorted dishes that are still really good in these times.
ETA: Used to have a 1913 copy of Fanny Farmer's Boston School of Cooking book but I sold it for a handsome price when I was selling everything I owned.
I gave it to my older daughter. At a sale a few years later, I picked up a WWII edition, with an addendum of recipes using alternatives to rationed food items.
I still have dozens of cookbooks, all ages. When we went to auctions, I always seemed to end up with the stash of recipes from the kitchen drawer. What treasures
That I sold but they all had an interesting Appendix in the back, like the wartime cookery section in the back of the 1942 edition. The others had plans for several styles of root cellars, another had diagrams for butchering various farm and wild game animals. It was the wartime cookery section that prompted me to buy the first one.
The very best pie crust recipe in the world is in that book, the southern flaky crust recipe is what I use.
I use the bread and roll recipes from that book, although after all these years, I have bread dough memorized Wonder if the authors ever dreamed they'd created a gold standard cookbook?
My other most favorite recipe in that book is the rolled oat bread, I think I alter it a bit but it comes out just like the rolled oat bread my mom made often when I was really young. She stopped some practices with the arrival of each new child. Couldn't blame her for that. I still make the bread but haven't for a while due to lack of a decent and workable kitchen.
It's kind of funny how following my last visit to my mom's I ended up with two copies of both books. There's a well used copy and a pretty clean, could even sell, copy that stays on the shelf.
I loved that detail in your post. Sure hope your kitchen situation changes. Some of my kitchens have been primitive, but we got by
What were they thinking? How did they eat this bilge? Good questions, but you won't find them answered here. This is a simple introduction to poorly photographed foodstuffs and horrid recipes. It's a wonder anyone in the 40s, 50s and 60s gained any weight; it's a miracle that people didn't put down their issue of Life magazine with a slight queasy list to their gut, and decide to sup on a nice bowl of shredded wheat and nothing else. It wasn't that the food was inedible; it was merely dull. Everything was geared for a timid palate fearful of spice. It wasn't non- nutritious - no, between the limp boiled vegetables, fat-choked meat cylinders and pink-whipped-jello dessert, you were bound to find a few calories that would drag you into the next day. It's that the pictures are so hideously unappealing.
Where have all these images slumbered, lo these many decades? In small faded books, shoved in the back of some Mom's pantry. They're collector's items now - but of course, eventually, everything is a collector item. I find them in antique stores, stacked carelessly, forgotten and overpriced, or carefully stowed in plastic envelopes, pristine, awaiting the collector's discerning eye. There's a market for these books.
But why? It's possible that many of the people who buy these books regard them as prime sourcebooks, texts from the Golden Age of Butter. Maybe some appreciate the camp value, but whatever snickering amusement you get from the pictures and text passes quickly. I can't see anyone pulling out their collection on a winter's night and amusing themselves with 50 year old cookie recipes.
Perhaps the main reason people buy these books is the Mom factor. At least that's my excuse. They're everyday relics of another time, my parents' time, and this gives them a poignancy they do not deserve, and do nothing to earn. But I love them anyway.
You have to read the commentary on these... and plenty more:
Hours of cookbook fun!
helpfully,
Bright
