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I've been doing some nostalgic cooking which reminded me of cooking from my Mother's cookbooks. During the depression, Mother was hired by the County Extension Office to teach farm wives canning safety and basic cheese making. Yet her cookbook library consisted of:

• Better Homes and Gardens ... a depression era edition


• The Joy of Cooking ... a war era edition


• Betty Crocker ... puchased when I was in the intermediate grades so I could cook fad foods such as snickerdoodles

Long after I'd left home, she did buy an updated Joy of Cooking.

Occasionally there would be a women's magazine recipe to try ... memorably a fresh ravioli recipe I tried having never seen fresh pasta, having none of the "required" equipment . . . but basically I was limited to imitation and those three cookbooks of which The Joy of Cooking got the majority of my attention. In comparison, my son grew up with shelves full of cookbooks.  What about you?

My mom had a late 40's edition of the Lily Wallace New American Cookbook, which was a wedding present and was my mom's principal cookbook. My parents, they cooked together, also drew heavily from recipes published in Look, Life, Woman's Day and Family Circle, and Parade (as previously noted, a newspaper supplement). Cooking together while listening to music was very much a Sunday afternoon thing. 

I have a vivid memory of us making gnocchi, which I now know was incorrectly done, but I also totally understand was an entirely reasonable misunderstanding of reading written-only instructions of how to form the gnocchi. Instead of little curls rolled off a fork, we had little patties with the tops indented by a fork. I think the recipe was from Life

My mom had Joy of Cooking, the Stork Cookbook she had from school, and some BH&G cookbooks.  She also had a small, maybe 3x4 inches, Betty Crocker cookbook called Food Men Like, I think she made her spaghetti sauce from that.  She was always trying new recipes clipped from women's magazines of the day or ones exchanged at the NCO wives club or the British Wives Club on base.  

I'll add some British input. My mother had the Good Housekeeping Cookbook and The Cordon Bleu Cookbook - I think this edition though her dust jacket was long gone (the book underneath was pink). A later addition was Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course. I cooked more from them than she did as she tended to repeat the same meals from week to week.

My mom had a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and a Betty Crocker cookbook, both from the late 1960s or 1970s. Also several community/church cookbooks, from our church & both grandmothers. And she had a recipe box with handwritten recipes -- several from friends; maybe from the newspaper or magazines as well.

My Mother never had Joy of Cooking, but she did have the original Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook from 1950, which she bought with Betty Crocker coupons. She had an early edition (tho not the first) of The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. She also had the tenth ed. (1960) of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (pre-Marion Cunningham). I don't remember her ever cooking from any of them. The other cookbooks she had were my gifts to her.

Mostly I read them, and from Betty Crocker 1950 I learned that 3 tsp = 1 Tbsp, and that 4 Tbsp = ¼ cup. I copied out as many recipes as I could from Fannie Farmer 1960 before she died.

The only cookbook I remember my mom using was Better Homes and Gardens. She had several recipe cards she pulled out for some of her regular dishes. My dad had a Chinese cookbook arranged by region. 

Originally Posted by: bittrette

She had an early edition (tho not the first) of The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. She also had the tenth ed. (1960) of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (pre-Marion Cunningham).

In the mid-1960's, I was doing a work-study term in Boston with roomates from Chicago and St. Louis. I was the only one comfortable cooking without recipes so we went shopping for an inexpensive, comprehensive cookbook - Fannie Farmer in paperback won out. I still have it and occassionally turn to it for a recipe.

My mother's cooking was renowned for being terrible, but she baked beautifully.  I don't remember many cookbooks other than Delia's Complete Cookery Course ... which I'm sure she rarely used.  Most meals were the same each week: roast dinner on Sunday (never with any gravy - she didn't do gravy!), left-overs from the roast fried up on Monday, spaghetti bolognaise on Tuesday ... and so on.  She cooked because it was a necessity, not a pleasure, but the puddings and cakes were fantastic and she really enjoyed making those. Many of her baking recipes came from magazines that she read.

My mother did once consult a cookbook that I'd bought for myself. My then-small collection of cookbooks was my hope chest for when I would leave the nest.

My mother, then a non-cook, married in England 1944 and dived in at the deep end, mainly consulting Ministry of food leaflets

The Cookbook was initially the New World Cookbook, then the Radiation Cookbook (or possibly the other way round)

New World and Radiation were the main manufacturers of gas stoves, and a new gas stove came with a hardback tome of recipes and advice, nearly every kitchen I knew contained one. 

The book served as a manual for the stove, showing you how to break it down and clean it, a repository of hints - how to store excess fats for use, what to save for the hens etc. Tgere were many recipes of course, many very plain food, but with clear timings. The two combined in features that taught you to cook an entire dinner of meat, vegetables and hot pudding (dessert) in the oven.

Some of the recipes were good, and a lot of the things I do without checking a recipe probably come from there.  But it undoubtedly taught my mother to overcook meat

When TV and newspaper cookery really got going my mother did broaden her horizons, and moved on to Fanny Craddock, Delia etc

I know that there were many Better Homes and Gardens books and of course Fannie Farmer (which has a place on our "special bookshelf" for lovely old titles and lots of church, school and kennel club fund raiser books BUT what I remember being used most clearly were the Best of Bridge titles.  I know that mom had all of them because many of them ended up here :)

As you may remember, mjes, Fannie Farmer 1960 was the cookbook that said that canned soup as an ingredient "should not be scorned by even the proudest cook."

Originally Posted by: bittrette

As you may remember, mjes, Fannie Farmer 1960 was the cookbook that said that canned soup as an ingredient "should not be scorned by even the proudest cook."

And then there was Poppy Cannon who specialized in teaching the home cook how to use frozen and canned goods.

My mother had Joy of Cooking, which I never remember her using, and The Betty Crocker Cookbook, which was the source for her fabulous desserts.  I still use it to replicate her pie crust, oatmeal cookies and applesauce cake.

My mum cooked everything from scratch even as a single parent to three kids but I dont think she had more than a couple of cookbooks for most of my childhood - a generic looking 'italian cooking' from which she made great pizzas and carbonara and a Good Housekeeping book. At one point in the 1980s she subscribed to an international cooking series from which some repeat recipes came - courgette pakora and a cauliflower curry with tomato and ginger stuck out for being delicious and not typical of rural scotland in the 1980s. 

My mother had a few dishes she made from scratch - I never knew whether she devised the recipes or got them from somewhere else. I managed to get one of them before she died.

mjes, I don't know which edition of Betty Crocker you had, but as I said, my mother got the original 1950 ed. Snickerdoodles may have come into fashion in the last few decades, but BC had a recipe for them from the start.

One thing that has changed is that most of the cookie recipes in BC 1950 called for solid shortening, like Crisco, which made for soft cookies. Butter or margarine came later.

In the "basic" BC cookbook that I have now (c1986), most of the cookie recipes call for margarine or butter, a few call for shortening, one calls for oil, and one has no fat in the list of ingredients.