Favorite Cookbooks, Part 1
We’re trekking back in time again today! Here is the cookbook I grew up with! I mean THE cookbook I grew up with!
This is The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and it is the first cookbook I remember using. As I said the other day, Mama taught me that if I could follow a recipe, I could cook or bake anything I wanted to! And she was right! (Here are the basic rules for cooking she shared with me.)
Don’t you love the messy pages of a well-used cookbook?!?
My sweet mother helped me out today by sending these pictures of the cookbook to me–thank you, Mama!–and then she sent me another picture of a set of cookbooks I had forgotten all about! The Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery.
She asked me if I remembered them, and I DO! It seems like they were slightly “fancier” than Fannie Farmer was, and it seems like I enjoyed reading through them.
THEN she told me a story I had never heard before! She said that Daddy didn’t really think she could cook when they got married. (“HOW did he know?” she asked!) He worked at Winn-Dixie (a grocery store) while putting himself through Bible college and taking care of Mama. Winn-Dixie offered this set of cookbooks as a buy-a-volume-a-week promotion, and he DID buy a volume each week for her! All 12 volumes!
She said that at the time he did NOT say out loud that he thought she might not be able to cook, but apparently they’ve laughed about it through their 48 years (and counting!) years of marriage! She said they turned out to be her go-to books in a lot of ways, along with Fannie Farmer!
Tomorrow I’ll share MY current go-to cookbooks, and yes, Fannie Farmer is one of them!
Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today! I hope you’ll pop back in tomorrow!
This is Day 18 of Michael Ann’s Kitchen, my series for the Write 31 Days blogging challenge. Check out the series page to find links for each day’s topics.
Follow me in social media:
4 thoughts on “Favorite Cookbooks, Part 1”
Do you have one of the Betty Crocker cookbooks? Red and white checks and 3-ring bound? There’s some good eatin’ in that book.
You know, I DID have that one for a while, and it DID have some good stuff! I think I culled it from the herd during a PCS. You know how that goes!
I do! I do! But my red and white check one is Better Homes and Gardens. My Betty Crocker is red. I have both 🙂
My dad worked at grocery stores at several places where we live, but never Winn Dixie that I know of. He worked at Piggly-Wiggly when I was a baby. I know this because we have a picture of him in a striped vest, string tie, and bowler hat, which I guess was his uniform? He worked at Brookshire Brothers in Lufkin, Texas when I was in 3rd and 4th grade and at A&P in Ponchatoula, Lousiana when I was in junior high. Are any of those stores still around? If they are, we don’t have them where I’ve lived as an adult.