February 22, 2012 - Recipes Just Aren't the Same!



I've subscribed to quite a few magazines in the past couple of years. They all, of course, have something to do with cooking and/or gardening. I've subscribed to Rachael Ray, Taste of Home, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle and
Woman's Day. An entire year of Rachael Ray gave me exactly one recipe that appealed to Mr. Granny and me. Taste of Home, which used to be my favorite magazine for recipes (I still have many copies from the late 90s-early 2000s) , might have given me a half dozen or so that I could have found on their website for nothing. Family Circle and Woman's Day weren't much better, but at least their magazines are less expensive. BH&G and Good Housekeeping are worth renewing, but not necessarily for their recipes. I still find most of them do not appeal to our tastes. Heck, let's face it.....we're old, and our tastes are old fashioned! We still like the foods we grew up with, the basic meat and potatoes. Fried chicken, pot roast and meatloaf!

Mr. Granny really started it all this morning when he mentioned how unappetizing a dish in our local newspaper's food section looked. He said it looked like "slop" to him (it was rizotto with mushrooms and smoked salmon). That sent us right into a discussion of the foods of our childhood, and sent me straight to the cookbook shelf for my stack of Pillsbury Grand National Recipes of the 1950s.


1951, 1952, 1953


1954, 1955, 1956 & 1957

I was surprised, after leafing through all of those books in my possession, to find most of the recipes were for cakes and cookies, quite a few for pies and desserts, but very few for main courses. The main courses were not the ones I remembered fondly from my youth or early years of marriage, but I sure do remember those cakes and cookies! I think the main dishes we enjoyed came in the later Pillsbury Bake Off cookbooks. I'll have to see how many of those I have in my collection.

I did mark a few recipes in the old books. Not the cookies, because I have no willpower....I am the cookie monster of all cookie monsters. Bake them and I will eat. And eat, and eat and eat. I have learned to bake them seldom, freeze them in small amounts, and (hopefully) keep my hands out of the freezer! I can pass on cakes, pies are appealing but don't tempt me nearly as much as cookies, and as much as I love yeast breads, warm from the oven, I do have some self control where they are concerned.








This was the only main dish that appealed to me in all those books. Beans (canned) and wienies, of all things!




17 comments:

  1. Interesting posting! We have been pulling out those old recipes to show the grandchildren how we ate when their mother was their age. Recently I made the original Red Velvet Cake from a 1958 recipe; also the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, Tunnel of Fudge cake. I had to find a modern recipe for that one since they no longer make the boxed frosting mix. Still tastes great though!
    I also bought a 5 pound canned ham and prepared it with the "classic" canned pineapple and maraschino cherry topping. Not as good as we remembered.
    Next on the menu will be Taco Salad, maybe this summer.

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  2. Sarah, I looked for newer books, but I think I gave them all to my daughter :-( Luckily most, if not all, of the recipes are now on line, if I can just remember what they are called. One of the favorites when my kids were growing up were Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs. Why is it the really good ones are so bad for us? LOL

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  3. Oh wow! I love how you have all those old recipe books! How wonderful! I love it!!

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  4. I much prefer the cooking from my youth. And I think there weren't many main dish recipes because it was simple---pot roasts, roast chicken, etc. My husband calls the new cooking "fru fru" ---lots of show, but NO go!
    :D
    I have to agree. So many of these recipes call for LOTS of ingredients, and quite frankly, the end result is not good.....

    Simple IS better!

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  5. I enjoy leafing through my Grandmother's cookbooks and magazines but find most of them contain something in gelatin, aspic, or a canned soup. Yuck. No matter how our eating habits change through the years nothing gets everyone excited like "breakfast" for dinner in my house.

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  6. I've never even thought to buy magazines for recipes. I've subscribed to very few magazines over the years. Right now we have just one - Science News. We are such nerds. I do scour the internet however. And when I was younger I loved watching cooking shows.

    And remember when you called yourself a packrat? Well I'm agreeing with you now as I'd never keep magazines that long. Wow. You must have tons. Though I did have National Geographics back into the '40s. I got rid of them about 5 years ago as the internet really made having them obsolete. I got rid of them on freecycle and the people that came to pick them up were shocked how huge the collection was. I did tell them how many linear feet of magazines there were. Boy they took up a lot of space.

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  7. I don't think that I have mentioned that "The Italian" collects cookbooks. We must have hundreds of them. The only cookbook that I really use is the "old" Betty Crocker's Cookbook. It has all the basics in it. I also have a lot of those Phillsbury Bake Off cookbooks too. They do have some great recipes in them.

    We stopped subscribing to magazines a few years ago as we never really used the recipes and you can find anything you need online.

    I can't resist cookies or brownies either :)

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  8. Meems, I used to have a lot, but my oldest daughter loves recipe books too, so I've given all but a few to her.

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    Sue, not only lots of ingredients, but usually ingredients I would never have on hand.

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    Kelly, LOL! We love our Jell-O salads, and if I can dump a can of mushroom or tomato soup on something I know it will be a hit at dinnertime! Hey, it's the way our mothers cooked!

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    Daphne, actually those, along with my entire cookbook collection, only take up one 2' shelf in the bookcase and a small stack of old Taste of Home magazines that fit in the bottom of my newspaper basket. I also donate any magazines over 6 months old (some much sooner, like immediately). I have one cubbyhole in my computer desk that has the back issues of BH&G, Good Housekeeping and just a few keepers from Woman's Day and Family Circle. I'm really not a pack rat at all, I only hoard garden seeds and genealogy papers ;-)

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    Robin, I used to have a lot of them but, as I told Daphne, most of mine have already been passed on to my daughter. My go to books are an old paperback BH & G New Cookbook and Farm Journal's Country Cookbook.

    I subscribed to all those magazines when Amazon.com had them for $5 a year. I wouldn't extend my subscription for a couple of them, even at that price!

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  9. I have quite a collection of cookbooks but many where my Mom's. Better Homes and Garden New is the one I go to the most and was able to get old additions for both my xDIL and my daughter on ebay. Everything you see today starts with packaged food of some sort it seems and I don't even buy packaged food for meals, I find a way to make it myself. I do still watch some cooking shows but for technique on how to do things, not the recipes.

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  10. Wilderness, isn't that old BH & G book just the greatest? Mine is a paperback, and so yellowed and worn from age and use, I hope it holds together for as long as I do ;-)

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  11. While I can't really comment on old vs new recipe contest, I do try various new things and lately been absolutely addicted to Pioneer Woman blog - some of the goodies she makes are divine!

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  12. Wow, that is pretty awesome you have those from back in the 50's. I just love how things were advertised and the way they looked during that time frame. I don't know if it is the fonts or the colors they used, but you can definitely tell when something is from that era. That most have been a wonderful time to grow up.

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  13. Kris, I was still in school and living with my parents when those books were published! I remember those cakes, my Mom was always baking. She hated to cook, but she loved to bake.

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  14. Older is better, I pulled out the Fanny Farmer Cookbook last week and made the Mac & Cheese from scratch, can we say yum!! Also one of my favorite Nanaimo Bar recipies comes from my Aunt's 1948 Home Ec. School Books. Double Yum.

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  15. My thoughts exactly...I would love a Betty Crocker 1950 ish cook book.

    Tose Beans and Weenies look pretty darned good to me !

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  16. LOL, Joan! I think we had beans and wienies once a week when I was growing up, and I still love them!

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  17. Heather, I was surprised to see several recipes that have been published more recently with new names. For instance, the Fruit Cocktail Cake I often make is actually from one of these old books. Somewhere along the line, somebody just changed the name.

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