My neighbor's 92 year old mom changed how I see old cookbooks

Was at a garage sale in Portland last Saturday and an older woman told me she never trusts cookbooks printed after 1970 because "they stopped testing recipes before printing them." She collects depression era cookbooks and showed me how the instructions assume you know basic stuff like how to render fat or test yeast. Now I'm wondering if my 1963 Betty Crocker picture cookbook is actually way more useful than the newer ones I've been grabbing. Anybody else find older cookbooks have better instructions even if the ingredients sound weird?

2 comments

2 Comments

robinwalker12d ago

Huh, I never really thought about it that way before. I always figured newer cookbooks had better science and testing behind them, but that makes a lot of sense when you put it like that. Now I'm starting to wonder if all those failed recipes I blamed on myself were actually the book's fault.

thomasm4112d ago

Hang on, I gotta push back a little here. Modern cookbooks test their recipes in actual test kitchens with trained testers, not just some home cook hoping for the best. The depression era cookbooks your neighbor likes had to cut every corner possible because of wartime rationing, so a lot of those recipes are designed to stretch cheap ingredients and not necessarily taste good. You might get a few weird flops from new books but at least the measurements are precise and the oven temperatures are standardized, which wasn't always the case back then. Your mileage may vary but I'd take a tested 2023 recipe over a vague "bake until done" instruction from 1932 any day.