Teenage Reading

I was 12 years old when I received a Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook. It had a mostly black cover along with a picture of a pretty pie with lattice crust, a baked chicken and a jar of cookies on the front. It was so beautiful.

IF I could fake a fever and convince my mother that I was coming down with something, I would spend the whole day in bed reading that cookbook from cover to cover, all day long. What a beautiful, ordered world with Baked Alaska and turkeys served with little pantaloons (I never understood that one, a dead bird wearing fancy stockings to the table). When I got married - that's the way it was, not when I get out on my own but when I get married - I would cook or bake all of those wonderful things.

That cookbook finally fell apart completely but it did have a lot of use. I hated to get rid of it, it was so nostalgic.

Cooking isn't a real big thing with me, I get by the easiest way I can now, a chicken in the crockpot with some veggies and I'm off to my art room. No pantaloons on the chicken either! Diane

Cookbooks and Cooking

What do your cookbooks say about you and your cooking? I don't think mine say what I cook as much as how I wish I cooked or how I should cook.

Too Many Tomatoes......right! I think I had about 6 in my garden last year. The Hershey Cookbook is a well used one as you might expect. The Joy of Cooking is the one I use when I use a recipe. The one with the paper cover is where I put savers, the vegetarian cookbooks only say I wish I could be a vegetarian but I can't. Oh, and then there's the wild food cookbook, it was given to me by a friend. We don't even have pawpaws here, the closest thing we have is dandelions and cattails. The one with the cloth cover is my precious family recipes, my sister's hot chocolate, my grandma's applesauce cake, my mom's pickles, I don't usually cook them but they're treasures. Then there's the basket with little cookbooks, another Hershey one (you never know when something might happen to the other), the muffin book with gigantic muffins, another honey book and Gems from Mammy's Southern Kitchen written in 1919. This book I got from Leonard's mom, another keepsake. I'd like to know about your cookbooks. The way I cook? Well, we had hot dogs for supper. God bless you, Diane