Craving Old-School Recipes? Buy These 13 Vintage Cookbooks

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There are new cookbooks coming out all the time, but sometimes, it can be comforting to dig out vintage cookbooks and rediscover the foods of yesteryear. They're still there waiting to take you back in time on a culinary adventure. The question is just how far in time you want to go.

Just keep in mind that some of the older cookbooks don't have the same shortcuts that modern ones do, as we've developed new kitchen tools, appliances, and time-saving cooking methods for the home cook who often also has a day job and no kitchen help. Luckily, some of the older ones have modern updates. So you can choose between the original and the updated version.

We've found a lot of great vintage cookbooks for you to peruse. Just in case you're curious about the food scene before you were born, we've gone all the way to the very first cookbook published in the U.S. in 1796, with cookbooks from every century since. There's even one that's had a new edition every year since 1979. So, pick your century, decade, or year, and have at it. Once you have a look at the 13 classic vintage cookbooks on our list, we won't blame you if you have difficulty deciding on just one.

American Cookery

Written in 1796, Amelia Simmon's "American Cookery" is about as old-school as you can get in the U.S. and is considered the first American cookbook. The recipes in this book include all sorts of Native American ingredients, like beans and potatoes, as well as some imported ingredients, like peppercorns and pigs. After all, the colonies were well-established by the time this cookbook appeared.

Still, the cookbook feels a little exotic. It lists out all sorts of unusual animals for cooking, including ones that have fallen out of favor for eating, like snipe. You can even learn how to cook a turtle or make a minced pie from neats' feet fee (and neats are best grass-fed, just so you know). Beyond how to cook meat of all sorts, the cookbook contains sweet and savory pies, puddings, custards, tarts, syllabubs, and cakes. Plus, there are all sorts of recipes for preserving fruits, vegetables, and even fish for eating later.

"American Cookery" can also teach you some interesting cooking techniques, such as how to à la mode beef. And luckily, that doesn't mean topping your beef with ice cream. Unfortunately, many of the recipes tend to be rather vague. So, you'll have to make your best guess for measurements, temperatures, and cooking times. As you can imagine, cooking from this cookbook can be quite an adventure.

The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

The original "Fannie Farmer Cookbook" is more accessible than you'd think, despite being written in 1896. Granted, you might want a later edition like the 100th Anniversary Edition by Marion Cunningham to clear up some of the vaguer instructions that assume you already know how to perform some cooking processes without instruction. A later edition offers more detailed instructions that correspond to modern know-how, ingredients, and kitchen appliances.

Fannie Farmer attended Boston Cooking School, which taught the scientific approach to cooking you will find in her cookbook. So, you'll find far more exact measurements here than in earlier cookbooks. Her career as a teacher at the cooking school shines in her encyclopedic-level writing. The original cookbook also goes into detail about specifics the modern cook might not need today, like building a fire in an old-fashioned wood stove. So, if you want to go super-vintage with your cooking, there's no better person to teach you how.

If you can think it, Farmer is ready to teach you how to make it. While many of the recipes are for foods that wouldn't be out of the ordinary today, like corn chowder, there are others that are certainly more vintage, like scalloped chicken, potato croquettes, and desserts like Irish moss blancmange (requiring real Irish moss as an ingredient).

Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook

The very first "Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook" came out in 1930 and has been a staple in American kitchens ever since. Granted, there have been many editions over the years as ingredients, stoves, and tastes have changed. It's the best-selling cookbook of all time for several reasons, one being that it came in a three-ring binder that allowed you to lay it out flat on the countertop rather than have to wrangle a cookbook constantly trying to close itself. Not only that, but the cookbook didn't assume you already knew how to do things like make a pie crust or what measurements you should use. Instead, it tells you everything you need to know. Thus, we've seen this cookbook on the shelf in kitchens of people who have no other cookbook in sight.

The version you choose will determine what types of vintage food you get to enjoy. For example, the one that came out during World War II in the 1940s helps you make more with less using available with ration points. Versions from the 1950s give you leisurely vintage grilling recipes, and the "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook" from the 1960s introduces classic old-school international dishes like chicken cacciatore. Versions from the 1970s provide budget meals and foods to cook in convenience appliances like microwaves, while you'll find a few health-conscious vintage recipes in the 1980s versions. "The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook" from the 1990s provides how-to photos and cooking times while highlighting quick recipes. So, pick your decade and enjoy.

Joy of Cooking

Interestingly, the author of "Joy of Cooking," Irma S. Rombauer, was known for being a horrible cook. However, she made up for it by collecting recipes from people who could cook and organizing them in a user-friendly way. We like this cookbook because we always know that the recipes are going to work and be delicious. Nearly anything we want to cook is here, which is why it helped shape 20th-century cooking. We also like that the ingredients appear in bold in the recipes as they are used instead of in one big lump up at the top.

The original version came out in 1931, with new editions coming out over the years. If you get the fully revised "Joy of Cooking" cookbook from 2019, it's much more modern, including the latest ingredients, techniques, and food trends like vegan recipes. So, if you want to go authentically old-school, you'll need an older edition. You can even still get the original facsimile edition of the 1931 "Joy of Cooking" if you want to make everything the old-school way. Plus, it features the whimsical cover Rombauer's daughter drew of the St. Martha of Bethany, the patron saint of cooking, fighting a dragon. Older versions, like ones from the 1930s, will provide you with vintage recipes like molasses pie, or one from the 1960s might have a chicken country captain. However, even the 2019 version might have recipes that are vintage enough for you, like chicken tetrazzini.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook

If you want to step into another era with your cooking, The Betty Crocker Cookbook is a great choice. Even the first one in the 1950s contained drawings as well as photos to serve as visual guides for preparation steps. The cookbook is affectionately called "Big Red," and there's a new version about every 5 years. So, you can narrow down the era you want fairly precisely. However, finding vintage ones can be difficult since many people collect them.

You can even still buy the original "Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook" from 1950 if you'd like to enjoy recipes like Wheaties ting-a-lings, hot cheese puffs, and American potage. However, the book goes beyond recipes, with all sorts of cooking information that any home cook would need to know, featuring a dictionary, images of cooking tools, information about storing food, substitutions, measuring equivalents, and how-to images for everything from chopping an onion to peeling tomatoes. It also has vintage recipes that have become vogue again, like a raspberry shrub and other non-alcoholic beverages.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

"Mastering the Art of French Cooking" is the only cookbook we know of that has inspired blogs, books, movies, and TV shows. Julia Child wrote it with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck in 1961. The idea was to write a cookbook that made French cooking accessible to American cooks, instantly placing it among the classics that every home chef should have. Even the 50th-anniversary version from 2001 (though only 40 years had passed) has all the classics that will take you back.

We've found ourselves embroiled in recipes like chocolate cakes that took six hours to make. So, these recipes certainly don't take the same types of shortcuts that modern recipes do. As such, they end up teaching you French cooking techniques that you will take forward to other future cooking endeavors. For example, she teaches readers how to make a variety of French sauces that feature in recipes throughout the book.

There are plenty of classic old-school recipes here to tantalize you, like boeuf bourguignon, quiche lorraine, bouillabaisse, crêpes Suzette, and chocolate mousse. Of course, you also get ones that have fallen further out of style, like all of her aspics.

A Treasury of Great Recipes

We're especially enamored with the idea of discovering vintage recipes in "A Treasury of Great Recipes" because it's written by actor Vincent Price (famous for "House of Wax") and his wife, Mary Price. Even better than it being a celebrity cookbook is the fact that this 1965 cookbook features recipes the Prices collected from their travels around the world. So, it gives an excellent picture of what the world was eating in the 1960s. Their celebrity status helped them to go behind the scenes in top restaurants around the world and return with recipes for their cookbook. However, the recipes are written in a way that the home cook doesn't feel intimidated by most of them. Granted, there are more aspirational ones requiring tools and ingredients you probably won't find in your local grocery store, like a duck press and a suckling pig.

This cookbook takes you through 1960s recipes from various restaurants and countries the Prices visited, including France, Italy, Holland, Scandinavia, England, Spain, Mexico, and the United States, complete with color photographs. This cookbook will have you trying your hand at recipes you may have never seen before, like chicken Itzá, banana pancake flambé Stonehenge, dumplings embassy, pepperoni Don Salvatore, and a pineapple Monte Carlo.

Talk About Good!

Another classic must-have cookbook from the 1960s is "Talk About Good!" If you think this spiral-ringed cookbook looks like something a fundraising group puts out, you're actually correct, as all proceeds from the cookbook has continued to fund the Junior League of Lafayette, Louisiana, over the years. The organization boasts of selling over 795,000 copies of this 1,200-recipe award-winning cookbook over the years.

This is the cookbook you want if you are interested in traditional, old-school Southern recipes, especially Cajun ones. These recipes don't come from just one person but an entire community of cooks sharing their favorites. So, you get a look into many Louisiana kitchens of the 1960s. You can dive right into making dishes like fried eggplant casserole, mushrooms stuffed with broccoli, twenty-four-hour salad (complete with mini marshmallows and whipped cream), devil's chutney, Creole dripped coffee, and classics like gumbo.

The great thing about this book is that, despite having been printed over and over, it's never changed except to make its lie-flat design more durable. So, you get the same recipes and Cajun food cultural history from a current copy as you would with a copy from the original printing.

James Beard's American Cookery

James Beard borrowed the name of his cookbook, "James Beard's American Cookery," from the very first American cookbook, as it builds on the tradition of showcasing what has become American cuisine over the years. It acknowledges not just all the new foods that cooks were creating in their kitchens but also foods that were coming into the U.S. through immigrants. So, you get traditional potato salads alongside Russian potato salads and chicken noodle soup alongside hot beef borscht. There are historical recipes here, like mock apple pie, which was being made in the U.S. in the mid-1800s, when cooks used crackers for their pies when apples were out of season.

James Beard was a foodie before it was trendy. He left quite a culinary legacy, and this cookbook is part of it. The quote on the front cover from TIME Magazine refers to the cookbook as "the Bible of American cooking." The whole cookbook is full of Beard's commentary and immense knowledge about the food we eat in the U.S., how it's served, as well as a bit of history. There are over 1,500 recipes to choose from here. So, you really can't go wrong. Plus, you get a snapshot of what American food looked like up to the time Beard wrote this book in 1972.

Moosewood Cookbook

Mollie Katzen wrote the "Moosewood Cookbook" in 1974, highlighting many of the most popular dishes she made at her vegetarian Moosewood restaurant in Ithaca, New York. The moment you open the pages, the hand-written recipes and artwork will take you to the 1970s, as will the flavors. However, the only tofu in this cookbook is in Chinese-inspired dishes. Instead, you'll find lots of cheese, beans, and vegetables here. Everything tastes like homemade comfort food, and it pulls not just from U.S. cuisine at the time but also veggie-forward international cuisine.

The cookbook provides plenty of recipes that will take you back to the vegetarian 1970s. Some of our favorites have been the broccoli and friends open-faced grilled sandwiches, a cauliflower spaghetti called pasta al cavolfiore, cheese beans, and cauliflower cheese pie. Sri Wasano's infamous Indonesian rice salad is high on our list of things to try next. Granted, we find that most of the original recipes need added spices and seasonings for our modern palate. However, if you get the latest edition instead of an earlier one, it adds some of the seasonings that were lacking in the original version, as well as a few recipes made with more widely available ingredients.

Southern Living Annual Recipes

You can use any of the "Southern Living Annual Recipes" cookbooks to jump straight into any year you'd like to cook from, starting in 1979, when Southern Living first started putting out its yearly cookbooks. Each year's cookbook is a collection of all the recipes that the Southern Living magazine has published throughout the year. So, as long as you were born in 1979 or after, you could even cook from your birth year. Or perhaps there's a year that was nostalgic for you that you'd like to recapture in food.

You may have to do a little digging to find one from the year you want, but you can even still find the "Southern Living 1979 Annual Recipes" cookbook. We found one from our local library from 2005. In it, there were dishes like chicken-and-artichoke olé, chili-cheese logs to serve during March Madness, and cheesy grits bread to make in your bread machine. Remember when bread machines were popular for a hot minute? Each cookbook also features the year's cook-off winners, like the chocolate-coffee cheesecake with mocha sauce that won the grand prize in the southern desserts category and the herb-grilled chicken with watermelon-feta salad that won in the easy entrée category.

The Silver Palate Cookbook

If you'd like a meal that's a throwback to 1982, you might want to try "The Silver Palate Cookbook." While some of the earlier classic cookbooks have recipes that take a lot of time and effort to make, "The Silver Palate Cookbook" has simpler recipes that you don't have to save for special occasions. However, that doesn't mean that these recipes aren't full of flavor, as they borrow ideas and flavors from places like Asia, Spain, and the Mediterranean to create new American fusion dishes.

If you're the type of person who likes to improvise with your cooking, this book is a great one to have, as it often offers a basic recipe along with some modifications. For example, you get a basic recipe for mini quiches along with six different ideas for quiche fillings. The book is full of all sorts of recipes you've probably forgotten about, but that have never gone completely out of style, like strawberry shortcake, cheese straws, chicken Marbella, and zucchini bread.

The latest edition of the cookbook came out in 2007. So, even that one is vintage at this point. But mainly, the new edition just added color photos for the already delicious recipes. Plus, the margins are full of all sorts of interesting ideas for cooking and entertaining.

Bill Neal's Southern Cooking

"Bill Neal's Southern Cooking" is another vintage cookbook that's a throwback to the 1980s. However, this time, it's a cookbook that highlights sophisticated Southern cuisine from that era. It explores various regional dishes as well as regional variations of dishes that were widely cooked throughout the South at the time. It's a cookbook that was extremely influential and became a go-to for Southern chefs who wanted to up their kitchen game and go beyond the ordinary fried foods and pork-infused vegetable dishes that most people envision when they think about Southern cooking.

Some of the Southern recipes you'll find in this 1985 cookbook are making a comeback, like shrimp and grits. However, you'll also see dishes that you might not have thought about in a while, like hoppin' John, Brunswick stew, or tomato gravy. Additionally, you're likely to find regional dishes that may be completely new to you, like burgoo, chicken purloo, or Natchitoches meat pies. So, this is the type of cookbook that can not only be nostalgic but also revise your image of Southern cuisine.

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