OLD cookbooks are the BEST!

4:15 PM / MAY 1, 2012                POSTED BY Rachel Sanders on Bon Appetit

The latest literary endeavor from Elizabeth Gilbert (you may have heard of her; she wrote a little book that spent about four years on the New York Times bestseller list?) is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in adventurous cooking, casual entertaining, pickling, or the creative use of odd bits of meat. (Hello, Brooklyn!)
What is it? At Home on the Range, a cookbook written in 1947 by Gilbert’s great-grandmother, Margaret “Gima” Yardley Potter. But the book isn’t an antique, in any sense of the word. As Gilbert writes in her introduction, “at that unfortunate moment in American culinary history when our country was embarking on a love affair with convenient and processed foods…Gima was having none of it.” Instead, she was cooking up Chicken Livers for Six and coaxing recipes for fricasseed rabbit out of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers. This is a cookbook for modern times and modern cooks, full of sassy jokes and smartly written recipes. It’s also a book that speaks deeply to the power of food and family through generations. Need a Mother’s Day gift? You just found it.

Millie; I have a bookshelf of low-fat cookbooks, vegetarian cookbooks, “healthy” eating cookbooks..  What I reach for over and over is the mannings Family Southern Cookbook, my grandmother’s recipes, old classic cookbooks in order to brush up on traditional cooking and recipes…the healthiest ones that are full fat, with rich stocks, pan gravies, pickles…real food.