Post #4148907

2026-07-26 19:56 UTC

I collect old cookbooks, have for decades. I thrift a lot of them, and I am notici g a shift in what is available as different generations downsize/pass on. What I have seen for the last few years is the disappearance of cookbooks published in the early to mid 20th. This was a golden era of cookbooks as families that lost their wealth in the WWs had to stop hiring staff and cook for themselves for the first time. Lots of companies published detailed books to help, and to advertise and sell their products. These cookbooks have good, basic, understandable recipes. They are actual instruction manuals. Photos didn&#39;t really emerge in these til the 60s, so no food porn.

Replies (1)

@commonst@social.vivaldi.net 2026-07-26 20:01

Some of my favourite recipes are from this era. They can be basic, but changing them up is easy. Some recipes encourage using what you have. Bread recipes call for "liquid" or "fat", and ypu just used what you had. Far easier to figire.out how to substitute from that. Community cookbooks have also vanished. Churches, schools, groups all published books for fundraisers. You could get a lot of varied and interesting recipes depending on the background of your group. With the internet why publish? There are easier ways to get money. Now thrifting yields a lot of more modern cookbooks. Glorious tomes of fancy photos and specific, direct instructions on how you have to make the recipe. The flexibility and confidence to make and modify is gone.

Open ##4175894