What Was Your First Cook Book? Either As A Gift Or Purchased

Nice topic!

I'm not too sure, but I think it was a kiddie's cookbook "gossiepietje ik kan koken"

It was sort of a story book with recipes in there about 2 kids visiting grandma and she makes them an apron and teaches them to cook.

I think I was about 10 or 12.

I know my mam made the apron as designed in the book and my first recipe out of it was probably apple pie.

I still got the book (and a number more children's cook books)

Mine was a gift, it was the Active Woman's Cookbook and our Avon lady gave it to me for my 11th birthday.  That Christmas I was given my second two cook books... one just simply titled Cakes and the other was Cheap Chow..Chinese cooking on a budget.

 

I don't think I used that cookbook until I met my husband and one of the first things I made from it was Sweet and Sour Pork.  I don't know what happened to Cheap Chow... I think I might have used it once or twice but I do still have the cakes book. 

Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook

The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: Chinese, Greek and Roman

 

Fabulous book and I still use it . I picked up a second copy in hardback for when my original paperback copy dies. It's showing its age.

The first cook book I remember was The Betty Crocker Boys and Girls Cookbook. My parents gave it to me and the first thing I made was called 'Fruit Basket Upset'.  I was 10 or 11 years old and soooo proud of myself. lol I had that Peanuts cookbook, too, at one time.

Mom had a fair range of cookbooks, which is what I cooked from from the time I was about 12. So I didn't get my own first until I was 17. It was Tomi Egami's Typical Japanese Cooking. It was a Christmas present from my then girlfriend.

 

50 years later and I've still got the book----and the girl.

Apparently we old boys started later with cookbooks than the ladies.

I shared The New Bride's Cookbook with my first wife. It was a wedding present. The idea was to provide simple, classic recipes, sized for two people, for young women whose mothers couldn't or wouldn't (for whatever reason) rush to the phone. Feminine bias aside, it gave me some discipline.

We bought Joy of Cooking not long after; it was useful then, and has stayed useful over the years -- but not particularly inspiring or transformative.

The first cookbook which really influenced me was Pellaprat's, Modern French Culinary Art (hello durangojo!), which I stole from my mother's bookshelf at about the same time. Now that was a revelation. I had no idea I -- or anyone outside a restaurant -- could cook like that. As the French say, "Who knew?"

BDL
Edited by boar_d_laze - 8/31/11 at 4:21pm

Hey, KYH---

 

How very nice you're still cooking with the same girl!

 

We started with Joy of cooking, as nearly as I can remember, and then moved on through all of the Frugal Gourmet's cookbooks. Now have about 35 lineal feet of shelves with cookbooks.  I've been cooking with my kitchen-mate a little longer than you have with yours, I think.

 

Mike

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Oh, the memories! I wanted so badly to make those "doughboys": biscuit dough wrapped around a stick, baked over an open fire. Wasn't going to happen in our family, but I did make the penuche fudge (achingly sweet) and a few other things.

 

Most of what I learned early was by cooking with my mom (no measurements except to bake), and is retained by memory of sight, smell, taste and emotion. I think the next one I got was from a high school friend with good taste and prescience: The New York Times International Cookbook. I didn't buy more while in college, but afterward I bought The Chinese Village Cookbook and the New York Times Cookbook. Both of those are in bad shape, but lovingly splotched and dogeared. The last cookbook I bought was The Joy of Cooking (a recent edition) at Half Price Books.

 

I'm now making a project of collecting "vintage" American cookbooks, so I stop at garage sales whenever I can. An inquiry at one house led me to a woman's grandmother's home nearby. She pulled out bags and boxes of cookbooks and pamphlets. I bought a selection, including the Meta Givens encyclopedia and some interesting church cookbooks. I'll have to decide what to focus on, as we're going to run out of space if I keep this up!

I think my first cookbook was Easy Basics For Good Cooking by Sunset that I bought at a yard sale sometime after my wife and I were married, I remember seeing some of my mom's hand written recipes when I was younger but I haven't been able to find those for years and with my dad passing away back in April unfortunately I'm pretty sure that they are gone forever (to the best of my knowledge she never owned a cookbook).

Her and my dad both were excellent home cooks (my mom cooked professionally for sometime when I as very young).

The funny thing is my dad taught my mom how to cook!!!!

Joy of Cooking in college.  After that probably the first Moosewood Cookbook.  A sign of the times.  Then a host of local (Hawaiian) church cookbooks that had local recipes.  I went away to college in the Midwest, so if I wanted to have Hawaiian local or Asian food, I had to learn to make it myself - all the way to making my own kimchee and char siu. This was in the 70's -- before many Asian staples were widely available in grocery stores.  And I called my mother a lot.

Mine was "The Joy of Cooking" and my mother gave it to me when I first started living by myself.

Mine was a Joyce Chin book on Chinese cooking, I forget the name of it.  My father gave it to me around 1966 along with a wok and some wok tools.  I passed all of them along to my older son about 8 years ago.

I got into cooking fairly late in life so when I went to my small community college culinary school I got my text books as my first cookbooks, but I remember going to a used book store and finding a Martha Stewart Living cook book, very early edition.....I was so stoked to have it.... not sure why but I am a big fan of hers.....

Yeah, I have those now as well - my mother's "loose leaf" collection, including her written versions of my grandmother's recipes - as well as some of the neighbor's recipes.  You know, like Mrs. Morimoto's maki sushi recipe (which uses unagi rather than tuna) and Mrs. Bell' s (our Hawaiian - Portuguese neighbor) Portuguese sweet bread recipe.  Also have a pretty decent collection of local church/hongwanji/HGEA cookbooks.  Great stuff.  I need to scan them all and send a copy to my sister in LA.  Using your grandmother's or great grandmother's recipes is always a bit tricky since, at least in my case, they tended not to use modern measures.  At some point, you need convert the "size of a walnut" measure to something a bit more standardized.

 

I used my Mum's recipe books whilst I lived at home and then when I went off to University, I remember an aunt giving me a book called either 'The Student's cookbook' or 'The Student's handbook'.  Quick and easy (and CHEAP!) food from scratch.

 

Nowadays I own literally hundreds of cookery books, including all my Mum's books (with her handwritten comments in the margins, such as when she cooked the dish, for how many and what she thought of the results), my Granny's handwritten notebooks, three of them (really precious to me) and her first edition of F  Marian McNeill's 'The Scots Kitchen', which is part history of food in Scotland and part recipes. It was published in 1929 and is sadly looking a little worn, but my husband bought me a recent edition of the same book and I have nobly 'retired' Granny's copy!  I also have a family receipt book, started in 1816 - and, yes, I still use some of the recipes, such as scones and jams - just like my Granny and Mum did, too!

Mine was volume II of Julia Child's Mastering the art of French Cooking.  Still is the basis of the HOW of cooking, even if i don't often make many of the recipes any more. 
 

I still have the one my mother had - it was the first book i cooked from - or i should say, baked from, though now i do use it for some american classics, like tomato soup (wonderful - campbells, eat your heart out) and others.  But it was my mother's, not mine. (The 1950s edition, not the later ones which are crappy)

 

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I bought that long after when i was already abroad, hoping to find some good, standard american recipes because i always heard of it as the Standard American Cookbook.  But i found it pretty useless - not many dishes appealed to me (hard to imagine them without picture, i guess) and the cakes never really came out very well like the betty crocker ones did. 
 

 

I got Joyce Chen soon after Julia Child.  I watched them both on what was then called Educational TV (PBS)

 

Mine was the Purity Cook Book, put out by a Canadian flour company. First pub. in 1932, my version is 1945. My grandmother gave it to me when I was about 8. I was so thrilled....I baked Johnny Cake from that book at least 50 times, until my family begged me to broaden my culinary horizons.

 

I still use that book for Johnny Cake, although it's falling apart.

My mother gave me the 5 Roses Cookbook, I was so young. I still have it. It is all taped up and doggy eared but I will never part with it.

I, too, have a  bundle of recipe cars from my mom, and a few from my grandmother. She wasn't comfortable writing in English (although she spoke 7 languages with varying fluency), so most of her advice came orally or through my mom. 

 

I got nearly all of my mom's cookbooks (about 8 of them), including The American Everyday Cookbook from 1955 which she probably received as a new bride at her second marriage. The book is held together with strapping tape and the acidic paper is browned and brittle, but I still consult it. Mom had a Settlement Cookbook, but rarely used it. Still, when I was looking for a recipe for blintzes, the book fell open to that page. She'd written a note about the recipe, so I felt she was guiding me to the right one. (It's an excellent, basic recipe.)