That sounds delightfully vague and non-threatening in a time where everyone’s words and intentions seem so loaded. Cookbooks are things we all understand, or believe we understand. They always give you recipes, sometimes give you narratives about food, community, family traditions, tribal identity….. And altruism sounds like “being kind” even if that’s not entirely true.
They intersect in the “community” fundraising cookbook industrial complex. In the past 20 or so years I haven’t seen as many of these little gems but they are still persist. Ebay, the soul-sucking void that sells nostalgia, and any Salvation Army thrift store can sell you at least a few of these for a $1 a copy. But there was a time where the ladies (always the ladies) of the congregation, the auxiliary, or the association would pool their home recipes and build a cookbook. The funds from selling these collections funded lots of community building activities, from picnics to restoring buildings to donations to “the Crippled Children’s Committee”–(that’s not me guessing BTW that’s a fact).
So I find myself a nostalgia addict, who loves food, and thrift stores. What else could I do but collect and giggle over these cookbooks? Clean the house? Forget that. These cookbooks have some great home cooking, some delusions about what “food” means, and some bizarre nonsense. So lets see what we find when we look back to a time where people didn’t have Pinterest to use as your cookbook collection.
Fun fact, at least to me since I’ve been in publishing on and off for 20 years, there were and still are companies who would help publish these for a fee and hyped the money you can earn.
For the anyone deeply interested here are some places you can
