I’m working on a project involving children’s cookbooks. I would love to hear if you had any as a child, and what the titles were. Did you learn useful things about cooking, and did you have a favorite recipe?
Mine was the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cook Book: for the Hostess and Host of Tomorrow. I made the meatloaf recipe many times, but the one that really cracked me up was the recipe for Jello instant pudding. I remember thinking: you need a recipe for that???!
Thanks.
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I didnt. Cooking was Mum’s job. I didnt cook until I was married - and only then because Mrs H was working away several days each week, so it was either cook or live off ham sandwiches. This was the early 70s after all. You know - when men were men and women were chicks …(ducks under cover).
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The first and only cookbook I had as a child was the Peanuts Cook Book.
The only thing I recall making from it was Lucy’s Lemon Lollipops. My first glimpse into the rabbit hole of home cooking.
I think the only other cookbook we had in the house was The Joy of Cooking.
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Well, I hope you can find this one, because I’d love to get my hands on it again We had a small, thin, hardcover Ladybird children’s cookbook that we loved.
I remember making a coconut ice (condensed milk, desiccated coconut, pink food color for the essential pink & white 
) and a no-bake chocolate pie (digestive or similar crust, cornstarch pudding filling). Others in the family made a lot more.
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I remember one of my Girl Scout books, and a recipe for “Blushing Bunny”. By high school it was Gourmet magazine.
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Here are a couple, but I don’t see the recipes you mentioned. The two seem similar. Copyright is 1977.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1060778639/learnabout-cooking-a-ladybird-book-by?gpla=1&gao=1&
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Look, I Can Cook by Angela Burdick pub 1972. I got this as a young teen for a birthday present. I made the moussaka that caught my oven on fire in my first apartment. Luckily, I’m not in danger of burning the house down any more when moussaka is on the menu.
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No kid-centric books. Mom had only a few cookbooks, and I was allowed to read/cook from them, most often as assistant to Mom but baking cookies was a weekly solo excursion in the kitchen.
Joy of Cooking - I liked the “about” sections that described ingredients and what made various cooking methods work.
Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook - the 3-ring binder design kept pages open. The charts for how long to cook x pounds of various meats were referenced often.
Church and Hospital Auxiliary spiral bound cookbooks - loved these because I knew many of the women who put their recipes in them.
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I got The Chocolate Cookbook from the Scholastic books flyer when I was under 10. I don’t remember making anything from it, but we kept it a long time. I was always interested in cooking, and ‘helped’ my mom a lot, especially with baking. Her cookbook of choice was the Purity Flour spiral bound, which she still uses. Now I distribute the Scholastic flyers in my classroom and nobody has ever ordered a cookbook, and I can’t recall even seeing one. Also, I don’t even like chocolate much, but there probably wasn’t a big selection of cookbooks in the flyer. Here’s a link to a used copy. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-chocolate-cookbook-paperback-1977-printing-tw3469_marcy-mager/2855232/item/29898082/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pmax_canada_everything_else&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIsOjN8PiShAMVxFFHAR1heAwKEAQYByABEgKb5fD_BwE#idiq=29898082&edition=20882484
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I had the Peter Rabbit Natural Foods cookbook, looks like published in 1977, the year I was born. I remember making a very odd chocolate pudding cake dessert from it where you pour boiling water into the baking dish over the dry ingredients.
My daughters are big fans of the Cooks Illustrated kids series, which has sadly been discontinued.
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That is the classic method for chocolate pudding cakes, where you sprinkle cocoa powder and sugar over the cake batter and pour over boiling water, which becomes the “pudding” (actually a sauce, at least when warm) at the bottom of the pan. It’s one I grew up with, my mother’s version having a non-chocolate cake flavored with cinnamon, and brown sugar in the chocolate sauce layer.
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I had this one when I was very little. I found pictures of it on eBay. The photos of the interior pages confirmed that this was the book - I don’t think I ever actually made the sandwiches and salad, but I certainly wanted to!
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Thank you for doing this. Once you’ve got a compilation, it’d be great if you could come back and let us know how to obtain it.
Myself, sorry, I had no interest or knowledge of cookbooks as a kid. But I would purely love it if my grandchildren had some good examples of kid-friendly stuff to get started with.
Thanks again!
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I had that, too! I’m pretty sure it’s still around, possibly in a box in the garage, or maybe still at my mom’s place. I remember making Red Baron Root Beer from that ‘cook’ book: Pour root beer into an ice cube tray and drop a maraschino cherry into each cube. Freeze. Serve with more root beer.
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The NYT had a recent version of that pudding cake, my friend’s teen daughter made it for thanksgiving:
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Lol! That “recipe” sounds awfully familiar!
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Not a cookbook but kind of related. Does anyone remember the Timer PSA’s from the 70’s? He was an odd shaped yellow guide who talked about nutrition on Saturday morning TV. He had a recipe for a frozen orange Juice snack that I tried, (it turned out bad.)
When I was very young I saw a Nancy Drew cookbook in a bookstore.
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I can’t remember what I cooked, but this:
I also liked Seventeen Magazine’s “Now You’re Cooking” column. I made chicken cacciatore for my family once.
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