Book Review: Best of Favorite Recipes' Country Cooking

Title: Best of Favorite Recipes’ Country Cooking

Author: staff of “Publications International”

Publisher: Publications International

Date: 1988

ISBN: none

Length: 96 pages

Quote: “Leeks add a mild onion flavor to this creamy soup.”

Best of favorite recipes? Whose favorite recipes, and why? Turns out that these recipes were collected from the files of organizations that market various food items: the American Dairy Association, the American Egg Board, and a full page of others for those who care. Here are the classic and unusual recipes they developed to market their products, based on what was selling in 1988.

It was an interesting period in cookbook trends; collectors will note the mix of granola food items like the apple-enhanced carrot cake and oatmeal-raisin cookies (sorry, no actual granola recipe) in contrast to reduced-fat recipes (some things traditionally made with a cup of butter get slimmed down to a tablespoon of oil) and traditional full-fat recipes (macaroni and cheese buried in white sauce smothered in buttered crumbs).

There’s something for everyone, because what markets one food item is likely to be free from another one. Vegans may be the most likely to feel disappointed by this book; there are several recipes for vegetable, fruit, and grain dishes that contain no animal products, but they’re not “mains.”

Some recipes are unusual and will probably always so remain, because a breakfast bread with sausages and apples baked into it side by side is probably something people want to cook and eat once in a lifetime. (If no cookbook displaying a full-page full-color photo of stuffed chicken skins had ever existed, ours might be a better world.) Others might be considered unusual because they’re extravagant, like the peach ice cream that contains more than twice as much peach puree as milk or cream—in a year when you’re propping planks under every main branch of every peach tree as the wood creaks under its load of fruit, you can see that this is clearly the way peach ice cream should be made, and in other years I suppose most people might think that cream is supposed to be the point of ice cream. A few odd or extravagant recipes deserve to become traditions, like the two-layered jello mold that uses fruit puree instead of mayonnaise or cream cheese for the cloudy layer.

For most people, of course, this was not country cooking. This book was sold in supermarkets and its intention was, quite shamelessly, to motivate people to go back to the supermarket and buy non-local food items to try the recipes that weren’t familiar to them. (And since these were the recipes most requested from the marketing groups, they’re not the basics; the audience for these recipes already knew how to make biscuits, chicken soup, lettuce-and-tomato salad, potato salad, pot roast, and the normal reasonable kind of macaroni and cheese.)

Despite its corporate commercial angle, this is a cute, colorful, whimsical little cookbook that almost any cookbook collector would want.