What Are the Best Michigan Community and Church Cookbooks to Look For?
The towns, the groups, and the small print runs worth chasing, named from the Michigan books that have actually come through my shop.
By Pam Fournier, Owner of Reading Vintage
The best Michigan community cookbooks are the small ones. A single church, a single school, a single factory, a single county fair, printed once, in one town, in a run of a few hundred copies, and never printed again.
That is the short answer. If you are looking for Michigan cookbooks and you want the ones worth owning, skip the statewide promotional books with a cherry on the cover and go looking for the thin spiral bound book that says Saginaw or Bay City or Negaunee on the front. Those are the ones with real cooks in them, real names, and usually a back half full of ads for a Michigan hardware store that closed in 1983.
I live in Midland and I have been out hunting sales for fifteen years, so Michigan books come through here constantly. Estate sales in this state produce church cookbooks the way they produce Pyrex. That means I get to see which ones hold up and which ones are just old paper.
October is Family History Month and National Cookbook Month, and today is the last day of both. A community cookbook is somebody's family history that a committee decided to print, so this feels like the right day to say which Michigan ones I would chase.
5 Key Takeaways
- The small single group books beat the statewide promotional ones almost every time, because the recipes came from named home cooks instead of a marketing department.
- Michigan community cookbooks fall into five kinds: church, school, workplace, fair or historical society, and statewide auxiliary. Each one is a different buy.
- Saginaw, Bay City, and the Upper Peninsula towns printed these constantly, and those are the books most likely to surface.
- The ad pages in the back are often the most useful part of the book, and they are the part most listings never mention.
- If your own town's book has not turned up yet, keep looking instead of settling. These come in one at a time, and a near miss will sit on your shelf as a reminder of what you did not find.
Why Do People Go Looking for a Michigan Cookbook in the First Place?
Because Michigan is a place people carry with them after they leave.
I see this over and over. Somebody grew up in Detroit, or had parents from Bay City, or spent every summer somewhere up north, and now they live in Ohio or Arizona and they want a piece of it back. The cookbook is a reasonable thing to want. It is small, it still works, and it has the food in it.
One buyer wrote to me after an order, unprompted, about her own Michigan roots. Her parents were from Bay City, she grew up in Detroit, and she and her sister had taken a trip back through their favorite Michigan towns a few years earlier. Her words for it were "a Michigan Memories journey with stops in our favorite Michigan cities."
That is the buyer for these books. Not somebody browsing. Somebody who already knows the name of the town she is looking for.
The frustrating part is that the books are hard to search for. A church cookbook from 1976 has no ISBN, no catalog entry, and often no real title beyond something like Favorite Recipes. You cannot type it into Google and get a tidy answer, because the only copies left are in attics and estate sales and the occasional shop like mine. So people give up, or they buy a general Michigan cookbook and feel let down when it turns out to be a tourist book.
That is what this post is for. If you know what kinds exist and what the good ones look like, you can recognize the right one when it finally shows up.
Which Michigan Towns Actually Printed Cookbooks?
More than you would guess, and the ones that surface most are not the famous towns.
Here is what is on my shelf as I write this, so you can see the shape of the category rather than taking my word for it.
Saginaw shows up more than anywhere else. I currently have a 1985 cookbook from St. Helen School in Saginaw called Reading Riting and Recipes, a Fundcraft spiral binding, and a 75th anniversary cookbook from Grace Lutheran Church in Saginaw from the same year. I also have Prize Winning Recipes, put out for the Saginaw Fair 75th anniversary in 1988. Three Saginaw books, three different groups, all in one small shop at one time. That tells you how many that town printed.
Bay City printed them too. I have the BMC Cookbook, an employee cookbook from Bay Medical Center in Bay City, a 1977 first printing. I also have one called Sweets and Meats Directory, put together by the Ladies Association of the First Baptist Church in Bay City, with local ads running alongside the recipes.
The Upper Peninsula has its own lane. I have a church cookbook from Concordia Lutheran Church in Palmer, which is a small place in Marquette County, and a Negaunee Historical Society cookbook from 1994 that came in as part of a three book set.
The German and Bavarian settlements are a category all their own. Frankenhilf Favorites, from 1976, is a Bavarian American cookbook out of Richville. If your family came out of that part of Tuscola County, or one of the other Franken settlements nearby, that is the kind of book that will have your grandmother's actual food in it.
The factory and workplace books are the quietest category. A while back I sold a 1978 community cookbook from AC Spark Plug Plant 2 in Flint, spiral bound, recipes from the plant workers themselves. Michigan ran on plants like that for most of a century, and the cookbooks the workers made are a record of how those families ate. There are not many, and almost nobody is cataloging them.
And then the statewide auxiliary books. I have Favorite Foods and Favorite Foods Two, compiled by the Lutheran Children's Friend Auxiliary of Michigan in 1974. Statewide rather than one town, but still a real group of Michigan women rather than a publisher.
You can see what is actually in stock right now in the Vintage Church and Community Cookbooks collection. The rest of the Michigan material, the maps and the Petoskey pieces and the state histories, lives in Michigan and Great Lakes.
The Five Kinds of Michigan Community Cookbook
Sorting them this way makes the decision easier, because each kind is good for something different.
1. Church cookbooks. The deepest category in Michigan, and the one most likely to have your family in it if your family stayed put. Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist congregations printed these the most in this state. Look for an anniversary year on the cover, because a 50th or 75th anniversary book usually got more effort and a bigger run.
2. School cookbooks. Smaller runs, usually a PTA or a class fundraiser, often from the 1970s and 1980s when companies like Fundcraft made it easy for a group to self publish a spiral book. Good if you want the exact decade your kids were in that school.
3. Workplace cookbooks. Hospitals, plants, offices, unions. These are the hardest to find and the most interesting as documents, because they tell you what a shift worker packed and what a hospital potluck looked like. If you had family at a plant, this is the book to chase.
4. Fair and historical society cookbooks. County fairs and local historical societies both printed them. The fair books lean toward baking and preserving, since that is what gets judged. The historical society books usually mix recipes with local history, which makes them useful even if you never cook from them.
5. Statewide auxiliary and club cookbooks. Lutheran auxiliaries, Junior Leagues, sororities, women's clubs. Broader than one town, so easier to find, and still real home cooking. A good starting point if you do not have one specific town in mind.
What Actually Makes One Michigan Cookbook Better Than Another?
Not the age, and not the town name on its own. Three things.
The names. Credit was never standard in these books. Some print the cook's name next to every recipe and some just run the recipes. The ones with names are worth more to almost everybody, because that is the whole point. A recipe with a cook's name and her town printed under it is a different object than the same recipe with nothing under it. If reading the names is what you are after, ask before you buy, because you cannot tell from a photo of the cover.
The ad pages. This is the part I think most people undervalue. These books paid for their printing by selling ad space to local businesses, so the back half is often a snapshot of one Michigan main street in one year. Every dairy, every funeral home, every implement dealer, every gas station. For anybody doing Michigan or family history, that section is a primary record and there is no other copy of it anywhere. Not every book has them, which is exactly why it is worth asking.
Whether it was used. Spatters on the sheet cake page are proof somebody made the sheet cake. Loose pages at the holes mean somebody carried the book to the counter a hundred times. I will tell you plainly when a book has that kind of wear, because some of it is history and some of it is just damage, and the job is explaining the difference. A cracked comb binding on a shelf copy is fine. The same crack on a book you want open next to the stove is going to get worse fast.
Availability is not the same as the right copy. That cuts both ways here. A Michigan book from the wrong town is wrong for a memory and still perfectly right for a kitchen.
How Do You Tell a Michigan Book Is Really a Michigan Book?
A lot of what gets sold as a Michigan cookbook is a national book with a Great Lakes photo on the cover. Here is how to check.
1. Read the title page, not the cover. The cover might say Michigan. The title page tells you who compiled it and where. If a church, school, club, or company name is printed there with a Michigan town after it, you have the real thing.
2. Look for the printer. Fundcraft, Wimmer, Morris Press, Favorite Recipes Press. Those names on the spine or the copyright page mean a group self published it, which is a good sign, not a bad one.
3. Go straight to the ad pages. Michigan phone exchanges, Michigan town names, a Michigan area code. Ads are the hardest thing in the book to fake, because nobody puts fake ads in a fundraiser.
4. Read the index before anything else. This is the step most people skip and it is the most useful one. If you get all the way through and nothing in there sounds like food you would make, the book is a document and not a cookbook. That is fine as long as that is what you wanted.
5. Check the pages nearest the holes. On a spiral or comb bound book, that is where pages tear out first. A missing page in a book that was printed once and never reprinted is simply gone, and that is the one flaw I treat as a deal breaker in this category.
6. Ask whether one specific recipe is in there. People ask me this constantly and it is a completely reasonable question. I would much rather turn to the index and check than sell somebody a book that does not have the one thing she came for.
7. Decide where it is going before you buy. Kitchen counter or bookshelf. That answer changes which flaws you can live with.
What If Your Town Is Not There?
Then wait. I mean that kindly.
These books come in one at a time, out of one house at a time, and the shelf changes every week. A book from the next county over will not do the job, and you will know that every time you look at it. The ones that surface are not predictable, which is annoying, but it also means your town's book is probably sitting in somebody's kitchen drawer right now waiting for an estate sale.
What you can do in the meantime is get specific. Write down the name of the church or the school, the rough year, the color of the cover if you remember it, and whether it was spiral, comb, or stapled. That is enough for me to recognize it when it comes through the door, and it is enough for you to recognize it in a photo on a shelf somewhere else. Vintage does not restock neatly, so if the right one shows up it is worth deciding on.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Are Michigan church cookbooks worth anything?
Most sell in the modest range rather than the collector range, and price is driven by hometown demand more than by age. A book from a town with a lot of people still connected to it will cost more than an older book from a town nobody is searching for. Condition and whether the recipes are credited both matter.
Q. What is the most common kind of Michigan community cookbook?
Church cookbooks, by a wide margin, especially Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist congregations. Anniversary editions are the most common of those, because a 50th or 75th anniversary was usually the reason a congregation decided to print one in the first place.
Q. How do I find a cookbook from one specific Michigan town?
Search the exact church, school, or group name along with the town, rather than searching for Michigan cookbook. These books have no ISBN and often no real title, so the group name is the only reliable handle. Then check back regularly, because they surface one at a time from estate sales.
Q. Are the recipes in old Michigan community cookbooks still usable?
Yes, for the most part. They came from home cooks who made them regularly. Quality is uneven because nobody tested them for a national audience, so read a recipe all the way through before you start. For canning times and meat temperatures, check current food safety guidance rather than the book.
Q. What should I check before buying a spiral bound community cookbook online?
Ask for photos of the title page, the index, and the pages closest to the binding holes. The title page confirms the group and the town, the index tells you whether you would cook from it, and the holes are where pages tear out first in a book that was printed once.
One Last Thing
A group of women in Saginaw decided their school needed money. They asked everybody for recipes, somebody typed them, somebody sold ads to the hardware store on the corner, and somebody drove the box home from the printer. Then they sold them to whoever walked in.
Forty years later that book is one of the only records of what those families actually ate, and it has their names printed next to the proof.
Michigan printed more of these than almost anywhere, which means your town probably made one. Go find out what it was called. Then go find it.
Keep Learning
- How Much Does an Old Church or Community Cookbook From My Hometown Cost? What really sets the price on a book that was printed once, in one town.
- Michigan-Made vs. Michigan-Themed: What Actually Counts as Buying a Piece of Home? How to tell a real piece of Michigan from a souvenir with a lake on it.
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