What Are the Best Old Recipe Pamphlets and Food Brand Booklets to Look For?

The thin stapled paper that lived inside the big cookbook is where a lot of family recipes actually came from. Here is what to look for. By Pam Fournier, Owner of Reading Vintage

Here is the plain answer. The booklets worth looking for are the ones a company gave away to sell you something: flour and milling booklets, canning and jar company pamphlets, chocolate and yeast baking booklets, appliance books that came in the box, dairy and trade association books, and the entertaining booklets the liquor and mix companies mailed out. Those six or seven families cover most of what turns up, and they are the layer of the kitchen shelf where the odd family dish usually hides.

If you are hunting a recipe and the big cookbook did not have it, this is where to look next. Not another cookbook. The paper.

October is American Archives Month, which is a decent excuse to say something I believe anyway. This stuff is a record. A twenty page booklet from a flour mill tells you what a company wanted a 1939 cook to make, what she was expected to already know, and what she had in the cupboard. Nobody wrote that down anywhere else.

5 Key Takeaways

1. The best recipe pamphlets were free advertising, which is why they ended up in nearly every kitchen and why so few of them survived.
2. Seven families cover most of what you will find: milling and flour, canning and preserving, chocolate and baking brands, appliance books, dairy and trade associations, entertaining and bar booklets, and radio or promotional giveaways.
3. Research libraries collect this paper on purpose, so if you feel silly chasing a stapled booklet, you are in good company.
4. Date a booklet by the company name and the address on the back cover, not by the recipes inside.
5. Condition rules are different for paper this thin. A missing back cover matters more than a stain does.

Why Nobody Thinks to Look for the Thin Stuff

I wrote a while back about how to work out which cookbook was on your family's counter. The short version is that the memory attaches to the fat book, because that is the one that was always out.

But the fat book is not usually where the strange recipe lives.

Think about how these came into a house. You bought a sack of flour and there was a booklet in it or an offer on it. You bought a mixer and a recipe book came in the box. You sent in a box top and three weeks later an envelope showed up. Your church group handed one out. None of it cost anything, so nobody treated it like a book. It got folded, it got splattered, it got stuffed into the back of the big cookbook, and it stayed there.

That is almost always where I find them. Not shelved. Wedged inside something else.

So people come to me looking for a cookbook when what they actually need is a twelve page booklet from a company that stopped existing in 1961. They do not know that is what they are looking for, because they never knew the booklet had a name.

I have handled enough of these now to spot the pattern. If the dish in your family had a brand name in it, or involved a jar, a jello mold, a pressure cooker, or an appliance somebody was proud of, you are looking for paper.

What Libraries Know About This Paper

I am not the only one who thinks these are worth keeping, and this is the part that surprises people.

Duke University's Hartman Center holds the Nicole Di Bona Peterson Collection of Advertising Cookbooks. According to Duke University Libraries, it runs to over 2,500 booklets and leaflets dating from the 1880s to the present, and it is mostly exactly this: advertising recipe booklets and leaflets for food products, kitchen appliances, and cookware. The early ones are black and white. The later ones get colorful.

Closer to home, Michigan State University Libraries holds a collection called Little Cookbooks, the Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Culinary Collection. MSU Libraries describes it as thousands of food and cookery related publications produced primarily by companies in the United States, running from the late nineteenth century to the present, and points out that researchers use it to study the history of advertising, food products, and individual companies.

Read that again. Thousands of them, at a university, in Michigan, because they are useful for understanding how Americans were taught to cook.

So when somebody tells me they feel a little silly hunting a stapled booklet from a flour company, I tell them about MSU. The paper is a record. It just happens to be a record that was handed out for free, which is why almost nobody kept it, which is why it is harder to find now than the hardcover cookbook that sat next to it.

A buyer wrote something about this that I think about often. She said: "The cookbook was in amazing condition. Hard to believe it was published in 1946! Loved all the little extras hidden inside and the bonus mini cookbook seller included. It has taken its place with its fellow BHG cookbooks."

The little extras hidden inside. That is the layer I am talking about.

The Seven Kinds Worth Looking For

Here is the list, organized by who published it rather than by what it looks like, because the publisher is what you can actually search. Everything named below is something I have handled, and I have noted what I have on hand as I write this.

1. Milling and flour company booklets. The oldest and usually the plainest. A mill printed recipes to teach you what to do with its flour. These are where you find the bread, biscuit, and plain cake recipes a household made constantly. The one on my shelf right now is Good Things to Eat, a recipe booklet from Henkel's Commercial Milling Company in Detroit, dated 1939. A Detroit mill, teaching Michigan cooks, in the last year before everything changed.

2. Canning and preserving pamphlets. Jar companies, pectin companies, and the government. This is the layer people most often need and least often think about, because home canning instructions changed over the decades and the old booklet is the only place the old method is written down. I have a bundle of eight pieces built around an Atlas Book of Recipes from 1952, with canning paper from Kerr, Morton, Sure-Jell, the USDA, and Michigan State. Read these for the memory and the history. Check current food safety guidance before you follow a canning time, always.

3. Chocolate, yeast, and baking brand booklets. The sweet ones. These are the booklets people remember by the picture on the front. On hand at the moment: a Chocolate Cookery recipe pamphlet from the Educational Department of the Walter Baker Division, General Foods, 1929, and a pair of vintage Baker's Chocolate recipe booklets together. Also a bread baking bundle with The Art of Baking Bread, The Fleischmann Treasury of Yeast Baking, and 250 Breads, Biscuits and Rolls. If your family cake came from "the Baker's chocolate recipe," this is your shelf.

4. Appliance books that came in the box. New gadget, new book. These get thrown out with the box, which makes them scarce, and they hold a surprising number of weeknight recipes families actually repeated. I have four electric mixer pamphlets together from Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach, and Powermaster Deluxe. I have a frying appliance bundle with Sunbeam, Kenmore, Fryryte, and a Spry recipe booklet. I have a National Presto cooker instruction and cooking bundle. I have Basic Freezer Cookery from Amana Refrigeration, 1959, and a freezer group with the Sears Cold Spot manuals and a 1955 Frigidaire chest freezer book paired with a 1954 Imperial Cold Pantry.

If somebody in your family had a pressure cooker or a chest freezer and there was a dish that only ever came out of it, you want the appliance book.

5. Dairy, beef, and trade association books. An industry group, promoting an ingredient. These tend to be better printed than the brand booklets, because the association had money. On hand: the Big Boy Barbecue Book from the Tested Recipe Institute, a 1960 spiral, together with a Let's Eat Outdoors pamphlet from the American Dairy Association.

6. Entertaining and bar booklets. The 1960s and 70s ones. Mixers, cordials, and liquor companies all sent out small books on how to host. These are the most dated and sometimes the most fun to read. I have a bundle with an Esquire Cheers supplement plus Kahlua, Galliano, wine and cordial booklets spanning 1966 to 1981, and a Standard Bartender's Guide packaged with a Bar-Tenders Instant Cocktail Mixes pamphlet.

7. Radio, premium, and promotional giveaways. The odd ones. Mail-ins, show tie-ins, regional promotions. I have a 20 Years of Corn booklet from Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, 1953, and Recipes from Around the World from the McNess Company, which was a door to door products company.

Most of these sit in the Ephemera collection in my shop, and the ones that read more like small cookbooks get filed in the Vintage Cookbook Collection instead. Worth checking both, because the line between a thick pamphlet and a thin cookbook is a judgment call and I do not always make it the same way twice.

The Booklet Is the Household. The Cookbook Is the Store.

Here is how I have come to think about it after fifteen years of opening cupboards.

The general cookbook tells you what a family was supposed to cook. The booklets tell you what they actually bought.

A Betty Crocker from 1962 is a national standard. Triple tested, written so a cook in Michigan and a cook in Georgia would get the same cake. That is its whole value and it is a real one. But it does not tell you that this particular family bought Fleischmann's yeast, canned with Kerr lids, had a Sunbeam mixer on the counter, and sent in a box top for a chocolate booklet in 1952.

The paper tells you that. The paper is the receipt.

Which is why availability is not the same as the right copy, and on this topic it cuts hard. There is plenty of vintage cooking paper for sale. Only one brand's booklet has your grandmother's frosting in it, and it is probably a brand you have not thought about in forty years.

How to Tell a Good Booklet From a Tired One

Condition rules for paper this thin are not the same as for a bound book, so here is how I actually judge them.

Covers first. A booklet is usually a cover, a few folded sheets, and two staples. If a cover is gone you have lost the title, the brand, and the date all at once. A missing back cover is worse than it sounds, because that is often where the company address and the printing code sat.

Staples next. Rust is normal and usually fine. Staples pulled clean through, so the pages are loose, is a different thing. That booklet will keep coming apart.

Then the spatters. Here I am going the other direction. A grease spot on the page with the good recipe is not damage to me. It is a bookmark somebody left. I describe it plainly and let you decide, the same way I handle what handwriting inside a cookbook is worth.

Watch for tape. Old cellophane tape on a thin booklet is the one repair I genuinely dislike. It yellows, it stains through, and pulling it off takes the paper with it. I say so when I see it.

Check for the mail-in coupon. A lot of these had an order form on the last page. If it is still attached and uncut, that is a nice detail and it tells you the booklet was kept rather than used up. If it is clipped, that is history too. Somebody wanted the next one.

How to Start Looking

1. Name the ingredient, not the dish. Think about what was in the recipe. Flour, pectin, yeast, chocolate, condensed milk, gelatin. The brand that sold that ingredient is the one that printed the booklet.

2. Then name the appliance. Pressure cooker, electric skillet, blender, chest freezer, waffle iron. If the dish only ever came out of one machine, the recipe came with the machine.

3. Pin the decade from the kitchen. You do not need a year. Think about which house it was in and roughly how old you were. A ten year window is plenty to search with.

4. Search the company name plus the word pamphlet or booklet. Not the recipe name. Sellers list these by brand, because the brand is what is printed on the front. Adding the word booklet or pamphlet to a brand name will pull up things a plain cookbook search will not.

5. Shake the big cookbook. Before you buy anything. If you still have any cookbook from that kitchen, hold it by the spine and let it fall open. Things come out. Folded cards, clippings, order forms, somebody's handwriting on an envelope.

6. Ask the oldest person who ate at that table. Not a shopping step and the best one on this list. Ask what brand it was. People remember brands better than titles, because the brand was on the can every week.

7. Check back if nothing fits today. Vintage does not restock neatly. These come in one estate box at a time and they do not come back. What is on the shelf this week will not wait, and what is not there may show up next month.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Are old recipe pamphlets worth any money?

Most are modest, which is good news if you are hunting one. Value comes from the brand, the condition of the covers, the date, and whether the specific recipes inside are ones people still search for. Early canning and chocolate booklets, and complete appliance sets with the original book, tend to hold up best.

Q. What is the difference between a recipe pamphlet and a small cookbook?

There is no firm line. In general a pamphlet is stapled, under about fifty pages, and published by a company to promote a product. A small cookbook is bound, usually priced, and published to be sold on its own. Plenty of items sit right in between, so search both terms.

Q. Can I still use the canning instructions in an old pamphlet?

Read them for the history, not as current instruction. Home canning guidance has been revised since these were printed, and times and methods changed. Check current food safety recommendations for anything involving pressure canning, water bath times, or low acid foods before you follow an old method.

Q. How do I date a recipe booklet with no copyright year?

Use the back cover. Company names, logos, mailing addresses, and ZIP codes narrow it fast. ZIP codes in the United States started in 1963, so an address without one usually points earlier. Phone number formats, price marks, and the paper itself also help.

Q. Why are these harder to find than the cookbooks they came with?

Because they were free. Nothing free gets shelved. They were folded, used hard, stuffed into other books, and thrown out with the appliance box, so far fewer survived than the hardcover cookbook that sat next to them on the counter.

One Last Thing

There is a particular moment at an estate sale I have learned to wait for. The big cookbook is easy to spot, because the spine is wrecked. You pick it up, tip it, and the real collection falls out on the table.

A church cookbook order form from 1973. A pectin booklet with one page soft from being opened wet. A folded index card in handwriting that stops partway down, because whoever was writing it already knew the rest.

That pile on the table is the actual kitchen. The cookbook was just the thing holding it together.

So if you have been looking for a recipe and the cookbook was a dead end, stop looking for a book. Start looking for the company that sold your family the ingredient. It printed a booklet, it gave the booklet away by the thousands, and a few of them are still out here.

They were never supposed to last this long. That is exactly why they are worth finding.

Keep Learning

• Which Cookbooks Did Most American Families Own in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s? How to work out which book was on your family's counter, starting from the binding instead of the title.
• Does Handwriting Inside an Old Cookbook Make It Worth More or Less? When notes and marks add meaning, and when they are just wear.

About the Author

Pam is a bookseller in Midland, Michigan, where she runs Reading Vintage on her own. She has been out hunting sales for fifteen years, including five years as co-owner of an estate sale company, and she has carried over 500 reviews across Shopify and Etsy since 2016. She opens and describes every booklet herself, which is why she can tell you whether the mail-in coupon is still attached.