What Are the Best Vintage Betty Crocker Recipes for Thanksgiving Pies and Sides?

You are not really looking for a cookbook. You are looking for one dish, in one handwriting, from one table. Here is how to find the recipe instead of the book.

By Pam Fournier, vintage bookseller and owner of Reading Vintage

Somebody is going to ask you for the gelatin salad this month. Not the turkey. Not the rolls. The orange thing in the ring mold that your aunt brought every single year and nobody under forty understands.

Here is the plain answer, and it is narrower than you want it to be. The best vintage Betty Crocker recipes for a Thanksgiving table are the molded fruit salads, the simple vegetable sides, and the two pie doughs that run through almost every edition. In the big general cookbooks you get the pies and the vegetables. In the thin brand pamphlets you get the no bake pies and the cranberry desserts. That is where the holiday food lives.

But I am not going to hand you a list of recipe titles I cannot see. Nobody indexed these books. There is no searchable table of contents for a 1962 ring binder sitting in a cupboard in Ohio. So the only honest best of list is one built from pages somebody has open in front of them, and that is what this is. Every recipe named below is printed in a book I have in my hands right now.

If what you actually want is the apple pie, I already typed that one out. It is the one from the 1950 book and it is the most read thing I have ever written.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Search for the dish, not the cookbook. The recipe name is a far better search term than a title nobody in your family ever said out loud.
2. The sides you remember are usually molded fruit salads, and they live in the general Betty Crocker cookbooks rather than the dessert spin offs.
3. The brand recipe pamphlets hold the no bake pies, including the lemon meringue one that came off a condensed milk can.
4. Nobody has indexed these books, so no honest list of their recipes exists online. Somebody has to have the pages open.
5. Ask a seller to check the index before you buy. I would much rather look than sell you the wrong copy.

Why Can't You Just Look These Recipes Up?

Because the index is on paper, inside a book, in somebody's kitchen.

This is the part that frustrates people and I think it is worth naming plainly. You can type "best Betty Crocker Thanksgiving recipes" into Google all day. What comes back is mostly new content written by people who have never held one of these books, recycling the same four dishes, with no edition and no year attached. It reads like it knows something. It does not.

Meanwhile the recipe you want is sitting on page 118 of a 1962 ring binder, under a name you would never guess, photographed in color, next to an ad for shortening.

So the search fails for a boring reason. Not because the recipe is lost. Because the only copy of its index is physical.

Here is how this usually comes to me. Somebody writes with a dish and no book. Orange gelatin with carrot in it. A cranberry thing in a ring. The green beans with the crackers on top. They remember the food exactly and the cookbook not at all, because nobody ever says the title of the cookbook. It is just the cookbook.

One buyer put it better than I can. She wrote: "The quality of the item was better than the one my mom originally had. I have been looking for two recipes that my mom (now 90 and unable to remember them by heart) would make for us. I am so very happy and I thank you over and over again!" That is Laura, November 2022.

Read what she was hunting. Two recipes. Not a book. The book was how she got to them.

And notice the clock in that sentence. Her mother is ninety and cannot remember them by heart. That is the real deadline on this kind of search, and it is not Thanksgiving.

What These Recipes Actually Look Like, From Pages I Have Open

Let me show you instead of telling you.

The Betty Crocker book on my shelf as I write this is Betty Crocker's New Good and Easy Cook Book, a 1962 first edition, fourth printing. It is the silver ring binder, 192 pages, illustrated by Rudi Trautmann, published by Golden Press for General Mills. Somebody named Gail Richmond wrote her name inside the front cover in blue ink, and there are old tape marks on that same page. It came with two Better Homes and Gardens pamphlets still tucked inside it, one on herbs and spices and one on table settings.

That is one copy. One. This is not a catalog listing, it is the book on my table.

The recipes photographed in color in that book include:

• Cranberry Banana Mold
• Double Quick Orange Gelatin Ring
• Creamy Orange Pineapple Salad
• Cinnamon Applesauce Swirl Salad
• Cheese Delight

Look at that list again and tell me it is not a Thanksgiving side table. Four of those five are the molded salad that sat next to the turkey, in the cut glass dish, in the same spot every year. Cranberry Banana Mold is the cranberry side somebody is still making in your family right now and calling "the cranberry stuff."

Then there is the thin paper layer, which is where the pies hide. I have a lot of five recipe pamphlets in the shop, spanning 1952 to 1993. Inside it: Borden's Eagle Brand 70 Magic Recipes from 1952, which carries Magic Lemon Meringue Pie. Fleischmann's Bake It Easy from 1961, which carries Chill and Bake Cranberry Cake. A Betty Crocker cake mix booklet. And a 1982 holiday booklet out of Freeland, Michigan called Jan Jacobson's Easy on the Cook, carrying Holiday Strawberries and Sugar Nuts, with Saginaw, Midland, and Bay City businesses advertising in the back of it.

A holiday booklet with Midland ads in it. That one did not travel far to get to me.

MNopedia, published by the Minnesota Historical Society, records that Betty Crocker was created in 1921 by the advertising department at the Washburn-Crosby Company in Minneapolis, and that Marjorie Child Husted, who joined in 1923, led the home economists who developed and triple tested the recipes. Triple tested. Written so a woman in Michigan and a woman in Georgia would get the same result.

That is why these recipes still work. They were built to be followed by somebody who had never made the dish before, which is exactly the position you are in now.

The Recipe Is the Search Term, Not the Book

Here is the part I would want somebody to tell me.

You have been searching backwards. You have been trying to identify a cookbook so you can find a recipe, when the recipe is the thing you actually remember clearly. You know the dish. You know what it tasted like, roughly what was in it, what dish it came to the table in, and who made it. That is a lot of information. It is just not a title.

So lead with the food. Write down the dish in the plainest words you have, including the wrong words. "Orange jello with carrots in a ring." "The cranberry one with banana." A seller with the book in hand can check an index in about a minute.

And this is where availability is not the same as the right copy does real work. There are hundreds of vintage Betty Crocker cookbooks for sale this minute. Most of them do not have your dish in them. The spin off books are the trap here, because they are prettier and cheaper and they sell well, and a cake and frosting book will never hold your gelatin salad no matter how nice the photos are.

The right copy is the one with your recipe on a page. That is the whole test.

Which Betty Crocker Book Holds Which Part of the Meal

After fifteen years out hunting sales, this is the rough map I use. It holds up well enough to shop with.

The general household cookbook holds your sides. The fat ones and the ring binders. Good and Easy, New Good and Easy, the Picture Cook Book. Molded salads, vegetables, relishes, dressing, gravy, and the standard pie doughs all sit in here, because this was the book that had to cover a whole year of meals. If you only buy one, buy this kind.

The pies split across two places. Fruit pies and the pastry recipes are in the general cookbook. The quick pies, the ones built on sweetened condensed milk or a mix, are in the brand pamphlets instead, and there are hundreds of those pamphlets for every one cookbook.

The dessert and cake spin offs hold almost nothing for a Thanksgiving table, and I say that as someone selling them. The Cake and Frosting Mix Cookbook from 1966 is a real piece of mid century baking, 144 pages, more than 300 recipes, first edition first printing, and it is wonderful for a birthday and useless for your aunt's salad. Buy it for what it is.

The entertaining and small batch books hold menus, not dishes. I have the 1958 Dinner for Two Cook Book paired with the 1959 Guide to Easy Entertaining, both ring bound, both first editions. Dinner for Two carries 491 recipes and menus. Honest warning on that pair: they are graded Fair. The title page of the dinner book is detached from the rings, the punch holes are torn, and there is old yellowed tape across it. Complete and readable, and rough. If you want a shelf copy, keep looking. If you want to read it, it reads fine.

The community and church cookbooks hold the dish with somebody's name on it. If what you remember is a dish nobody outside your town has heard of, Betty Crocker is probably the wrong trail entirely. I sorted out which kind of book holds which type of holiday recipe in church cookbook or Betty Crocker, which has the holiday recipes families really made.

How to Find the Thanksgiving Recipe You Actually Remember

Six steps, in the order I would do them.

1. Write down the dish before you write down the book. Every detail, including the vague ones. Color, texture, what dish it came in, whether it was sweet, whether it had something crunchy on top. You are building a search term, not an answer.
2. Call the oldest person who ate at that table. Do this first, before you shop. It works more often than any other step on this list, it costs nothing, and the window on it closes. Laura's mother is ninety and the recipes are already gone.
3. Pin down the decade from the kitchen, not the book. Think about which house it was in and how old you were. A ten year window is plenty to shop with and much easier to remember than a year.
4. Go for the general cookbook first. Not the pretty dessert spin off. The fat one or the ring binder, from your decade. That is where a side dish will be if it is anywhere.
5. Ask the seller to check the index. This is the step people skip because it feels like an imposition. It is not. I would rather spend two minutes with the index than have a box arrive and be wrong. Any seller who will not look is telling you something useful.
6. Decide whether you will cook from it or keep it. A cook needs a copy that opens flat with every page in it. A keeper can live with a tired spine and a name in the front cover. Those are two different purchases at two different prices.

One honest note on timing. I promise one business day to get a package out the door. I do not promise a delivery date, because that part is not mine to promise. So if a cookbook needs to be in your kitchen for the actual meal, order it earlier than you think you need to. Not because of pressure. Because there is one of each of these and the mail is the mail.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is the most famous Betty Crocker Thanksgiving recipe?

The apple pie from the 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book is the one people ask for most, by a wide margin. It is the recipe my own readers search for every fall. The pastry and fruit pie instructions in that book carried forward into later editions, which is why so many families cooked the same pie for decades.

Q. Are the gelatin salads in old Betty Crocker cookbooks actually good?

Some are and some are a product of their moment. The fruit based molds, like a cranberry or orange pineapple one, still read as a real side dish and still taste the way people remember. The savory ones are a harder sell to a modern table. Make the one you remember and judge it yourself.

Q. Can I still use a 1950s or 60s recipe safely?

Yes for most baking and everyday cooking. The one place to be careful is food safety guidance, which has changed. Check current recommendations for meat temperatures, stuffing, canning times, and anything involving home preserving. Read the old book for the recipe and check current guidance for the method.

Q. Which Betty Crocker edition should I buy for holiday cooking?

Buy a general cookbook from the decade your memory comes from, not the oldest printing you can find. A 1962 ring binder suits a sixties kitchen memory better than a 1950 first printing does. The year is doing more work than the title is.

Q. Why can't I find a list of recipes in a specific vintage cookbook online?

Because almost none of these books have been indexed digitally. The table of contents exists only on paper. That is why asking a seller who has the book in hand to check the index is the fastest route, and why generic lists of "vintage Thanksgiving recipes" online rarely name an edition or a year.

The Pie Is the Point

Somebody at your table this month is going to say that the gelatin salad is not the same anymore. They will be right, and they will not be able to tell you why.

It is because the recipe left. Not the dish, the recipe. It went into a box when a house got cleaned out, or it went to a sibling, or it is still in the book and the book is in a cupboard three states away. What is on the table now is a reconstruction, made by somebody doing their honest best from memory, and it is close and it is not it.

That is a findable problem. It is a cookbook with a name in the front cover in blue ink and an index on paper. Somebody has it. Sometimes it is me.

Every cookbook on the vintage cookbook shelf in my shop carries its year, its publisher, its edition, and honest condition notes, including the parts that do not flatter the book. Ask me to check the index. That is not an inconvenience, it is the job.

And if what you came here for was the apple pie, it is right here: the famous 1950 Betty Crocker apple pie recipe, typed out, no book required.

Find the recipe. The book is just where it has been waiting.

Keep Learning

• The Famous 1950 Betty Crocker Apple Pie Recipe. The one recipe from these books that people search for every single fall, written out in full.
• Church Cookbook or Betty Crocker: Which Has the Holiday Recipes Families Really Made?. How to tell which kind of book your family's holiday dish actually came out of.

About the Author

Pam Fournier is a vintage bookseller and the owner of Reading Vintage in Midland, Michigan, where she lists, photographs, packs, and ships every item herself. She has been out hunting sales for fifteen years, five of them as co-owner of an estate sale company, and cookbooks are the category she handles most.

Reading Vintage has earned over 500 reviews across Shopify and Etsy since 2016. Every customer quote in this article is a real review, word for word, and every recipe named is printed in a book she has in hand.