Church Cookbook or Betty Crocker: Which Has the Holiday Recipes Families Really Made?

One book holds the standard version of the dish. The other holds the one your family actually ate. Here is how to tell which one you are looking for. By Pam Fournier, Owner of Reading Vintage

Here is the fastest way I know to answer this.

Think of the holiday dish you miss most. Now ask yourself whether it had a person's name attached to it. If your family called it the pie, or the rolls, or the stuffing, you are probably looking for a Betty Crocker. If somebody in your family called it Ruth's scalloped corn, or Aunt Dot's jello salad, or the cranberry thing Mrs. Kemp used to bring, you are looking for a church or community cookbook.

That is the real answer, and it holds up more often than you would expect. Betty Crocker holds the national versions of national dishes. A church cookbook holds the one dish nobody else in the country makes, because one woman in one town made it every December and then typed it up for a fundraiser.

Both books are worth owning. They just do different jobs, and knowing which job you need saves you from buying the wrong one and feeling let down when the recipe is not in there.

This week is National Friends of Libraries Week, which feels right for this. Church cookbooks are the most library-like thing in my shop. Somebody collected them, somebody organized them, and the whole point was to keep something from getting lost.

5 Key Takeaways

1. If the holiday dish had a person's name on it in your family, start with a church or community cookbook. If it did not, start with Betty Crocker.
2. Betty Crocker recipes were written and tested by a staff of home economists for a national audience, which is why they became the standard versions.
3. Church cookbook recipes came from the members of one group in one town, which is why they hold dishes you cannot find anywhere else.
4. Not every community cookbook credits the cook by name, so check before you buy if the name is the point.
5. The two books fail in opposite ways. Betty Crocker will not have the odd family dish. A church cookbook may not have the basics.

Why Isn't Grandma's Holiday Dish in Her Betty Crocker?

This is the question behind the question, and I get it often enough that it is worth answering first.

Somebody tracks down her mother's Betty Crocker, which is the right book, the right edition, the cover she remembers. She opens it looking for the dish that showed up every Thanksgiving. It is not there. Nothing close is there. And now she is wondering whether she remembered the wrong book.

She did not. She remembered the right book. The dish just came from somewhere else.

Here is what usually happened. Her mother cooked out of the Betty Crocker all year for the everyday things, and that is why it sat on the counter and got worn out and became the book the family pictures when they think of her cooking. But the holiday table had three or four dishes on it that came from other places. A recipe card from a neighbor. A clipping from the newspaper. A church cookbook that came home from a bake sale in 1971 and went into the cupboard and only came out in November.

So the memory attaches to the book that was always out, while the recipe lives in the book that almost never was.

I have been out hunting sales for fifteen years, including five years co-owning an estate sale company, and I can tell you what a holiday cook's shelf actually looks like when you find it intact. There is one big general cookbook with a broken spine. There is a stack of thin community cookbooks. There is a recipe box or a folder of clippings. The holiday meal was built out of all three, not one.

That is good news, honestly. It means your memory is fine. You just need to work out which part of that shelf the dish came from.

What Made Betty Crocker the Standard?

Betty Crocker was never a person. That surprises people, and it matters here, so it is worth saying plainly.

According to MNopedia, published by the Minnesota Historical Society, the name was created in 1921 by Samuel Gale, head of advertising at the Washburn-Crosby Company in Minneapolis. The company had been getting a flood of household questions from customers and wanted a woman's name to sign the answers with. The last name came from a former company director, William G. Crocker.

What came after is the part that explains the recipes. MNopedia records that Marjorie Child Husted led a group of home economists who created and triple-tested recipes to meet the Betty Crocker standard. Then in 1950 General Mills published Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, which became a national best seller.

Read that back and you can see exactly what kind of book you are holding. A staff of trained home economists, testing each recipe repeatedly, writing for a woman in Michigan and a woman in Georgia and a woman in Oregon who all needed the same instructions to work in their own kitchens.

That is why Betty Crocker holds the standard version of standard dishes. The pie crust. The roast. The basic dinner roll. The frosting. These are the recipes that had to work for everybody, so they were written to be plain, repeatable, and hard to ruin.

It is also why Betty Crocker does not have the odd dish your family loved. A recipe only got in if it was worth printing for the whole country. The cranberry thing with the crushed pineapple in it never had a chance.

If you are trying to figure out which of the two big household cookbooks was actually on your mother's counter, I wrote a whole piece on how to tell a Betty Crocker from a Better Homes and Gardens by the cover alone. The solid red one with the script name is Betty Crocker. The red and white check is the other one, and plenty of people have those two swapped in memory.

What a Church Cookbook Does That Betty Crocker Cannot

Now the other side of the shelf.

A community cookbook is built the opposite way. Johnson and Wales University's culinary library describes the pattern clearly in its guide to the form: the recipes were collected from members of the sponsoring organization, the sponsor was a group like a PTA, a church group, or a Junior League, and most of these books were put together to raise money. The guide also notes that scholars treat them as historical and cultural documents, not just recipe files, because they show how a particular community actually lived and ate.

That is the whole difference in one sentence. Nobody tested these recipes. Nobody standardized them. They were gathered up from whoever turned one in.

Which means the quality is uneven and the measurements are sometimes a guess and once in a while a step is missing because the woman who wrote it down knew it by heart and forgot to mention it. It also means these books hold things that exist nowhere else on earth.

The dish with somebody's name on it. The casserole that only makes sense in one county. The holiday salad that three generations of one family ate without ever once wondering where it came from.

One more thing worth knowing before you shop. That same library guide points out that credit was inconsistent, and that a community cookbook may or may not include the name of the person or family who submitted the recipe. Some of these books name every cook. Some just print the recipes. If the name is the reason you want the book, that is a fair question to ask a seller before you buy.

The Name Test

Here is how I think about it when somebody messages me trying to find a remembered holiday dish. I ask one question. Did the dish have a name on it?

It had a person's name on it. Ruth's rolls. Aunt Dot's salad. The Kemp cranberries. A named dish almost always came from a community cookbook, a recipe card, or a clipping, because naming the cook is what those sources do. Betty Crocker never printed a recipe under a neighbor's name. It could not. There were no neighbors.

It had no name, just the thing itself. The pie. The dressing. The gravy. That is a general cookbook dish, and for most American families in the 1950s through the 1970s that means Betty Crocker or Better Homes and Gardens.

It had a brand on it. The green bean thing. The one with the soup in it. Those came off a can label, a food company pamphlet, or a brand recipe booklet, and those are a third category entirely. They turn up tucked inside cookbooks constantly, which is its own small piece of luck.

The name test is not perfect. Nothing about tracking down a fifty year old recipe is perfect. But it tells you which shelf to start on, and starting on the right shelf is most of the work.

It also lines up with the thing this whole shop runs on. Availability is not the same as the right copy. There may be a dozen vintage cookbooks for sale that would technically answer your search. Only one kind of book is going to have your dish in it.

So Which One Should You Buy for the Holidays?

Depends what you want to happen in your kitchen this year.

Buy the Betty Crocker if you want to cook the standards well. Pie, rolls, roast, frosting, the basics of a holiday meal done the way they were done when you were a kid. The instructions are clear, they assume you have a normal kitchen, and they work. If you are cooking a holiday meal for the first time, or the first time without the person who used to do it, this is the more useful book to have open on the counter.

Buy the church or community cookbook if you are chasing one specific dish. Or if you want the food of one particular place, which is a real thing people want and a good reason to buy. These are also the better books for reading rather than cooking, because the ads and the names and the little notes add up to a picture of a town.

Buy both if you are rebuilding a holiday table from memory. That is what the original cook had, and it is why the meal is hard to recreate from one source. Most people doing this end up with a general cookbook plus two or three local ones, and that is the correct answer rather than a failure to find the one book.

A buyer told me this after she found a cookbook she had been hunting, and it is the clearest description of the whole thing I have: "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!"

Two recipes. Not a cookbook, two recipes. That is almost always what this is really about.

How to Track Down the Holiday Recipe You Remember

1. Write down the dish before you write down the book. Name the dish as your family said it, including the odd name if there was one. Then list what was in it as best you can. The dish is your search term, not the cookbook.

2. Run the name test. Named dish, go local. Unnamed basic, go general. Brand name in it, look for pamphlets and recipe booklets.

3. Ask the oldest person who was at that table. Before you shop. I know this is not a shopping step, but it is the one that works most often, and the window on it closes.

4. Search the group and the town, not the words church cookbook. If you think it came from a local book, search the church name, the town, and the decade together. The titles on these books repeat endlessly. Favorite Recipes was used by hundreds of unrelated groups, so the title alone tells you almost nothing.

5. Ask the seller whether the recipe is in the book. Please do this. People message me about it all the time and it is a completely reasonable thing to ask. I would much rather turn to the index and look than sell somebody a book that does not have the one thing she wanted. A seller with the book in hand can answer in a minute.

6. Check the back pages and anything tucked inside. Loose cards, clippings, and a note in a margin are where family recipes actually survive. More than once the dish somebody was hunting turned out to be on a card somebody else had left inside the book.

7. Check back if nothing fits today. Community cookbooks come in one at a time from estate sales, so what is on the shelf changes. You can see what I have right now in the Vintage Church and Community Cookbooks collection, and the Vintage Cookbook Collection is where the Betty Crockers and the household standards live. Vintage does not restock neatly, so if the right one is there it is worth deciding.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Are church cookbook recipes reliable?

They are uneven. The recipes came from members of the sponsoring group and were not tested by a staff, so measurements and steps vary in quality. Many are excellent and many assume knowledge the cook forgot to write down. Read the whole recipe before you start cooking it.

Q. Why isn't my grandmother's holiday dish in her Betty Crocker cookbook?

Because the holiday table was usually built from several sources. The general cookbook covered the basics, and the unusual dishes came from community cookbooks, recipe cards, clippings, or brand pamphlets. The memory attaches to the book that was always out on the counter.

Q. Do church cookbooks list who contributed each recipe?

Sometimes. Credit was never standard in these books, so one may name every cook and another may just print the recipes. If the contributor's name is the reason you want the book, ask the seller to check before you buy it.

Q. Which cookbook has the better holiday pie recipe?

For a standard fruit or cream pie, the Betty Crocker version is the safer bet, because those recipes were tested repeatedly to work in any kitchen. For an unusual regional pie, a community cookbook from that region is far more likely to have it.

Q. Can I find the exact church cookbook my family used?

Often, yes, though it takes patience. Search the church name, the town, and the approximate year rather than generic terms. These were printed once in small runs, so copies surface one at a time rather than sitting in stock somewhere.

One Last Thing

I think about the difference between those two books more than is probably normal.

One of them was made by a company that invented a woman's name so customers would have someone to write to. Trained professionals tested the recipes over and over until they worked for everybody, everywhere, and that is a real accomplishment. Millions of families cooked well because of it.

The other one was made by a committee in a church basement who sold ad space to the hardware store to cover the printing, and who put Ruth's name next to Ruth's scalloped corn because Ruth made it and everybody knew it.

Both of those are worth keeping. But only one of them was ever going to have your family's dish in it, and it is usually not the famous one.

So if you have been looking in the wrong book, you are not misremembering. You are just one shelf over. Go find the one with somebody's name in 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.
• Betty Crocker or Better Homes and Gardens: Which Cookbook Was in My Mom's Kitchen? How to tell the two apart by the cover when you only half remember it.

 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 handles and describes every cookbook herself, which is why she will turn to the index and check whether your recipe is in there.