Which Cookbooks Did Most American Families Own in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s?

Ask ten people which cookbook their mother cooked from and most of them can describe it before they can name it. Red. Thick. A binder. One page near the back stuck shut. By Pam Fournier, Owner of Reading Vintage

Here is the plain answer. For most American families in those three decades, the cookbook on the counter was one of a short list: a Betty Crocker, a Better Homes and Gardens, a Joy of Cooking, a community or regional cookbook from a place the family lived, or a book that came free with an appliance or off the back of a can. One general cookbook did the everyday work. Everything else on that shelf was smaller and thinner and did one job.

The reason people get stuck is that they are trying to remember a title, and the title is the one thing nobody in the house ever said out loud. It was the cookbook. So this post is built around what the book looked like and felt like in your hands, because that is the part you actually kept.

Everything named below is a book I have handled myself. I am not going to tell you what sold the most copies in your state, because nobody can tell you that honestly. I can tell you what keeps turning up in Michigan estate sales and kitchen cupboards after fifteen years of looking, and what the published record says about the few books big enough to leave one.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Most kitchens had one general cookbook plus a stack of smaller books and booklets, so the dish you remember may not be in the book you remember.
2. Betty Crocker and Better Homes and Gardens were the two most common general cookbooks, and the cover tells them apart faster than the title page does.
3. Joy of Cooking is the book people name correctly most often, because it is the one that reads like a long conversation instead of a picture book.
4. Community cookbooks, brand pamphlets, and appliance books held the odd family recipes, and those are the hardest ones to find again.
5. If all you remember is the format, a binder, a spiral, a thin paper booklet, you already have enough to start searching.

Why You Remember the Book but Not the Title

This is the part that frustrates people, so I want to name it before anything else.

A cookbook that gets used does not get read like a novel. It gets opened to the same four pages for thirty years. Nobody looks at the spine. Nobody says the title. It sits on the counter or in the cupboard above the stove and it becomes furniture.

Then one day you need it. Somebody passes away and the house gets cleaned out and the book is gone, or it went to a sibling, or nobody can remember where it went. Now you are trying to buy it back and all you have is a color and a feeling.

I hear from people in exactly this spot more than any other kind of buyer. They write to me with a cover color and a decade and a recipe their mother made. Sometimes that is enough. Often it is.

What does not work is typing "my mom's old cookbook" into a search bar and hoping. What works is narrowing the format first, then the publisher, then the decade, and letting the title show up last. I wrote a longer piece on how to search for a cookbook you can only half remember if you are in the middle of that hunt right now.

One more thing worth saying out loud. You are not being sentimental about a book. You are trying to get back a set of instructions that produced a specific result, in a specific handwriting, with a specific gravy stain on it. That is a reasonable thing to want and it is findable.

What the Record Actually Shows

A few of these books were big enough that real history got written about them. Those facts are worth knowing, because they explain why certain books ended up in so many houses.

Start before the period, because the shape of the American home cookbook was set in 1896. Smithsonian Magazine reports that when Little Brown and Company released Fannie Farmer's six hundred page Boston Cooking-School Cook Book that year, the publisher expected so little from it that it made Farmer, then principal of the Boston Cooking School, pay for the first three thousand copies herself. She sold 360,000 in her lifetime, and the magazine puts the total to date at more than seven million. Standardized measurements, level cups, a recipe you could follow without already knowing how to cook. Every book on this list is downstream of that.

Then 1931. Smithsonian Magazine reports that Irma Rombauer produced the first version of Joy of Cooking that year and later brought her daughter into the business, and that the book has circulated more than eighteen million copies worldwide. Eighteen million. That is why so many people name it correctly. There were simply a lot of them.

And then the one that shaped the look of the whole era. According to MNopedia, published by the Minnesota Historical Society, Betty Crocker was invented in 1921 by the advertising department at the Washburn-Crosby Company in Minneapolis, after a magazine contest flooded the company with household questions and the advertising head, Samuel Gale, decided the answers should come from a woman. The surname honored a former company director, William G. Crocker. MNopedia also records that Marjorie Child Husted, who joined in 1923, led the home economists who developed and triple-tested the recipes, and that the step-by-step instructions in the 1950 Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book helped make it a national best seller.

Triple-tested, written for a woman in Michigan and a woman in Georgia to get the same result. That is why these recipes worked, and why a new bride in 1958 was so often handed one of these books rather than a family recipe box.

What I cannot give you is a ranked list of which book was in the most American kitchens. No one counted that. Anybody who gives you that number made it up.

The Kitchen Shelf Was a Stack, Not a Book

Here is how I think about it after fifteen years of opening cupboards at estate sales.

The thing people picture as "my mother's cookbook" was almost never one book. It was a shelf. One fat general cookbook with a broken spine, two or three thin spiral books from a church or a hospital auxiliary, a drawer of recipe booklets that came free with flour and condensed milk, and whatever came in the box with the electric skillet.

The general cookbook got the credit because it was the one always out. But the holiday dish, the one odd salad, the cake somebody always asked for, those usually came from the thin stuff.

So when you go looking, do not look for the book. Look for the shelf, and work out which part of it your recipe came from. Availability is not the same as the right copy, and on this topic that cuts both ways. There are plenty of vintage cookbooks for sale. Only one layer of that shelf has your dish in it.

A buyer put the feeling better than I can. She wrote: "This was the cookbook my mother learned from so it is very special to me and a great addition to my cookbook library!" The cookbook my mother learned from. That is a specific book, and she knew it when she had it in her hands.

The Six Kinds of Books That Were Actually in There

Here is the shelf, broken into the six parts I keep finding. I have named real books I have handled so you have something concrete to compare against your memory.

1. The general household cookbook. The fat one. This is the book that taught a household to cook and it is the one most people are chasing. The two that dominate my shelves are Betty Crocker and Better Homes and Gardens, and people mix them up constantly. The solid red cover with the white script signature is Betty Crocker. The red and white check is Better Homes and Gardens. If you cannot tell which one you are picturing, I went through the differences in how to tell a Betty Crocker from a Better Homes and Gardens.

Examples I have handled: Betty Crocker's New Good and Easy Cook Book from 1962, the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book 1965 Souvenir Edition in a gold five-ring binder with tabbed sections, the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook edited by Ruth Berolzheimer from 1971, and Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook from 1961. Joy of Cooking belongs in this group too, though I do not have one on the shelf as I write this.

2. The single subject spin-off. Once a family trusted the brand, the brand sold them six more books. Cakes. Barbecue. Dinner for two. These are thinner, often spiral bound, and they are frequently the book somebody actually baked from, because it opened flat.

Examples I have handled: the Betty Crocker Cake and Frosting Cookbook, a 1966 first edition from Golden Press, Betty Crocker's New Outdoor Barbecue Cookbook from 1967, and Betty Crocker's Dinner for Two Cook Book from 1958, illustrated by Charles Harper.

3. The appliance and convenience book. New gadget, new book. The blender, the electric skillet, the pressure cooker, the mixer. These are easy to overlook and they hold a surprising number of weeknight recipes families actually repeated.

Examples: The Quick and Easy Electric Skillet Cookbook by Ceil Dyer from 1969, and The Busy Woman's Cookbook from the editors of Farm Journal, 1971, which is the farm version of the same idea.

4. The community, church, and regional cookbook. Spiral or comb bound, printed once, usually to raise money, often with a local business advertising on the back. This is where the dish with somebody's name on it lives.

Examples I have handled: The Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers Cookbook from 1970, the Detroit Free Press Cookbook from 1984, the Michigan Republican Women's Party Cookbook dedicated to Governor and Mrs. George Romney, and the Panhellenic Cookbook from 1968 out of Montgomery. These come in one at a time and they do not come back. You can see what I have at the moment in the Vintage Church and Community Cookbooks collection.

5. The brand recipe pamphlet. Thin, stapled, free with the product or mailed for a box top. Twenty to fifty pages. These got tucked inside the big cookbook and that is where I find them, decades later, still in there.

Examples: Betty Crocker's Frankly Fancy Foods pamphlet from General Mills, 1959, and a lot of five pamphlets I have that includes Borden's Eagle Brand from 1952 and Fleischmann's from 1961. If a dish in your family had a brand name attached to it, this is your layer of the shelf.

6. The book that belonged to somebody else in the house. Kids' cookbooks and diet books. Not the mother's book, but on the same shelf, and worth knowing about because people sometimes remember the wrong one.

Examples: The Kids in the Kitchen Cookbook by Lou Levine, Macmillan, 1968, a bundle I have of Mix and Fix Cookbook 1975 with Dishes Children Love 1955 and A First Cook Book for Boys and Girls 1953, and the Weight Watchers Cookbook from 1966 with the International Cookbook from 1977 by Jean Nidetch. If the book you remember is small and the pictures are bright, you may be remembering your own first cookbook rather than your mother's.

Most of the general cookbooks, the spin-offs, and the appliance books sit in the Vintage Cookbook Collection in my shop. What is there changes constantly, because these come from estate sales one box at a time.

How to Work Out Which One Was Yours

1. Start with the format, not the title. Was it bound like a regular book, in a ring binder, spiral bound with a metal coil, or stapled like a magazine? That one answer cuts the field by more than half.

2. Name the color and what was on the front. Solid red with script writing points to Betty Crocker. Red and white check points to Better Homes and Gardens. A photograph collage points to a later edition of either. Plain paper with a church or town name points to a community book.

3. Pin down the decade from the house, not the book. Think about which kitchen it was in and how old you were. A ten year window is plenty to search with and much easier to recall than a year.

4. Write down the recipe, not just the book. The dish is a better search term than the cookbook. A seller with the book in hand can check an index in a minute, and I would much rather look than sell you the wrong copy.

5. Ask the oldest person who ate at that table. Before you shop. This is not a shopping step and it works more often than any of the others, and the window on it closes.

6. Decide what you need the copy to do. If you are going to cook from it, a working copy with some wear is fine and usually cheaper. If you want the exact edition your mother had, say so when you ask, because edition and printing are things a careful seller can confirm.

7. Check back if nothing fits today. Vintage does not restock neatly. A book that is not on the shelf this week may come in next month, and the one that is there now will not wait.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What was the most popular cookbook in America in the 1950s?

No one kept a count that would answer that honestly. What the record does show is that Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, published in 1950, became a national best seller, and that Joy of Cooking, first published in 1931, has circulated more than eighteen million copies worldwide.

Q. How do I tell a Betty Crocker from a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook?

By the cover. Betty Crocker used a solid red cover with the name in white script. Better Homes and Gardens used the red and white check pattern. The check is the one most people misremember as Betty Crocker, so if you are picturing plaid, you are picturing Better Homes and Gardens.

Q. Is a ring binder cookbook worth less than a hardcover?

Not automatically. Binder editions were built so a cook could lay them flat and add pages, which is why so many got used hard. Condition and completeness matter far more than the binding. A complete binder with all its tabs can be worth more than a tired hardcover.

Q. My family's recipe is not in the cookbook I remember. Did I remember wrong?

Probably not. Most kitchens held a general cookbook plus community books, pamphlets, and recipe cards. The memory attaches to the book that was always out on the counter, while the unusual dish usually came from one of the thin books that stayed in the cupboard.

Q. Are old cookbooks from the 1950s and 60s still usable for cooking?

Yes for most baking and everyday cooking, with one caution. Food safety guidance has changed since then, so check current recommendations for canning times, meat temperatures, and anything involving home preserving before you follow an old method.

One Last Thing

There is a moment I watch for at estate sales. The general cookbook is usually easy to spot because the spine is destroyed. But if you pick it up and shake it gently, things fall out. A folded recipe card. A newspaper clipping gone brown. A church cookbook order form from 1973. Somebody's handwriting on the back of an envelope.

That is the real shelf, compressed into one book. One family, one kitchen, thirty years of what they actually ate, stuffed between the pages of the only book that was always within reach.

So if you are hunting for the cookbook your family had, remember that you are hunting for a stack. Find the general cookbook first, because it is the easiest one to identify and the one your memory holds best. Then go looking for the thin stuff, because that is usually where the dish is.

And when you find the right one, you will know. Everybody does. They pick it up and the weight is correct.

Keep Learning

• 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.
• My Mom's Cookbook Went Missing When We Cleaned Out Her House. Can I Find the Same One? How to search with a fragment instead of a title.

 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.