Mom 'n' Pop's Apple Pie 1950s Cookbook

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Description: This book is a celebration of a time when life was simpler, and perhaps better. It was a time when our family still gathered around the dinner table every day for wholesome home-cooked meals. 

This book is a celebration of the foods, and of the lifestyle that we enjoyed in the 1950s. These are the foods that I remember from my childhood and which I have prepared for my own family in the decades since. These recipes, collected over many years, evoke the 1950s, and they are the types of foods that were served on my mom's dinner table, or on the backyard picnic table next to my pop's grill. 

The homemakers of the 1950s fashioned meals that were a blend of what they had learned from their moms and what they learned from women's magazines and from swapping recipes with friends across the backyard fence. Grandma's old favorites were still a staple in our diet, but mom was willing to try something new from the spice drawer once in a while. 

I remember when mom started to use garlic, and the first time she used tarragon on a chicken dinner. Pop said it smelled like Thanksgiving, and we all loved it. In the 1950s, the lifestyle of many suburban families included the backyard grill, and that somehow became pop's domain. On those sunny summer days, he would don his chef's hat and throw some burgers on the coals. When she saw pop at the backyard grill, grandma always reminded us with a wink that grandpa had never lifted a finger to cook anything. 

The 1950s were really the golden age of American home cooking. The new kitchens allowed the young moms to cook the recipes they had learned from their moms and grandmothers with ease, and the unprecedented array of labor-saving kitchen appliances gave them time to experiment a little bit without straying too far from the basics. 

In the 1950s, we saw the meals that mom put on the table as being truly American. I remember pop saying that the only two foreign foods he had ever tasted were Swiss Cheese and French fries. It is certainly true that our diets were much more limited then. Almost no-one had ever had tasted a taco, and pizza was something that you could find only in the Italian neighborhoods of larger cities. Terminology was also different. The word "pasta" had not yet entered our vocabulary. Noodles were noodles, and macaroni came with elbows or it came shaped like letters in our "alphabet" soup. 

However limited they may have been, the basic foods were better back then. A home-made hot dish is always better than anything that you find pre-packaged in the frozen food section. Just because we don't have as much time as mom did to prepare our meals, doesn't mean that we can't enjoy a good home-cooked meal once in a while, and that's what this book is all about. 

In this book, we return to those wonderful days of bean salad, baked beans and green bean casseroles. We have selected recipes that recapture a spirit of simplicity and of wholesomeness. These recipes were chosen with an eye to the recipes that mom inherited from grandma, ones she developed herself and ones which capture the spirit of those times. In most cases, these are oven or stove top meals, although in some cases we have also included microwave instructions where they seem appropriate. 

Whether you grew up in the 1950s or the 1980s, we hope that you'll enjoy this book and find recipes that help evoke a time and a table where the food was cooked fresh and cleaning up our plates was a joy. 

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Condition: Good condition. Dust jacket has some minor wear in the laminate.