Today, as more and more of us get our recipes from the Internet while the cooking aisle in major bookstores is packed with books by celebrity chefs, old cookbooks are almost the only cookbooks worth owning. Old cookbooks are cookbooks made for real women serving real families at real dinner tables. No celebrities required and you didn't have to hit the print button.
 
And if you look closely, they're a treasure trove of culinary, social and women's history. I collect old cookbooks now, but the first old cookbook that came into my hands was simply given as a family memento. It was the 1927 Butterick Book of Recipes and Household Helps. It was given to me by my mother and inside, handwritten, is my great-grandmother's name.

Jessie Woodall was my great-grandmother on my mother's side, the flatlander side of my family.  My father was, after he completed his bombing missions during World War II, stationed in Oklahoma. He made off with my mother and took her away to a West Virginia holler, just as Jessie's husband took her away when they married, hauling her off to Oklahoma before it was even a state.  My great-grandfather claimed land in Oklahoma as part of the government's effort to settle the area, making him one of the state's early pioneers. My great-grandfather had to haul lumber back and forth across the prairie, by lantern-light when necessary, to build them a house.

Jessie was a good cook, by all accounts, and I like having her cookbook. I like to imagine her turning its pages, and I wonder which ones were her favorites. There's an X by a recipe for Little Chocolate Cakes. I wonder if that means she didn't like it?

There are plenty of tips included for the domestic goddesses of the time, such as this one for how to make it easier to see things inside your oven while you're baking-paint the inside of the oven a light color with aluminum paint. I think I'll stick with a light bulb.

When setting the table: "The handles of all of the flat silver placed to the right and left of the plate must be in a perfect line with the edge of the table." I bet Jessie always had her table set properly, even on the wild prairie.

The Butterick Book of Recipes and Household Helps was published by the Butterick Publishing Company and includes all sorts of extras geared to the women of its time, such as instructions for keeping a reserve supply shelf and the temperature breakdowns of slow, moderate, or quick ovens. Older recipes often only directed temperature by those terms. (Slow, less than 300 degrees, moderate, over 300 but below 400, quick, 400 or above.)

Along with recipes, there is an abundance of  "household helps" to guide the women of the day in caring for everything from their skin and nails to their carpets and house plants. It was a book for women who didn't have a lot of books, and in fact, might only have this one book. It was a little of everything - the most necessary, the most useful, the most all-encompassing. It was a practical book for a new bride to take to the wild prairie with her to set up housekeeping, but also a book for an established matron with six children to feed who needed fast, efficient information at her fingertips to get her through her harried days.

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

I've tried several recipes out of this book. I keep it on hand in my kitchen and enjoy knowing it spent many years in my great-grandmother's kitchen. I love this one for crullers: