One of my origin stories

Many of us can point to a moment, person, place, or thing that shaped the course of our lives. I have something from my childhood that was one of the starting points for my cooking adventures. And I was able to recapture it.

In October 2023, I wrote about what I called Memory meals”, and in that post I said in passing that “There was also a cookbook for kids in our house”, and that cookbook, first published in 1957, was called Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls. That cookbook is seared into my mind because it was the first one I ever used, when I was around 7 or 8 at most.

Last year, I was planning on writing a blog post about memories of how I learned to cook various things, and that made me think of the long-gone cookbook I used in childhood. I Googled it thinking there might me an online version of it somewhere, only to find that I could buy an authorised “facsimile edition” that was a fauthful reprodution of the original, though the original as a fully spiral bound one. Nevertheless, I ordered the reproduction (pictured up top).

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with an impulse buy. But more about that later.

I made many things in that cookbook, but the main thing I remember about it is using its recipe to make scrambled eggs (image at right), and I’m pretty sure I made that for my mother as breakfast in bed at least once. In any event, I followed the recipe precisely, because I thought it was important. I was like that for many years after that, until I realised that cooking is about experimentation as much as—or possibly even more than—precision.

My mother was also a big influence in teaching me to cook, and I talked about one specific thing: THE Beef Stew (our family reciper), in a post in July 2023. I still make that, and scrambled eggs, but both are now without a recipe. I’m such a renegade—well, no, I’m just well-practiced—and “practice” is the important part.

The cookbook reproduction looks exactly like what I remembered, with the same charming late 1950s kibe drawing, a few somewhat oversaturated colour photograph pages, and what must’ve been radical for the times: It really did feature boys and girls making the various recipes—well, line drawings of them, but still. I grew up seeing that, and my dad cooked, too, so even that shows how much representation matters in pretty much everything.

However, there is a significant difference. The last page in the reproduction, right after the index, is a page entitled “Enjoy your cookbook today”, because “some ingredients are no longer available or have changed.” For example: “Please use only pasteurized eggs or pasteurized egg product…” in two recipes, one of which was eggnog—and as a kid I made that with raw eggs as the recipe called for. Quelle horreur! I survived, apparently.

There aren’t many things I can point to as a starting point in part of my life’s journey, but that cookbook was one of them. And that’s why I was so glad I followed my impulse and bought the cookbook. I’ve aid a few times that I have very few “treasures” from my childhood and youth, and so, I have very few touchstones for the jouney on how I came to become me. That means I treasure the few things I do have, and that includes this facsimile cookbook. As well it should.

When I mentioned the cookbook in that October 2023 post, it was in the context of a dish I made that, as I remembered it, the cookbook called “eggs in a frame”. It turns out, it really does call it that (and the recipe was on page 66, for the record). Sure, my memory was more reliable when I was decades younger than I am now, but there’s a part of me that’s especially happy to be able to verify that, in fact, my childhood memory was correct. Maybe that, too, shows what a big part of my young, impressionable life that cookbook was. I’m glad about that, too.