New (Old) Cookbooks

Just went to Goodwill and scored four new cookbooks.

• California Culinary Academy: Italian Cooking (1987)
• The New York Times International Cookbook (1971)
• Southern Living: The Vegetables Cookbook (1975)
• Southern Living: The Creole Cookbook (1976)

I can't decide which one I'm most excited about. I am most likely to cook recipes from the Italian Cookbook (which is fairly current), though the NYT cookbook is extremely cool, with recipes from countries that have changed names a few times already since this book was published.

The real fun though was in the Vegetables Cookbook. This was from before Southern Living started putting out the annual cookbooks that mom, a few of my sisters and I all collect. I have ridiculous amounts of fun reading the titles of recipes from the fifties, sixties and seventies. The pictures in this particular book are seriously dated, and the recipes are scary bad. My favorites are the "vegetable" recipes that call for 3 strips of bacon each. (shuddering)

A short list of recipes that I will never, ever, in a million years cook:

• Scalloped dandelions (never a good idea)
• Spinach ring (make it stop)
• Lima bean-olive casserole (need I say more?)
• Frozen peas in cream (OMG - thats too nasty to even talk about)
• Garbanzo bean surprise (I'm not eating anything with "surprise" in the name)
• Carrot loaf (make it stop)
• Spiced fiddleheads (what the?)