Spinning a random post from one Hodgepodge question

 

 This week there is just not time to write a Hodgepodge post.  Sometimes when that happens, I'm able to answer just one question and that works out great.  Not this time, though.  The one question I would have answered would have been about my favorite cookbook(s). 

That would take way more time than I have today, so I'm simply spinning it into a post about cooking magazines, vintage and newer, which I have always enjoyed cooking and baking from.  Most of the text is coming from a draft of a book I'm thinking of publishing about kitchens I have known and loved. 

You may never have heard of Farm Journal, a magazine which was subscribed to by farmers and ranches all over the United States — maybe Canada too.  In the 1960s my family subscribed to it.  Near the back of this magazine was a fairly hefty section just for women.  Loads of wonderful recipes that had been sent in by readers or developed in the Farm Journal test kitchen were featured here.  The recipes for a specific issue of the magazine often had a theme — say, garden produce, gifts from the kitchen, cakes, beef or chicken main dishes, or whatever.  When the Farm Journal arrived in our home and I got my hands on it, the recipes were the first things I turned to.  I imagine a lot of country women and teen girls did the same.  

Farm Journal cover from December 1961

And then, logically enough, Farm Journal began to produce cookbooks.  How I loved these books!  My mother purchased many of them — and later on, so did I.  There was a cookie cookbook, a large, comprehensive Country Cookbook, a freezing & canning cookbook, an Informal Entertaining Country Style Cookbook (one of my top favorites), a chocolate cookbook, a family favorites cookbook, a healthy snacks cookbook and many more.  

The Farm Journal Homemade Cookies cookbook

Thanks to the evocative and folksy writing style of Nell Nichols, the Farm Journal food editor,  I could read those volumes by the hour.  The recipes were so delicious, too.  The chocolate cookbook is completely spattered and freckled with brown from baking so many of the sweet treats.  The Family Favorites cookbook is another from which I made recipe after recipe.

When Taste of Home magazine came out, both my mother and I subscribed.  I had been  cooking in my own kitchen for some time at that point.  I think the reason we instantly fell in love with Taste of Home is that it had that same folksy feeling as Farm Journal.  Indeed, the reason Farm Wife News, of which Taste of Home was an offshoot, had originally been started was that all of the older farm magazines and journals had begun to discontinue their women’s sections.  Understandably, rural women missed that and were thrilled when Reiman Publications stepped into the void with Farm Wife News.  My mother subscribed to that, as did I after it became Country Woman.  Then Reiman branched out even more with Taste of Home, a cooking magazine loaded with recipes, and a staff of field editors from all over the United States and Canada.  I still have every Taste of Home issue I ever received, and I've cooked and baked from them often.  When Quick Cooking, later renamed Simple & Delicious, came along, I subscribed to those too.

When each new issue arrived, I would always find a new recipe — usually many more than one — that I couldn’t wait to try.  My mother was the same, and so was my friend Marilyn — and later, my daughters when they had their own kitchens.  We would so often compare notes about what recipes appealed to our families and which one we would like to try first.  Some of my very best recipes came from Taste of Home or other Reiman publications.  Although I enjoyed submitting recipes to their contests, it came to the point where I was limited into which ones I could send in.  So many of our favorite recipes had come from there in the first place!

I stopped subscribing to any cooking magazines some years ago.  I have all of the recipes I will ever want or need (although that doesn't stop me from pinning more to my Pinterest boards!) and right now I am cooking with very limited ingredients due to a special diet my hubby is following.  And yet a couple of weeks ago in Maine, I picked up a free 2024 issue of Taste of Home in a thrift shop.  Must be I still find them somewhat irresistible!