My mom got a set of cookbooks in the 90s, and being paperbacks, they’ve now just about had it. She loves them, though, so new copies are in order. I replaced the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook (2006 ed), and it looks like I won’t have any problems getting a new version of the Pillsbury Complete Cookbook (also 2006 ed). But the last edition of the Fannie Farmer cookbook came out twelve years ago.
Suppose I order one, would the book I receive literally be 12 years old, or is it just that the last edition came out in 1996, but they’ve produced copies since then?
I haven’t seen a copy in person, so I can’t check the copyright page like I might a novel and see what it says about print runs. On one hand it seems like cookbooks are popular enough to warrant a lot of print runs, but on the other if it were popular, why has it been so long without a new edition?
I seriously doubt that any copy you’d get would be 12 years old. As for why there’s not been a new edition, why should there be? Generally, when new editions of cookbooks are released, they’re simply the same old content, gussied up with a new forward or pictures.
I don’t know about that. I have Betty Crocker Picture Cookbooks, one circa 1950, and one circa 1970. They are as different as peas and apples.
It’ll be that the latest edition was from 1996.
Putting out a cookbook is a tremendous amount of work, especially those very large collections. Any recipe changes have to be kitchen tested.
And realistically, you don’t need a new edition of a classic cookbook all that often. They’re periodically updated to adopt some new trends and adapt to dietary changes (ie, elimination of lard from recipes happened in a lot of classic books when they put out new editions in the 80s and later) but a recipe that worked five years ago will generally still be fine today.