I still use a Country Womans Association cookbook that was first published in 1928.
Serious Q- he didn’t happen to have a Seventh-Day Adventist background, did he?
This thread would not be complete without a link to The Gallery of Regrettable Food.
…You’re welcome. 
(The MEAT! section is my favorite.)
Fifteen cent burgers.
And how. My relatives up there still practice “glop in a pot” cooking of all sorts. The word “hot dish” invokes in me a Pavlovian spinal shudder.
One thing I’ve noticed that has changed over the years is that in the 40s and 50s, canned goods seemed much more popular. I don’t know if it was because food preservation seemed “space age”, or if the big move from cities to suburbs meant that more people had to get their food in cans rather than fresh produce, or what, but lordy, there was a lot of canned food back then.
And, once again anecdotally, I’ve noticed that people who grew up in that era still seem to like the canned stuff. To my palate, canned peas are oily mush that cannot be tolerated; yet, my parents and my wife’s parents keep on buying the cans. It’s the flavor of their youth, I guess, but ergh.
And while I’m thinking about this, someone please answer this question for me: has anyone, at any time, in the history of the world, ever used canned cream of mushroom soup to actually make cream of mushroom soup? All I’ve ever seen it used for is as the glue in various allegedly-edible primordial science projects.
And people wonder why immigrants coming to this country tended to stick to their own foods. :eek:
Max Torque - I once made a pot pie that used cream of mushroom soup as the base, though it had additional vegetables added to it. That’s the closest anyone in my family’s ever come. I think my sister once threatened to cook the soup and serve it as-is, but there was a revolt.
me
Dad did virtually all the cooking because Mom never really learned how. I suspect all the meals for the first few years were an approximation of what he ate in the Navy; ketchup-based spaghetti sauce, for example. The Army spaghetti in Band of Brothers bore a striking resemblance.
And me.
Not THIS Minnesota Lutheran… 
Me, too! Cream of chicken’s good, too.
Yes on this and on the cream of mushroom. And Mom bought cream of celery, too. The cream of mushroom had those odd, rubbery eensy-weensy little dices of mushroom, but all of them had to be stirred assiduously during cooking, lest they stick to the bottom of the pan and burn, or scum over on top and form lumps. You don’t want cream of god-knows-what soup for lunch? Just say so, Mom will find you a replacement…like head cheese on old bread.
Yes on me to the mushroom soup, too.
My former father-in-law (northern MN) used to make this stuff, but called it szoltsa or soltsa: basically a Polish head cheese. It was absolutely ghastly.
What’s necessarily wrong with Cream of Mushroom soup? Other than the idea of eating it straight out of the can?
You haven’t lived until you’ve had Venison and Wild Rice Casserole with a CoMS base. Damned good stuff. Even better with bits of Morel in it.
Just like modern cookbooks, there are good and bad recipes alike in them.
I sometimes go into my wife’s copy of Ruth Wakefield’s cookbook for some tips - and that cookbook came out in 1940. There are some great recipes in there along with some horrors.
Wakefield, of course, invented the chocolate chip cookie, so some things do endure.
It seems like many of the cookbooks that survived were produced by food companies, and were thus pushing their products. The books put out now by food companies are atrocious too - pick up a Kraft cookbook and take a look.
The exception being my Betty Crocker cookie book, which you can have when you pry it from my cold, dead, flour covered fingers. Seriously - in the property division of my divorce, I think that was the only thing we fought over.
I used to love those cream-of- soups. I haven’t had on in decades, though.
My Betty Crocker cookbook (from the early 80s) is something of an enigma. It has the best dinner roll recipe on the planet. But the party snacks?
“Spread cheese spread on a slice of balogna. Fold decoratively and secure with a pick.”
Yuck!
This isn’t hard and fast either, as you mentioned - these food companies had test kitchens and home economists and cooking contests - and some of the dishes that emerged from these were amazing.
One of the cookbooks I own is a compendium of recipes found on the back of cans and jars. There are fantastic recipes in there - from the aforementioned chocolate chip recipe (still on the back of every bag of Nestle’s chips) to the classic pecan pie recipe printed on every bottle of Karo syrup.