Collecting cookbooks

I've gotten so much reading pleasure from the vintage cookbooks I've come across this year that I wanted to tell you about some of them.

What's Cooking at Neiman-Marcus? is a slim volume I'd never even heard of before, and I certainly wish I'd heard of it before I finished writing Dainty Dining, as these recipes would have been ideal for that. I correctly assumed that the store's famous popover recipe would make an appearance, and it did, but it also has recipes for some decadent-sounding desserts like Cappuccino Pie and Praline Parfait. It's hard to imagine a store giving customers a free anything today, much less a cookbook of beloved recipes, so I'm happy to have found this.

On a visit to the antique mall during my recent crafting retreat, I found this large (8x10-inch) comb-bound book titled Bayou Cuisine. It has lots of tempting regional recipes, including a bacon-and-avocado dip I just made, and it has three recipes for teacakes that I'm hoping to try soon, but the real reason I had to have this was because of the sticker on the cover, showing that this once sold for $9.95 at my beloved Rich's!

Also on the crafting retreat, I bought this hardback book titled Miss Daisy Celebrates Tennessee. I have one of Daisy King's tearoom cookbooks, so I figured I would enjoy this one, too, and I did, especially since it celebrated 200 years of Tennessee history in 1996. I'm enjoying the history as much as the recipes.

And speaking of history … the cookbook I'm most intrigued by is this one, Tignall's Famous Recipes, which was compiled by the Tignall P.T.A. in 1951. You know the recipe for Wacky Cake I shared on Friday? It's one of the recipes that was tucked between the pages of this well-loved cookbook. I'd never heard of Tignall, Georgia, until I bought this book, and curiously enough, as I headed to my friend Kathy's house in Statesboro following the craft retreat in Lavonia, lo and behold, we passed right through the small town of Tignall, so I was delighted!

When I see handwritten or typed recipes and others that appear to have come off a can or a bag of flour, I am smitten. This cookbook is so full of stuff that it was packaged in a plastic bag so the various papers wouldn't fall out, and for just $5, this book has already provided me with far more than $5 worth of entertainment! Are you drawn to old cookbooks and/or old recipes too?