blue artichoke

The best thing about church is the cookbooks. I recently acquired a bevy of these cookbooks, en route to the Friends of the Library book sale. Before donating them to the library, though, I started flipping through them and have discovered a treasure trove of great recipes. Many are from the 1960s and 1970s, and the recipes take advantage of new conveniences, like box cake mixes. Some earlier cookbooks have recipes completely from scratch. I tend to like those better.

After flipping through several of the cookbooks, I can see some trends. Some years, crab cakes were really popular, and then there was the fruitcake craze, prune cake mania, gelatin fruit salads and the banana bread years. Chocolate cake has always been popular. I’ve added a few more banana bread recipes to the current Snackdown battle, pushing the end even further out of sight. I’m not yet sick of banana bread, though, so I’ll keep battling on, once I clean the ashes and baking soda out of my fire-prone oven.

Here’s a neat link to an online collection of cookbooks.