I think it must be a dairy farmer thing. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but both sets of my great-grandparents on my mom’s side were dairy farmers. It must be in my blood. Everyone I know (except my boyfriend) looks at me funny when I put my cake in a bowl, but I don’t care. It’s too delicious!

Haha. Yes, my boyfriend prefers lots and lots of heavy cream, but if the cake is very sweet I prefer milk as it is a little less rich. Was your Dad a dairy farmer? Because my guy grew up on a dairy farm. I’m a milk-on-cake convert.

This is SO TRUE of Americans, and I’d never thought about it before. Although I love ice cream and puddings, I usually like things in them (although cake with milk poured on it until it falls apart is a favorite treat at our house). And fruit sauces have to be chunky (no smooth applesauce for me!). Jams too. And savory things? Forget it. Unless it’s rich chicken broth poured over bread until it’s silky, I like my savory things to have bite to them. I like soups better chunky than smooth, ditto pasta sauces, salsa, etc. About the only savory thing I don’t like chunky is dip, be it bean or sour cream. It’s got to be smooth for dipping.

Fascinating look into American tastes.

I like kale stems! They are nice if you boil them to death with the greens and a little bacon, salt pork, or ham hock and onions. Ditto broccoli stems. I just cut them smaller than the florets and they cook up just fine.

I’m bad about greens (mostly radish tops, I’m not a fan of beets). BUT! Pickle juice is wonderful in potato and/or egg salad.

I also save all my bread ends for bread pudding. Stash them in the freezer and they keep forever. I also buy and store day-old bakery bread specifically for bread pudding. Panade made of toasted day-old bread soaked and baked with rich homemade chicken stock is also divine. Or stir stale bread into soup for a silky thickener.

What a great article! Gave me lots of good ideas.

And here I was all excited that oldcookbooks.com was full of free, digitized cookbooks! Oh wait, that would be silly, let’s sell them instead!

For people who want freebies, Michigan State University has its Feeding America archive of digitized vintage cookbooks. Here’s the link: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/ If you search Amazon or other e-book sites you can often find free digitized versions of vintage cookbooks (I found about 60 for my Kindle). Cornell University also has a HEARTH collection of online, digitized content, including vintage cookbooks: http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/ And all of it free.

There are always thrift stores, library book sales, and garage sales, which is where I pick up most of my hard copies. I find pre-1950s cookbooks are best for recipes that are not chock full of canned soup and boxed cake mixes.

Okay, end cookbook rant. Can’t help it - I love them too much.

Don’t forget frog-eye salad! My aunt made it with those teeny little ball pasta, canned pineapple, mandarin oranges, fruit cocktail, and cool whip. It’s delicious. Other cool whip Midwest favorites include glorified rice (cooked white rice, pineapple, cool whip) and my future mother-in-law’s fruit salad made of mandarin oranges, orange jello powder, cottage cheese, and cool whip.

I never use it myself, but if such salads are available, I will heartily avail myself. Can’t eat it plain on top of stuff though. It always has a chemically aftertaste that I guess canned fruit covers up.

I’m unemployed and we just threw a holiday party last night. The boyfriend dropped $25 on 5 pounds of beef bottom round roast and I made slow-cooked french dip sandwiches with brown ‘n’ serve rolls (they were on sale and quicker than baking bread), made a honey mustard and creamy dip from a mix for a bag of pretzels, put together a salad with some homemade dressing, cut up a block of cheap sharp cheddar, and made apple cranberry pastries. We had about a dozen people over and it was perfect and low-key. And less expensive, less food, and less work than previous parties I’ve done. If we hadn’t wanted to spend the money on the beef, I totally would have used the crock pot to make dried beans into delicious taco filling and had tacos. But tacos didn’t seem Christmasy enough, hence the french dip sandwiches.

YES. My favorites are rural ones, especially those that are pre-1950. They tend to include fewer recipes based on canned soups and jello, and have lots of from-scratch recipes from older generations.

Dear Melissa Clark,

I finally broke down and bought “Cook This Now” because everyone had been raving about it on the internet. And while not everything is my style, I marked around half of the recipes - which is a lot for me as I’m pretty darn picky (not about types of food, but about styles of cooking). And now that I hear you love both creative writing and history AND food? I think we might be kindred spirits.

I love that you are egalitarian about food - not everyone is. I often ask myself: What do I want to make for dinner tonight? Thankfully, when I ask the same question of my boyfriend, it’s usually “You know me, I’m not picky, whatever you make will be good.” So I get to cook a lot of what I want, which is nice.

Anyway, thanks for writing such a lovely, down-to-earth book. My only complaint? Not enough prosy headnotes!

YES. I learned some cooking skills in home ec. in 7th grade, and while my mom cooked quite a bit, I didn’t learn directly from her.

And just because we have calculators and audio books, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep teaching kids to do math and to read. Life skills are useful no matter how much technology advances.

Home Economics (real economics, not just mixing stuff in a pot), including sewing, canning, laundry, budgeting, and gardening, should be standard in all high schools. If we had that, we might have a better-run society.

The ultimate lesson of all things household and cooking: time is money. You can either spend time or you can spend money and you can definitely spend both, but you can’t usually save time AND money together.

I am currently unemployed, though the boyfriend works, and am in graduate school full-time (and paying my own way). So money’s a little tight in our household. Last night I really didn’t feel like cooking and we didn’t have much in the way of leftovers to scarf, but we didn’t have the money to go out, so I made dinner anyway. And y’know what? It was fantastic. And cheap. I roasted two heads of broccoli (and the stems!) with a little olive oil, a small sliced onion, salt and pepper, and a little granulated garlic. Then I boiled a couple of red potatoes (they boil faster if you cut them in chunks). Once the broccoli was done, I mixed in some shredded cheese and let it melt. I drained the potatoes, mashed them, and topped with the broccoli. It was like a broccoli-topped baked potato, only way faster and more delicious. The broccoli was local and organic and the potatoes were also local. Proof that you can make a good, relatively healthy, from-scratch meal that doesn’t cost a lot in about 20 minutes flat.

Wow - I think it would be more fun to do a $5 total cost dinner. $5/person is kind of a lot. That’s $20 for a meal for a family of four!

Also, I would not consider hard boiled eggs with canned tuna and a salad a “meal.” Maybe it’s because I like my stuff all mixed up together, but when you can get cabbage for $0.49/pound and some places have ground beef or chicken legs for $1 or $2 per pound, I’d have a hard time justifying hardboiled eggs for dinner. Fried egg sandwiches, yes. But not hardboiled eggs.

Polar sodas make a lot of cool, old-fashioned flavors. The double fudge (a chocolate soda) is cool and their creme soda is pretty good. But my favorite is orange dry, which is reminiscent of the French Orangina. I have a feeling it would make a fantastic orange dreamsicle float.

Oh man, can I start my MA over and go for food studies instead of Public History? Lol.... I’ve always want to study and learn more about food and I’m really drawn to historic and ethnic foods. Want a research assistant? Lol...

Nice! Shopping for whole produce in season is much cheaper (and more delicious). I would add shopping for dry goods in bulk at a co-op. Things like dried beans and grains are often fresher there, and because they can buy in bulk, they often pass on the discount. I get all of my baking supplies, spices, nuts and dried fruit from a co-op up by my boyfriends’ parents house. The nuts and organic flours especially are so much cheaper than at the grocery store.

While it’s hard for us to do totally veggie meals, we rarely cook what my mom calls “big meat” - that is, a large hunk of meat cooked separately from veggies and starch. For us, a little meat goes a long way and I mix it in with lots of vegetables, such as in stir-fry, soup, pastas, and casseroles. We use dairy and eggs as meat replacers, too.

I like the new spice idea and shopping at ethnic stores. There’s an Asian grocery store near us, but I’ve never been. Maybe now I’ll have to go!

Soup is a create curer of cooking lethargy. It’s slow without being difficult, simple to prepare but complex in flavor, and you can be as creative or as traditional as you want in making it.

Sometimes I wish I lived somewhere that was cool or cold year-round so I could eat soup all the time.

Ha! I hate biting into whole cherry tomatoes, too. Savory things should not squirt when eaten. But I love tomatoes sliced up.

I’ll have to check this book out now.

@GeoDiva - That is such an awesome story! I wish my mom had made us cook when we were younger. She tried when we were teens, but by then we were lazy and uninterested. Getting kids involved in cooking is I think the only way to get them to truly love veggies. Case in point: I kinda liked veggies as a teen and in college, but now that I’ve been cooking for myself and others for a few years? I love vegetables!

I often wonder if we would all love cooking from scratch so much if we HAD to do it every day. Like you said, it’s elective, but I know there are days when I’d much rather order in (especially after a long day at work) than dirty more pots and pans that I’ll have to wash later.

It is laziness? Or is cooking and keeping house a full-time job that we simply don’t value enough to recognize as one?