I got a free 1968 Sunset cookbook for entertaining

M

mariadnoca

Moderator
I’m amazed the human race survived because apparently 1968 was a very bad year for fancy entertaining food. There’re seafood soufflés that are made with a gelatin/wine/clam juice base. Yum. Gelatin encased food strikes again.

They have a recipe for cashew chicken that you cook at table side, you know to be fancy, but you’re cooking in an electric skillet. Why do you want to do this? Or worse, the second choice main course where you are cooking on a charcoal hibachi grill – tableside. I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna cook on a charcoal barbecue on my dining room table in the house.

There’s also lobster tail, where are you simmer them in a tomato-based sauce, with brandy and clam juice, but serve them topped with hollandaise. Way to ruin lobster.

Also, did you know the hostess with the mostus that’s prepared for unexpected guests always has a canned ham in the pantry? Neither did I!

Every random page I open the book to has something like this. Every recipe strike fear in some new twist.

I don’t remember any of this from 1968. I guess we were just too blue collar for this fancy food.

ETA

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse I opened to a random page in desserts. Yes, there’s a cheesecake with cheddar cheese in it, made with orange flavored cookie crust, but I bet you didn’t guess it also had beer in it did you?

 
The Sunset books were SO wonderful to a young newlywed cook. One of my favorite cocktail buffet

(and we had those often for entertaining) recipes was salmon mousse in a 60's/70's copper fish mold--made with canned salmon because fresh wasn't available in the interior of the US then. How times have changed.
https://food52.com/recipes/4563-salmon-mousse

Julia had just published the first volume of Mastering a few years before.

 
This is all so funny. Really, ruining some good basic food. And I can just see the electric frypan

sitting among the good china a crystal. And maybe the cord being held up by one of the guests.

YIKES

Thank you to Julia

 
OMG, so funny, I was a young married girl in the 60

my new husband with my NOT culinary skills. Jello was big and I tried very hard to come up with new and exciting ways to serve it. He was an ex meat shop owner and used to great meat. I grew on with cream tuna on toast! So, I had to learn how to do beef, lamb and pork. Chicken, I knew about because grandpa raised chickens and I knew how to do a few things with it. Meat and potatoes were the thing and I was not used to heavy meals like that. I prefered a good baked potato over a steak. My cooking certainly has evolved with the times, and I am so thankful for the cool ways to do veggies and salads these days. And so much more healthier ways to cook meats.
I still have my Better Homes and Garden from the 60's, tattered, stained as it is, but I cannot part with it. Sunset Books too, so many of them.

 
Just married in the 60's and not much of a cook!

That describes me too. I learned how to make casseroles in grad school -- tuna noodle was my specialty. When we got back from a 2 year stint in Jamaica, eating a lot of canned food, we'd developed a taste for curry (usually canned, too). I had a friend who decided that she and I would produce an Indian dinner featured in Sunset magazine that she subscribed to. In total ignorance about what we were getting into, we produced a very respectable lamb curry and beef samosas that were to die for. Still a T&T for us.

 
I think they upped their game through the '70s and beyond. Their Chinese cookbook from...

... copyright 1979 is STILL in use in my kitchen, and it has given us some of our favorite recipes of all time.

I did find a Jello "cookbook" from the late '60s buried in a storage box recently. It was incredibly dull, ugly, awful and, believe it or not, racially insensitive.

Michael

 
I have 10 Sunset soft cover cookbooks

I learned how to bake bread, cook my first Mexican food, Can and preserve fruits and veggies, cook my first Chinese food, make homemade pasta, learned how to make dishes lower in fat but still tasty, sooooo much more from the Sunset books when I was a young cook. My cooking library at that time was probably The Joy of Cooking, the Betty Crocker Cookbook and these ten Sunset books. I still have them all and I still look through them and use recipes from them. Like Karen I have used the Mexican cookbook a lot- and the Italian cookbook too. At the time I bought them they cost between $2.45 - $5.95.

 
Michael, can you post the names of a few of the recipes that have become faves for your family?

I did notice, with amazement, how little meat is used to feed up to 4 people. I compared a Tomato Beef recipe I use now to the one in the book and it calls for over twice the amount of beef.! It also says in the book that the Chinese eat well, but little so the recipes in the book are pretty authentic for that time period and area.

 
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