For my friends who like history and cooking, I have the greatest cookie cookbook ever written. Seriously. If you do not already own a copy of this cookbook, you owe it to yourself to pop over to Amazon and order one right now (I checked, and there is a 2002 reprint currently available.)
When I was a kid, my mom's copy of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book was the one that I baked from the most. My dad has a sweet tooth, and every week we had something coming out of the oven which never lasted very long around him. I particularly enjoyed baking cakes and cookies, and this cook book has a tremendous variety of recipes. It has my all-time favorite recipes for chocolate brownies, butterscotch brownies, snickerdoodles, chocolate crinkles, and lemon squares (which I later modified into orange squares; substitute orange juice for the lemon juice - it's sublime!).
This book starts out with a "cooky primer" section divided into the six methods of cookies making: drop, bar refrigerator, rolled, pressed, and molded. Color photos of the finished cookies run across the bottom of this section so you could see what it was supposed to look like.
I was constantly trying something new, like Koulouria, which I remember as being very tedious but did get me a blue ribbon at the county fair. Spritz, in all kinds of colors and whatever flavors Mom had in her baking cupboard, marzipan (trying and failing to mold that crumbly dough into perfect little fruit shapes), candy canes and holiday bells for Christmas, and a memorably sticky pineapple turnover.
An interesting section in the back is "a nostalgic peek" at the best cookies from 1880 through 1963; the Cinnamon Jumbles recipe caught my eye today, and I think I will have try it soon.
One of the first cookbooks I ever bought for myself was a 1979 paperback version of this cooky book from a school book fair. The cover is a modern 1970s brown, but the interior is exactly the same. Shocked to realize it is more than 40 years old now and almost qualifies as an antique in its own right. The pages are covered with my notes, star ratings, drips and splatters. I later found my own copy of the 1963 spiral-bound in an antique store; I knew better than to try to "encourage" Mom's copy to wander over to my house!
