The Offical Cook Book Review of The Ages!

First of all I must say how impressed I was by how many cook books the library had. And I also must say how impressed I was after walking up four stories of stairs to find an elevator! Kidding aside I did find some interesting trends overall for cookbooks. Just by looking at the cook books that Georgia Tech had from the 1970’s and before I realized that they did not have a lot of pictures in them. I think it is safe to hypothesize that this was due to the price of printing pictures and picture quality at the time. So instead of pictures in these elderly books there were oodles of text and vivid descriptions of what the recipes were suppose to taste and look like. When I was young I can remember looking through my mom’s cook books and there were tons of pictures, and I came to like that feature. Therefore I found that the books without the pictures to be overly complex and outdated, however they did feel to be very rich in character because of the old age and dusty pages. Reading them made me feel intelligent.

The two books that I did find quite interesting where Sunset Menu Cook Book by the editors of Sunset Books and Sunset Magazine, and Beverages by The Editors of TIME – LIFE Books.

I found the book Beverages quite interesting at first because it threw me off. I had never really considered drink making part of cooking before. After skimming through the pages I found a plethora of recipes and pictures of fancy looking kool-aid. Some of the recipes were quite involved, while other required very few ingredients. The layout of the book was fantastic. It had the ingredients in the beginning of the passage followed by step by step pictures. I found this format very effective and helpful. It showed how the cooking or drink making in this case was suppose to look at different stages of creation. Also in the back of the book there is a nice condensed version of the recipes with the required ingredients and simple instructions on how to make the drinks.

The other book I found interesting was Sunset Menu Cook Book. This cook book looked like it was made by the people who make the Cracker Barrel’s menus. I fancy Cracker Barrel so this style was very familiar to me. The book was amazingly simple and basic. The pages have a very nice theme of brownish yellow and black. The best part about this book was the layout and organization. The book grouped the recipes in meals. For example the book would give a breakfast meal with an entrée, drink, and side dishes. This is quite useful especially if you are a novice in cooking because it aids you in making entire meals instead of just one dish. This book didn’t have quite as many pictures as Beverages, but did have enough pictures to know what the final product of every recipe looked like.