Rock Creek Mobile Home Park and the Canby Mother’s Club Community Cookbooks
I’m going on a picnic. Nothing fancy, just an authentically romantic, picnic for two with simple, tasty treats. Crispy corn dogs, zesty pickled green beans, and crunchy zucchini patties, finished off with classically delicious lemon bars. And all those amazing recipes were found inside these two vintage community cookbooks, so I wanted to take a moment to share them with you.
First, is this humble gem, ‘Favorite Recipes for Our Best Cooks’ Cookbook. Pretty generic title, and a generic cover, in fact you may come across this exact cover and title if you’re looking through vintage community cookbooks. That’s for a good reason.
In the 70’s and 80’s, community cookbooks had become such popular fund raisers for clubs and causes, publishing companies popped up to cater to the need. They would provide stock covers and standard inserts as well as printing and editing services for clubs, taking a lot of the burden off the clubs. It was a win win for all involved, allowing small clubs that otherwise couldn’t handle the job of printing and binding and artwork and editing.
Keep in mind, depending on the decade, they would have had to use typewriters, and hand binding, and all sorts of cumbersome and expensive processes. Was something lost in the process? Yeah, maybe a little. Artwork was less folky and kitsch, intros were less personal, but the trade off was higher quality printing, better organization, and all these great pages filled with tips, tricks, and weight and measurement conversions, so I don’t mind one bit.
And you can still get an idea of what organization the recipes were from by checking the first page of the inside. In this case, it’s the Canby Motner’s Club. I couldn’t find any records for the club, and I don’t think they are still in existence, but I did find one post in the local newspaper from 1979 that mentions the club :
“wants to invite all the women of the community to a luncheon at the Canby Fire Hall…After the luncheon Bingo will be played. Baby sitting will be provided. There is no cost for either the luncheon or baby sitting.”
So I love to think about how sales of this cookbook helped pay for lovely little free luncheons with babysitting and bingo.
And the second cookbook I’ll be borrowing a recipe from is the Rock Creek Mobile Home Park Cookbook. This is one of my favorite cookbooks, and I cook from it all the time. It’s an example of the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the first. It’s completely hand typed from front to back, with hand drawn artwork contributed by members of the community, and even little poems and quotes from neighbors.
The cover is hand laminated, and manually bound. It’s a true labor of love, and everything I adore about community cookbooks. As you can see it took no less than 8 women to assemble the contents, and every chapter has artwork contributed by a different artist. And look how cute it is!
A mobile home park is a genius group for a community cookbook. This park, in particular, is a retirement community, and I don’t know if they were raising money to improve their park, or maybe they just wanted to do something fun to share their favorite recipes with each other as a simple act of neighborly togetherness, whatever their motivations, I’m so grateful they did.
So, thank you so much, Canby Mother’s Club and Rock Creek Mobile Home Park, I treasure your recipes, and look forward to enjoying them at my picnic. If you happen this come across any of these humble little paperback cookbooks, please don’t overlook them. They are treasure troves of authentic home cooking, time capsules filled with historic recipes, and they should be appreciated right alongside the glossiest hardback celebrity chef’s cookbooks. So, follow me for more recipes from amazing books like these, and share with anyone you think might enjoy them as well. For now, I’m going to get cooking for my picnic, and I’d love you to join me.