10 Vintage Cookbooks Made By Beloved Brands

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Vintage cookbooks are, quite frankly, fascinating. They offer a window into people's diets and cooking habits from decades gone by, and the phrasing and ingredient lists can tell you a lot about the social climate at the time they were published. On top of this, they can also help us understand the brands that used to be popular, and the different products that used to be kitchen staples. Branded cookbooks are, of course, particularly insightful when it comes to this. Thankfully, there are many, many vintage cookbooks made by brands out there to learn about and look through.

From Betty Crocker and Campbell's to Hershey's, we've included a few examples of vintage cookbooks made by beloved brands below. If you want to collect them, we advise moving quickly if you see something you like, as vintage cookbook collecting has become quite the serious and competitive hobby in recent years.

Betty Crocker is an American icon. In the 1920s and the decades that followed, she held the hands of home cooks across the country (housewives, primarily) with her homemaking tips and recipes. A character created by the Washburn-Crosby Co. (which soon became General Mills), Betty Crocker was never a real person, but that didn't matter to the people who relied on her cooking know-how to get them through dinner parties. That's why, in 1950, General Mills decided to capitalize on her popularity and publish "Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book."

The cookbook was a hit and quickly became a trusted resource for families everywhere. It was re-issued multiple times over the second half of the 20th century, and even today, it is still used by home cooks across the U.S. Some long-standing favorite recipes from the vintage cookbook include angel food cake, white mountain icing, coconut cake, and banana whip.

The most obvious use for canned soup is, of course, to empty the can into a saucepan, heat it up, and eat it for lunch or dinner with a side of bread. But in 1970, canned soup brand Campbell's (which, fun fact, was the first to introduce condensed canned soup to the American market in the 1890s), wanted to show everyone just how versatile its signature product could be. Enter: "Cooking with Soup: A Campbell Cookbook."

As you might expect from the title, the book was packed with recipes for "creative cooking" with canned soup. Some of the recipes are a little dated, but offer an interesting insight into just how much you can make with a humble can of soup. According to Campbell's, a can of condensed mushroom soup could be used to make a broiled egg salad sandwich, while a can of condensed celery soup could bring flavor to a tuna burger. In 1985, Campbell's released a follow-up cookbook called "Campbell's Creative Cooking with Soup."

Today, you might combine Jell-O with whipped cream, fruits, or cake. For most of us, this dessert stays in, well, dessert territory. But in the 1960s, people were really pushing the limits of what Jell-O could be. Jell-O salads, specifically, were all the rage, and often involved combining the wobbly gelatin-based product with ingredients like celery, fish, and even veal.

In 1962, General Foods, the then-owner of the Jell-O brand, decided to help people get more creative with Jell-O by releasing its own cookbook, called "The Joys of Jell-O." Those joys, apparently, involved combining Jell-O with ingredients like grated onions, olives, and canned tuna, to make a Ring-Around-the-Tuna. Other so-called joys involved combining Jell-O with everything from mayonnaise to canned vegetables.

Not all of the recipes have stood the test of time (we probably won't be combining lime Jell-O with fish anytime soon), but some say the sweeter recipes in the book were actually pretty tasty. The Crown Jewel Dessert, for example, involved a more appetizing-sounding mix of Jell-O, pineapple juice, sugar, and whipped topping.

Before the Washburn-Crosby Co. merged with other flour mills and evolved into General Mills, it launched its flour brand, Gold Medal, in 1880. It was called that for one very basic reason: It won the gold medal in a flour milling competition. Nearly two and a half decades later, Washburn-Crosby Co. released a cookbook to promote the use of that award-winning flour, simply called the "Gold Medal Flour Cook Book."

The cookbook featured recipes for everything from dumplings and croquettes to cookies and pies. It even gave an example of a Christmas Dinner menu, which included multiple courses of oyster soup, fish cutlets, and roast turkey or goose, followed by orange salad and plum pudding.

More cookbooks seemingly followed from Gold Medal Flour. In fact, similar cookbooks to the 1904 edition, published in 1910 and 1917, have been listed on eBay.

More than three decades after Hershey's chocolate candy bars first hit the market, the chocolate company decided it was time to help people cook with its products. Hershey's Chocolate Corporation teamed up with home economist and author Christine Frederick to release a pamphlet filled with recipes featuring Hershey's products. There was a chocolate gingerbread square, for example, which came together with ingredients like flour, ginger, cinnamon, and Hershey's Breakfast Cocoa, and another recipe for chocolate nut bars with Hershey's baking chocolate.

In 1971, Hershey's reissued the 1934 cookbook for a new audience. It left the core essence of each recipe alone for the most part, but modernized the methods and some of the ingredients (adding margarine, for example). The recipes are still popular today. Folks have taken to social media to share recipes from the cookbook.

Kraft's Philadelphia cream cheese has been a staple in American homes for a very long time now. It first hit the market in 1880, after being invented in New York (not Pennsylvania) eight years earlier. This creamy, velvety cheese had some serious staying power, though. A century on, in the 1980s, people still loved it. In fact, they loved it so much that the brand released its own "Kraft Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese Cookbook" to help people cook with it.

The pages of the cookbook are filled with recipes for dishes like orange-butterscotch cheesecake, as well as soups, dips, and sauces, and, for the most part, they've aged well. Reviewers describe the recipes as tasty, easy to make, and timeless. They also praise the variety on offer in the book, noting that many of the main dishes (like creamy Alfredo sauce) are still in their rotation today.

Today, Dole PLC is, quite frankly, huge. In fact, it is the world's biggest provider of fresh fruit. Its roots trace all the way back to the late 1800s, when it became a pioneer of the canned fruit industry. It's released several cookbooks over the years. In 2008, for example, Dole released a pineapple cookbook in the shape of a Dole Pineapple can, and in 2002, there was another recipe book called "Taste of the Tropics." But two decades before these books, in the 1980s, there was another cookbook: "Dole Easy to Elegant Cookbook."

The book includes more than 150 recipes, each of which was designed by Dole to help people create easy and elegant recipes with its products. Dishes like Saucy Fish Fillets (with Dole pineapple), Black Bottom Cupcakes (with Dole bananas), and Omelet Aux Fruits (with Dole bananas and Dole raisins), line the pages. Some say they still use some of the recipes from "Easy to Elegant" and even regularly get compliments from dinner party guests.

While Campbell's helped to popularize canned soups, Lipton put soup mix on the map. Back in the 1950s, it introduced onion soup mix for the first time, but it was when someone combined it with sour cream to create California dip that sales really rocketed. This success likely inspired the brand to launch its own cookbook, called "Lipton's Soup & Salad Cook Book," in 1970. The book features a recipe for the California dip, of course, but there are also recipes for many different soups, fruit salads, and main dish salads on the pages, too. Of course, most include Lipton products.

According to the book, you can combine Lipton onion soup mix with macaroni and vegetables to make your own minestrone, for example, or combine Lipton noodle soup mix with chicken broth and eggs to make egg drop soup. Each recipe usually featured a long version, with a more extensive ingredient list and a "time-saver" version, which usually featured a Lipton product.

Armour is another brand that has been on the shelves for a long time. The brand, which specializes in meat products, was founded in Chicago in 1867. One way that it supported people across America to cook with its products was through its "Monthly Cook Book," which was basically a recipe-filled magazine released — you guessed it – monthly.

There are a few old copies of Armour's "Monthly Cook Book" floating around. Arguably, most of the recipes are outdated now, but they do offer an interesting look into the types of foods people were cooking with at the time.

For example, one edition from March 1912 features a recipe for Economy Head Cheese, which involves cooking a pig's head, boiling it, and then adding ingredients like liquor, salt, pepper, cloves, and Armour's beef extract before putting it all in a loaf pan to set. Another recipe from an October 1913 edition describes how to make tongue toast, with a can of Armour's Veribest Lunch Tongue, cream, and eggs. We did say they were outdated.

Kraft Foods (now of Kraft Heinz, although the company has announced its plans to split) has been a food and beverage juggernaut for decades. It has humble beginnings in Chicago in the early 1900s, and since then has transformed into one of the biggest food companies in the world.

Although it hadn't yet merged with Heinz, Kraft was still very successful well into the 1960s, and like all successful food companies, it wanted to market its products in creative ways. That's why it launched "The Treasury of Good Food Ideas from the Kraft Kitchen," which was a cookbook filled with recipes involving Kraft products, like mayonnaise, French dressing, and cheddar cheese. Kraft-everything, really.

There have been many Kraft cookbooks since. There was, of course, the aforementioned Philadelphia cream cheese cookbook but also "The Kraft Cookbook," which was published in 1978.