Belonged to my mother Florence, and I will keep it forever! ( )

Of the over a couple of dozen cookbooks in our shelves, this general cookbook is the one we've used the most over the years--you can tell from how it's falling apart, battered and stained. Yes, it's pretty old--from before I was born, and Joy of Cooking, which we bought last year, has come to replace this as our go-to book--maybe more because we don't have to deal with pages falling out everywhere. But as a basic cookbook, this was hard to beat. ( )

Our family's favorite general cookbook. When they've updated this book, they've removed many of our favorite recipes and we had to buy an out of print edition to replace ours, which fell apart due to a poor binding. ( )