Worth replacing: Five Roses cookbook

Not only is my mom’s 60’s edition of the Five Roses cookbook worth replacing, I have replaced it once. I’m not sure why I’m still so attached to this book. I haven’t made one of the recipes as it’s written in this book in years. Yet, I still find myself leafing through it for ideas quite often. Even more peculiar is that my mother, still an active home cook, no longer has a copy of this book since I have hers. Apparently Five Roses cookbook dependency skips generations.

I learned to bake from this book and my mother used it frequently when I was growing up, too. The pies, cookies and cakes in the Five Roses cookbook form the backbone of childhood food memories. Although my mother had three or four cookbooks, this was the ‘go to it’ book for anything that she didn’t have committed to memory. It was the workhorse of our kitchen.

Highlights I recall from childhood are the Yorkshire pudding, the biscuits, butterscotch meringue pie and the hermit cookies. These recipes are on the most tattered and splattered pages of my mom’s original copy.

Did your mother have a favourite recipe book? And, if she did, do you have a copy of it that you can’t part with?