Retro Recipes from the ’50s and ’60s: 103 Vintage Appetizers, Dinners, and Drinks Everyone Will Love

Gundry, a Food Network Cutthroat Kitchen winner and executive producer of RecipeLion, a food website, adds to her 103 Recipes series (Everyday Dinner Ideas, etc.) with this lackluster book. This collection of popular recipes from the 1950s and ’60s contains what you might expect to find in a cookbook from the time or written on weathered index cards in grandma’s recipe box. Recipes include easy beef stroganoff and a turkey tetrazzini. A book about this era couldn’t overlook cocktail-party fare, and Gundry includes several options, among them a party cheese ball, crab puffs, and cream-cheese-stuffed celery. The featured desserts could only come from midcentury America, and include a creamsicle Jell-O mold, magic tomato soup cupcakes, and Harvey Wallbanger cake. There are also recipes for sweets still popular today, such as crispy rice treats, grasshopper pie, and classic peanut-butter cookies. The recipes are not always diligently researched: for example, beef Wellington rose to popularity in the 1960s, not the 1950s, and most likely thanks to Julia Child and not President Nixon (although he was famous for serving beef Wellington at nearly every state dinner he held during his presidency). Nevertheless, Gundry has made it easy for theme-party planners to find the necessary recipes all in one place. (Jan.)