Would you like to travel in time back to 1964? If so, take up the pages of Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers: Salads including Appetizers, a cookbook that once stood in my mother’s kitchen.

The title evokes a different age—a time when enrollment in Home Economics proved that a high-school girl was growing up, nearly ready to step into the status of homemaker.

Home Economics was a required course. Even if the rare girl became a physician or, gasp, a pilot (as one of my bolder classmates did), she was going to need domestic skills.

I was clueless coming into Home Economics. With justification, my mother cringed at my efforts to cook and ran me out of the kitchen. In her defense, she ran me out to the piano, where she expected me to practice hours every day. That’s where I belonged, she said over and over. I dropped my apron and complied.

My mother hated to cook. She cooked for her siblings from an early age while her mother, the sole supporter of the family, worked long hours in a garment factory. Her definition of “hell” amuses me to this day: being chained, eternally, to a cookstove. I suspect she’d proclaim that Dante failed to describe that layer of the Inferno because it lay deeper than those he visited.

I remember only two incidents from Home Economics. We had to sew a skirt to pass the course. Have you watched me use a scissors? Any straight stretches I cut result from sheer luck trying to correct my wavy course. Still, I did sew one skirt, although I have no memory of it. Perhaps Miss Camper secreted it in her desk, since our sewing projects had to be “proudly displayed” in the exhibit cases along the hallways.

Also, I remember being severely chastised for cracking an egg on the rim of the bowl. That’s how my mother did it, but apparently it was wrong. An egg should be cracked on the lip of one bowl, but split open and poured out into a separate vessel so as not to spread some kind of disease. Maybe ole-timey eggs were coated with chicken poo. But I doubt the eggs we used were quite that hazardous. Still, to this day, every egg I crack using one bowl evokes a touch of guilt.

But back to 1964, when Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers hit the shelves. The then new-and-trendy spiral binding of my mom’s copy dried up long ago and cracked away. The pages have lain in a sad pile on my kitchen shelf, although I do take them up occasionally and sift through them, reading with pleasure the recipes submitted by Home Economics teachers across the US.

My, people relied on Jell-O and canned pineapple to put spice into life, didn’t they? Cream cheese too (until Cool Whip appeared  in 1966). Whatever Jell-O could not do, cream cheese apparently did. Overall, salads meant small plates of colored, jiggly stuff laced with shredded carrots, bottled maraschino cherries, coconut flakes, and cubes of celery, walnuts, or pecans. Such salads were served on a bed of iceberg lettuce or, rather, on a single leaf of iceberg lettuce. No need to overdo, right?

On the other hand, those salads tasted delicious, as did the various slaws, potato salads, and macaroni salads filling such cookbooks. Something else to note: few ingredients required an adjective, unless it was something like “red” cabbage. Also, nothing was tinged with anything. The only dash around might be a dash of salt, and there were no health warnings or quotients given for calories-per-serving.

The bottom line: the joy of cuisine was direct and easy to grasp. Success lay in oblong packs of frozen strawberries and cans of peas. Women apparently had time to marinate carrots 24 hours before adding them to a concoction (I’m joking—women have never had time). And mayonnaise fixed whatever cream cheese could not.

For some reason this morning, I found myself once again reading through the pile of pages from my mother’s 1964 edition, wondering, “Is it possible to find a copy of this cookbook in better condition?” I doubted it.

How wrong I was. The Internet, that place where sentimentalists like me indulge in times of yore, had dozens of them available. According to the descriptions, some even had the cover and the spiral binding intact!

So, yes, I did order one. The total cost was $8.64 including shipping. Surely $8.64 is a small price to pay to sweep away all 377 of these untidy pages and replace them with a copy that stands upright, whose pages can be turned.

. . . except those fluttering pages were my mother’s pages. She had circled some recipes, and annotated others. Of course, I can transfer her markings. But toss the whole thing into the trashcan? Am I able to do that?

Could one of you please come pat me on the shoulder and gently say “There, there, dear, it’s better this way,” take those pages away, and give them a decent burial in your compost pile where they will do some good? Here, I am not joking.

If you find my skirt, on the other hand, please put it in the trash. And be careful how you crack your eggs.