The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking sets its sights deliberately low...

The cover of Jacqueline Hériteau's The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking definitely looks like it's from the 1970s-- which it is. (1976 to be exact.)

I think everything in the 1970s was brown with a few orange accents. 

The recipes are intended primarily to help '70s homemakers deal with rising food costs by using less expensive cuts of meat that take longer to cook and using up leftovers, especially while everybody is out trying to earn money to buy the groceries. (Again, these old books are feeling eerily relevant...) And the book really does seem committed to the bit, offering recipes to turn leftover odds and ends into soup...

(I love the built-in flexibility of recipes like this, inviting cooks to swap in or out whatever is on hand! Have to admit I'm skeptical about how well leftover spaghetti or macaroni would fare after 10-12 hours in the slow cooker, though.)

...or, alternatively, a different kind of soup.

Again, it's got an admirable "use it all up" mentality, but the phrase "hot-dog leavings" does not exactly excite the appetite (though it is amusing to imagine a tiny person with a pooper scooper following an animated hot dog).

The book is also somewhat charming in that it does not overpromise what its recipes can accomplish.

Gotta admire the admission that Chicken Stuffed with Celery "is not better than roast chicken-- just easier on busy days."

And while Bean-Pot stew is "An authentic, old Maine recipe" and economical, it's "A bit bland, perhaps."

But at the same time, perhaps our modern sensibilities are rather hard on bland dishes. They can have their place, as the book also points out with Church-Supper Meat Loaf with Tomato Sauce.

Modern readers might be tempted (as I was) to make fun of the notion that something "bland" is appealing, but then I thought about the thing I hated most about church potluck suppers when I was a kid: getting a plateful of things that looked good and then realizing that they were NOT what I assumed they were. And then getting yelled at for wasting food. And then spending the rest of the day worrying that the little bit I did eat was secretly poisoned and I was going to die. (Now that I'm a grownup, I realize that I just don't like caraway seeds or anise, but they won't kill me if they unexpectedly make an appearance in something I'm eating.) So here, the blandness probably does make it less likely this will get thrown away at the potluck (though it may also cut down on the likelihood that anyone will ask for the recipe, either). Besides, there's also a recommendation to season it up with oregano, rosemary, basil, parsley, and soy sauce, though I think modern readers would still be justified in laughing at the notion that these seasonings will make the meat loaf "spicy."

This is a very practical cookbook for the most part, and far from the hyperbole a lot of people expect in food media today. I can't help but be a little charmed, even if I have no plans to repurpose hot-dog leavings or cook leftover pasta into oblivion.