Farm Journal's Choice Chocolate Recipes

This rather modest mass-market paperback from the 1970's is one of the best chocolate cookbooks I have. When I need a quick and easy chocolate recipe, this is the one I go to first, and I strongly recommend it for the home baker. This book is not what it may appear to be. It is not a compendium of chocolate recipes that have appeared in the pages of the Farm Journal Magazine over the years, nor is it a collection of recipes that reflect the tastes and culinary prejudices of a lone, female food editor. It is the collective wisdom of thousands of home cooks and bakers. FJM collected some 10,000 chocolate recipes from its readers, then tested and selected the best ones and published them in this book. The result is similar to those Pillsbury Bake-off cookbooks. For the most part, the recipes are the easy to do, mix-and-dump variety. They use ingredients and equipment that every home kitchen has. There are no recipes that require special ingredients that can only be obtained at one import deli in NY, nor ones that need a special pan that can only be ordered from Austria or Australia. Aside from a few recipes that use whipped egg whites and some cooked sugar recipes, none of the recipes are beyond the capabilities of the average home cook. There are some odd things, mainly because it is from 30+ years ago, and some recipes go back much further than that. Unsweetened chocolate is called for more often than milk or dark chocolate. It is one of the few cookbooks that specifically call for sifting flour directly into the measuring cup. The cocoa powder called for is always natural (the recipes do not specify which type, but in that decade, only the natural variety was available; Dutch processed type was rare). The chapter on cakes and the one on sauces I found to be better than the rest. Not all of the recipes are good; some sounded terrible. All the recipes (mostly cakes) I tried worked without trouble. There is no recipe listing in either the table of contents or chapter heads; to find a recipe, you either have to squint at the index or flip through entire chapters. There are no pictures. It has chapters on chocolate info, cakes, cookies, brownies, pies, desserts and sauces, fudge, and candy. I did not really count, but there are probably 200 or so recipes.