Tells you all the essentials of how to cook meat and veges and make basic sauces and all that, plus has a whole lot of relatively simple recipes that use common ingredients.
I remember my ANZAC biscuits recipe in particular has less butter and more sugar, like you say, and is clearly inferior. A bit sad. However we also have Edmonds: Best of Baking, which is newer than my Edmonds Cookbook, and prescribes more like the old recipe with more butter.
That was some good eggnog
I'm not sure what 1950s eggnog looked like but I'm guessing it was more like the German style Eierlikör (i.e. made mostly with liquor and eggs) than the modern eggnog (i.e. mostly milk and cream).
It’s almost like the Michelin: intended to sell more of a product (tires/flour), but ended up iconic in its own right.
This doesn't mean that you won't find recipes from a foreigen cuisine in them. Most of them are however adapted to the cuisine the book is from.
Sometimes it's a recipe that is basically unknown in it's country of supposed origin (Spaghetti with meatballs).
But often they are only adapted to the different preference in taste, or the different things you will get at the grocery store.