Will It Freeze

Will It Freeze (1979) by Home and Freezer Digest (British European Associated Publishers), ISBN: none — Condition: Good — as sold by Crappy Old Books

Before the internet, before food blogs, before your freezer was groaning with three mystery tubs of “something brown,” there was Will It Freeze. Published in 1979 by the augustly named Home and Freezer Digest, this slim but mighty volume (a cool 80 pages) tackled the eternal domestic question: “Can I chuck this in the freezer and hope for the best?”

The book is part reference manual, part culinary dare, and part accidental time capsule of 1970s British food culture. Inside, ingredients parade in orderly lists—helpfully printed in blue ink, with occasional blue pages to make the whole thing feel cold. (Yes, they really committed to the theme. Somewhere out there, a designer was very proud.) Each entry tells you what can be frozen, what shouldn’t be, and what will emerge from the icebox transformed into something you might—or might not—recognize.

This copy is in Good condition: all 80 chilly pages intact, legible, and still radiating a kind of frosty authority. The cover may show light wear, but the spine is solid, and the blue ink is as bracing as ever. No freezer burns, no suspicious sticky spots, no pages fused together by long-forgotten shepherd’s pie. Just honest vintage wisdom on how to put everything from apples to zucchini into suspended animation.

And of course, it’s brought to you by Crappy Old Books, the proud reseller of volumes that are never truly crappy—just charmingly peculiar. Where else would you find a handbook that doubles as a cookbook, a science experiment, and a retro art project in monochrome blue?

If you’ve ever stood in the kitchen with a raised eyebrow and muttered, “But will it freeze?”—this book has your answer. Forty-odd years old, still chilling.

Keep browsing: See more Food books Other books by Home and Freezer Digest