Vintage Recipes

A collection from long ago.

This box of recipes is a window to the past, some of them are almost 100 years old, relics of our culinary consciousness. Most of this box's dinners, snacks, and drinks have been forgotten over time.

This box belonged to one of my grandmothers. It’s a collection of handwritten recipes, as well as cooking ideas that were clipped from newspapers, and magazines through the years.

If they were alive today, both of my grandmothers would be centenarians, one born in 1910 and the other around 1917-1918 depending on who you ask. Record keeping back then wasn’t what it is today. Both of them were great cooks, nothing fancy, just good food.

This box has survived war and economic depression, births, and deaths. Generations have enjoyed the recipes in this box, some are still made today, and others are reflections of the culinary trends of the time and are no longer appreciated.

I chose recipes that looked like they had been well used. This one seems like it has been thoroughly enjoyed throughout the years, you can see where ingredients were spilled on the card or my grandmother picked it up to make sure her measurements were correct.

Before the invention of the internet, instant recipes, and cooking tutorials, this was as on-demand as you could get. No culinary category was spared in this collection.

There was no shortage of hard liquor back in the day as we see from this recipe for “Tea Punch” serving 60. It calls for 2 bottles of bourbon, just a cup of strong tea, and 2 bottles of ginger ale. This refreshing beverage was probably made for a 1950s backyard BBQ where the liquor flowed like wine and the good times never ended.

If this box could talk what kind of stories would it tell? How many times was it moved from home to home, or did it sit on a counter, or in a cupboard for years as it sits now? For being as old as it is, the recipes inside remain unaffected by the passing of time.

The tape holding together this recipe for Old-Fashion Fish Chowder is still intact. The person who wrote this recipe assumes that the cook is not only buying a whole head-on fish but is also proficient in filleting the fish, and making stock. This one calls for ingredients from long ago like salt pork, haddock, and is to be eaten with “common crackers”.

My mom used to make something like this Spanish rice recipe when I was very young. It was something similar to this, rice cooked in a zesty tomato and pepper sauce. It was simple, fairly cheap, filling, and it didn’t taste too bad either. This version says to add garlic if desired, in my version, the garlic is not optional, it’s mandatory.

I was closest to my paternal grandmother, I can remember being very young when she taught me to make scrambled eggs, cooked in bacon fat, and hashbrowns, also cooked in bacon fat. She used her hands to turn over whatever was cooking in the pan, and her finger to check the temperature of soups and stocks.

Her house was old and she had an old kitchen with what would now be considered vintage kitchen appliances. I would go through the drawers in her kitchen and wonder what some of the tools were, I would only find out later after she was gone.

Tom and Jerry is a traditional Christmas-time cocktail similar to eggnog with the addition of spiced rum or brandy. It was a very popular drink back in the day, they even had Tom and Jerry punch bowls and cocktail mug sets that you can now buy as vintage. As I said, there was no shortage of alcoholic beverages back in the day when punishing your liver was the thing to do.