Vintage Cookbooks and Recipes
This is a work in progress. It’s here because I have to point the short URL to something. It will eventually be filled with more about whatever it was that sent you here.
- July 27, 2022: Franklin Golden Syrup Recipes
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The chocolate oat cakes are a cross between baked oatmeal cookies and unbaked oatmeal candies.
I recently bought an old Franklin Golden Sugar Refining Company cookbook—a pamphlet, really—from about 1910. The Franklin Sugar Refining Company of Philadelphia was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, sugar refineries in the United States—and probably the world. They don’t exist today; they’re just a side-note to a company that itself doesn’t exist. Their cane syrup doesn’t exist either. Today, most syrup for baking is made from corn instead of cane.
I didn’t realize when I bought this book that golden syrup was cane syrup. I especially didn’t know that golden syrup was a special kind of cane syrup, one that’s difficult to find nowadays except in specialty stores and through mail order. But I decided to go all the way—so many of the recipes mention the unique flavor of golden syrup that I decided to test them using it. I bought Lyle’s Golden Syrup as a substitute for Franklin’s.
Golden syrup has a wonderful caramel flavor. If this is what golden syrup used to be—and from the description of some of the recipes, I’m pretty sure it is—it’s sad that it isn’t more available. It has a wonderful creamy caramel flavor great not just for baking but also for pancakes and waffles.
There are surprisingly few histories of golden syrup online. As I write this, the Wikipedia entry is barely more than a stub. The Lyle’s page and most British pages about golden syrup focus on Lyle’s, not on the syrup itself.
Franklin Golden Syrup Recipes (ePub ebook file, 9.2 MB) is a very short collection of recipes. Unlike other branded syrup recipe books I’ve seen, it focuses exclusively on baked goods and candies. There’s nothing here about using the syrup on hams or in casseroles. I’ve also made it available as a paperback flipbook.
- Dominion Electric Corporation Wafflemaker Manual
- Dominion Electric Corporation waffle irons are ubiquitous on eBay and in antique shops, but the manuals for them are not. Here’s one that came with the Model 1315A.
- The missing indexes
- Whoever decided that cookbooks don’t need indexes was never stuck hungry at one o’clock in the morning with nothing but a pepper, a tomato, and a couple of cloves of garlic.
- Padgett Sunday Supper Club
- Lost recipes from a gone century.
More cookbooks
- Franklin Golden Syrup Recipes
- Golden syrup has a wonderful caramel flavor. This ca. 1910 promotional cookbook from the Franklin Sugar Refining Company really shows off that flavor.
- A Decade of Jell-O Joys: 1963-1973
- What changes a decade brings! I have the 1963 Joy of Jell-O and the 1973 New Joys of Jell-O. What happened to Jell-O and gelatin between the sixties and the seventies?
- Padgett Sunday Supper Club
- Lost recipes from a gone century.
- The Donna Rathmell German Bread Machine Cookbook collection
- Donna Rathmell German’s little cookbooks, from the Nitty Gritty collection, are a great companion to your bread machine and a great lesson in using bread machines to make bread.
- The missing indexes
- Whoever decided that cookbooks don’t need indexes was never stuck hungry at one o’clock in the morning with nothing but a pepper, a tomato, and a couple of cloves of garlic.
- 49 more pages with the topic cookbooks, and other related pages
More food history
- Ice cream from your home freezer
- You can make great ice cream with whole eggs, egg yolks, and egg whites. You can even make it without eggs at all. All you need is syrup and cream—and a refrigerator with a freezer or a standalone home freezer.
- A Decade of Jell-O Joys: 1963-1973
- What changes a decade brings! I have the 1963 Joy of Jell-O and the 1973 New Joys of Jell-O. What happened to Jell-O and gelatin between the sixties and the seventies?
More recipes
- Padgett Sunday Supper Club
- Lost recipes from a gone century.