A great cookbook and a great piece of refrigerator history.

Frigidaire Recipes was the first entry in my Refrigerator Revolution: Revisited series. It came out before I started making reprints available. So I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to revisit it at the same time that I publish the Frigidaire Recipes reprint. Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB) is a wonderful book. It was, in fact, the inspiration for starting this series. While I’d already had the other books in the series, the 1928 Frigidaire Recipes was such an incredible peephole into the early years of the home refrigerator/freezer that I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant about how home refrigerators changed home cooking.

Since writing my original refrigeration post, I’ve tried several more recipes from Frigidaire Recipes, and they continue to be great dishes. Because my tastes are what they are, most of the new recipes are sweet ones, and many of those are (somewhat) appropriate for breakfast. The Chocolate Egg Nog has become a go-to breakfast beverage, in both its original form and with Coffee Sauce instead of the Chocolate Syrup the original calls for.

Coffee eggnog is amazing.

Coffee Egg Nog

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Miss Verna L. Miller
Frigidaire Recipes (paperback, Lulu storefront)
Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB)

Ingredients

• Coffee syrup
  • ¾ cup strong hot coffee
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 tbsp corn syrup
• Eggnog (per serving)
  • 1 egg
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 tbsp brandy

Steps

1. Coffee syrup
   • Mix coffee, sugar, and corn syrup together.
   • Bring to boil and cook for ten minutes.
   • Chill in refrigerator and use as needed.
2. Eggnog
   • Chill all ingredients.
   • Beat egg with salt.
   • Add milk and brandy, with coffee syrup to taste.
   • Beat thoroughly.
   • Serve immediately.

The Chocolate Syrup recipe that accompanies the egg nog in the book makes about the amount needed for one or two Chocolate Egg Nogs. Because the syrup is useful far beyond just for egg nog, I quadruple the recipe. This requires about ten minutes of boiling to get to syrup.

The chocolate syrup on the left and the coffee sauce on the right, meant to be stored indefinitely in your new Frigidaire refrigerator.

Chocolate eggnog with brandy is a great way to start or end the day.

I used a hand mixer, similar to what was available at the time. Worked great!

Coffee syrup might not have been great on coffee ice cream, but it was great on lemon sherbet.

When vintage recipes say to “cook” by boiling for a specific amount of time, I start timing the “cooking” only after the liquid comes to a simmer. For a double boiler, this means I start timing when the water in the lower portion comes to a simmer. I don’t know that this is correct but it seems to work.

The frozen fruit salad looks a lot better than it reads.

Like most other books of its era, Frigidaire Recipes does not use temperatures for making sugar dishes. Candy thermometers must have been relatively rare even among refrigerator owners. For reference, the Coffee Sauce reached 222° after following the instructions in the recipe to cook for ten minutes.

Interestingly from a terminology standpoint, the Chocolate Syrup was thinner than I’d normally call a syrup, and the Coffee Sauce was thicker, more, in fact, like a syrup. Functionally, this was correct: the Chocolate Syrup was meant for mixing into a beverage. Being thinner made it easier to stir into the egg and milk. The Coffee Sauce was meant for ice cream, which always needs a thicker topping.

I use them interchangeably. The (coffee) sauce is great as a beverage mix, and the (chocolate) syrup is great on ice cream and cereal.

I mentioned in the original post that Frigidaire Recipes attaches a note on the order of “very good for invalids” to any recipe that calls for alcohol. The Chocolate Egg Nog is one of these, and having made this recipe, that is a fig leaf of enormous proportions. This is a great beverage for any party, and that’s almost certainly what it was designed for, not for sickbeds. That said, I have a lot of respect for Frigidaire after reading the 1927 General Electric Recipes and Menus of which more later. General Electric punted completely on the use of alcohol in recipes during prohibition by… not having any recipes that call for alcohol except for flavoring extracts.

The Coffee Sauce is not just phenomenal on ice cream. It’s also great on old-school puddings, such as the cornmeal pudding from Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery. I really want to try it on waffles and pancakes. One place it didn’t do well, oddly, was the Mocha Ice Cream. Or perhaps not oddly: the coffee flavor of the ice cream doesn’t provide any contrast to the coffee flavor of the syrup. It ends up making one or the other taste too weak.

Mocha Ice Cream with Walnuts

Servings: 6
Preparation Time: 2 hours
Miss Verna L. Miller
Frigidaire Recipes (paperback, Lulu storefront)
Frigidaire Recipes (PDF File, 15.5 MB)

Ingredients

• 1 cup milk
• 2 tbsp finely-ground coffee
• 2 egg yolks, well-beaten
• 1 tbsp flour or browned flour
• 2 egg whites
• 1 cup whipping cream
• pinch of salt
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ cup chopped walnuts or hazelnuts (optional)

Steps

1. Cook a half cup of milk with the coffee in double boiler for five minutes.
2. Strain through cheese cloth and cool to room temperature.
3. Mix flour, sugar and remaining half cup milk.
4. Cook in double boiler for fifteen minutes.
5. Add egg yolks slowly, beating, and cook an additional five minutes, whisking continuously.
6. Cool to room temperature.
7. Beat egg whites with salt until stiff.
8. Combine coffee mixture and custard, then fold in the egg whites.
9. Put in refrigerator to cool.
10. Whip cream, fold into custard, and pour into a cold dish.
11. Freeze overnight.
12. If using nuts, fold into ice cream after it starts to solidify, an hour or two into freezing.

The Mocha Ice Cream doesn’t say to stir during freezing, because it doesn’t need stirring unless you’re adding nuts. Add the nuts after the ice cream has started to harden, about an hour or two into freezing. The recipe calls for English walnuts, but in my opinion black walnuts are a much better flavor match.

Another interesting ice cream is the Cherry Ice Cream; it’s not in the ice cream chapter but in the “Preserved Fruits” chapter. It contains only cherry preserves, cream, and maraschino cherries.

Heat cherry preserves and run through puree. Cool, add cream slowly, then beat with rotary egg beater and pour into tray. When frozen to mushy consistency, remove from tray into ice cold bowl and beat with rotary egg beater. Add ⅓ cup chopped maraschino cherries. Return again to tray and allow to finish freezing without further agitation.

This is never going to make it into my Ice Cream Cookery but it is a very workable ice cream in a pinch. Replace the cherry preserves with any preserves, pie filling, or jam/jelly and you can have some ice cream going with practically no work at all. Replace the maraschinos with the same for a swirl ice cream or just leave the maraschinos out, and you’re down to a two-ingredient ice cream. You can see exactly this in the immediately subsequent recipe for Strawberry Ice Cream that does this with strawberry preserves.

I still haven’t tried the frozen fruit salads. Freezing such salads seems likely to result in odd textures at the very least. But I have made the Fruit Salad Dressing #1. For reference, there were nearly four tablespoons of juice in the lemon I used. This dressing is very much a dessert dressing. It would make a great covering for fresh fruit in a pastry or meringue shell.

The fruit salad dressing is very much a dessert dressing.

The cheese sauce was great as part of a cheese omelet.

The cheese sauce was also great as the filling for celery appetizers.

Chocolate syrup over coffee-walnut ice cream is, unsurprisingly, very good.

Ice cream from cherry pie filling I’d never gotten around to using in a pie and was about to expire.

The cheese sauce, meant for re-heated cornmeal mush, is a very versatile mix. The recipe doesn’t specify what kind of cheese to use—very appropriate for a recipe in the leftovers section—so I used some Parmesan cheese that had been sitting in the freezer for a long time. I used this cheese sauce in French omelets and as a celery filling for an appetizer.

It would also be good on toast or biscuits, I expect. In fact, I expect it would be great on anything that you put melty cheese on. A tomato-cheese sandwich would be amazing using this instead of cheddar or American cheese.

Like all of my reprints, the printed version of Frigidaire Recipes comes from the same scan that I provide as a download. Like those, it does have some differences from the original:

1. The reprint’s interior is black and white, not color.
2. The reprint is 5.5 by 8.5 inches, not the 5.25 by 8.0625 inches of the original. This makes it slightly more readable, but the main reason is because it’s the closest in ratio of the formats that Lulu can print.
3. The notes in the back have a short URL on the bottom that links back to this page.

The reprint is otherwise an exact copy of the original. If you enjoy these recipes, and you don’t want to spring for originals (or deal with protecting them from further degradation) I recommend these reprints. I’ve been using my own reprint copies, including this one, in favor of punishing the original. I will say, though, that Frigidaire put their original together very well. It’s a sturdy sewn binding with good paper and is still in great shape nearly a hundred years later.

Frigidaire Recipes remains a lovely book and a wonderful resource for cold cooking in your automatic refrigerator. It is filled with good and easy dishes tinged with old-school elegance. I’m glad to share it with you. Both of the sauces and the ice cream featured on this page are also in my new Ice Cream Cookery, which contains many ice cream recipes from the dawn of home refrigeration as well as more modern no-churn ice creams.