Negative Space: food history
- Aunt Jenny’s Old-Fashioned Christmas Cookies
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Spry shortening’s 1952 Christmas cookie book was one of many by which they attempted to compete with Crisco.
- A Centennial Meal for the Sestercentennial
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How did Americans in 1876 celebrate the centennial culinarily? Some of their recipes are surprisingly modern, and some are unique flavors worthy of resurrecting.
- Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book
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Let the singing and teaching banana introduce you to the joys of baking and cooking with bananas: green, yellow, and brown!
- Club recipe archive
- Every Sunday, the Padgett Sunday Supper Club features one special recipe. These are the recipes that have been featured on past Sundays.
- A Decade of Jell-O Joys: 1963-1973
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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?
- El Molino Best: Whole grains in 1953
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El Molino Mills of Alhambra, California, published a fascinating whole grain cookbook in 1953.
- Finding vintage cookbook downloads
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There are several sites for finding vintage cookbooks, from general-purpose online archives to special collections at universities. Here are a few of my favorites.
- A golden harvest of sunflower seeds
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Golden Harvest Sunflower Seed Recipes is a fascinating bit of ephemera from the seventies and the tail end of the era of regional whole grain mills.
- A home-cooking handful from Eddie Doucette
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A glimpse at a long-lost 1954 Chicagoland television cooking show, including recipes. They were typed by a viewer, so some of them require creative interpretation.
- Ice cream from your home freezer
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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.
- January birthday veal from 1950
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The Veal Rolls from the 1950 recipe calendar of Hope Lutheran Church in Chicago.
- Looking back over 1950 in vintage cooking
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While I didn’t make my goal of trying a recipe every month in the month it was meant for, following this calendar through 2023 was an interesting experience and provided some very good food.
- Mom’s High School Cooking Notebook, 1960
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My mother kept her high school recipe notebook for as long as I can remember. It was often on the kitchen counter when the counter was dusted with flour.
- Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876
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If this is what people were eating in 1876, they were eating very well. From coconut pie to molasses gingerbread to tomato jam, these are great recipes—albeit requiring some serious interpretation.
- The New Centennial Cook Book
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Over 100 Valuable Receipts for Cakes, Pies, Puddings, etc.… borrowed verbatim from other cookbooks.
- Padgett Sunday Supper Club
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Dedicated to the preservation of vintage recipes.
- Plain & Fancy in the seventies with Hiram Walker
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Enjoy a whole new world of fun, excitement and discovery in Hiram Walker Cordials, adding a personal touch to all your memorable moments and special occasions—plain or fancy!
- Promotional cookbook archive
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I’ve managed to acquire several old promotional pamphlets and cookbooks that don’t appear to be available elsewhere on the net.
- Promotional Cookbook Archive
- I’ve managed to acquire several old promotional pamphlets and cookbooks that don’t appear to be available elsewhere on the net. I’m making them available here.
- Quiet ovens and Australian rice shortbread
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What is a quiet oven? How do we translate old recipes? Executive summary: 325°; very carefully. Plus, two Australian recipes for rice shortbread as a test of my theory.
- Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1928 Frigidaire
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The 1928 manual and cookbook, Frigidaire Recipes, assumes a lot about then-modern society that could not have been assumed a few decades earlier.
- Rumford Recipes Sliding Cookbooks
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One of the most interesting experiments in early twentieth century promotional baking pamphlets is this pair of sliding recipe cards from Rumford.
- Something fishy in the state of Wisconsin
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Fish soup, fish salad, and fish gelatin. These are very fifties recipes—for better and for worse. Very worse.
- Stoy Soy Flour: Miracle Protein for World War II
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To replace protein lost by rationing, add the concentrated protein of Stoy’s soy flour to your baked goods and other dishes!
- Tempt Them with Tastier Foods: An Eddie Doucette Recipe Collection
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When I get locked into a serious recipe collection, the tendency is to take it as far as I can. You can benefit from my obsession with this collection of wonderful recipes from the fifties and sixties “files of Eddie Doucette”, television personality and IGA chef.
- Tempt Them with Tastier Foods: Second Printing
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The second printing of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods contains several newly-discovered Eddie Doucette recipes, as well as an interview with the chef’s son, Eddie Doucette III.
- Vintage cookbook reproductions, and gold cakes compared fifty years apart
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I’m going to start producing facsimiles of some of the vintage cookbooks I’m covering here, because some of them are wonderful, and also because it’s easier to read them in a larger format.
More Information
- Feeding Michigan
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“Feeding Michigan is a digital archive of 68 cookbooks from the MSU Libraries’ collection, which were published in Michigan or produced by Michigan communities, organizations, churches, or individuals dating back to the late nineteenth century.”
- The Joy of Cooking (1943)
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“A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with an Occasional Culinary Chat.”
