One of my favorite recipes for the holiday season is Hot Water Ginger Bread, which I have dubbed: ‘no ingredients left in the house ginger bread.’ I found it in a reprint of Fanny Farmer, and I have now amassed a large collection of cooking pamphlets from the turn of the last century through the depression and war years. The recipes that offer innovative ways to compensate or just plane ignore the lack of an ingredient are especially interesting to me.
So it was that I was looking through some of my cooking pamphlet collection for a cake recipe that either was or could easily be made vegan with very little change. I found Depression Cake. The only non-vegan ingredient included in the original recipe was butter and I figured I could easily substitute vegetable shortening. The batter was not thin as the recipe warned so I added ½ cup of applesauce. The denser cake took one full hour in the oven when divided into two loaf pans.
The result was decidedly good, though not very sweet. It would be easy to make this into a mock fruit cake by increasing the sugar, soaking the fruits in rum, and then drizzling the cake afterward. I will have to try this next.
I picked up the White Lily Flour Cook Book by J. Allen Smith & Co. of Knoxville, Tennessee (1932) while at a vintage market recently. Unusually, it included a recipe that used no flour at all! The amounts of sugar to egg white make the mix almost nougat-y and yet they are also like a firm dacquoise, or nutty meringue.
The instructions said drop by teaspoon, but I think they could stand a little light shaping to be less dollops-of-concrete-like after baking. The original recipe also said to bake on an ‘oiled baking sheet,’ but I found this was not necessary if using a silicone baking mat.
I might be running out of room in the modest space I have allotted myself for my vintage recipe pamphlets. I find it fascinating how the culmination of industrialization, new kitchen appliances, changing class structure, war, depression, and post war boom meant that EVERYONE – including electric companies, food suppliers, government agencies, and more – wanted to teach us how to cook at the end of the 19th century through and past the 1960s. Well, online collections of recipe pamphlets don’t take up space. Here are some:
I have been both searching for, and working on, the perfect honey cake recipe for some time now. I love honey, especially the flavor varietals produced by honey from certain plants and locations. But I don’t love how heavy honey cakes can be, thus the search. So far, I have come up with a pretty good recipe for small cakes:
Originally had a 1/2 c of vegetable oil in with a 1/2 c of apple sauce, but the last time I made them I used a whole cup of apple sauce and forgot the oil – they came out wonderful. And by wonderful I mean, they were light and springy, admittedly a little sticky to the touch on the outside, but not heavy like many honey cakes can be.
I also gave this recipe a try recently:
Spiced Honey Cake from 1938 Season to Taste – Spices.. and How to Use Them
I also gave the Spiced Honey Cake recipe from a 1938 “Season to Taste” baking pamphlet. It too was not overly heavy, but it didn’t taste as strongly of honey. The lack of heaviness and honey flavor were both probably due to only 1/2 cup of honey.
I have an unfinished project tracking fruitcake recipes through newspaper clippings that calls to me. To get me in the mood to revisit it, and to get you in the mood for the holidays, here are some choice clippings of the theft, poison, and murder with which fruitcake has been associated.
Every evening, Wilmington daily commercial. (Wilmington, Del.), 09 Jan. 1922. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. The Washington times. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]), 08 Jan. 1911. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]), 31 Dec. 1929. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.), 22 Feb. 1959. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]), 09 May 1892. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
Hello! I hope y’all’s Halloween was as lovely as mine! As the first of the feasting holidays (in my house), I busied myself making seasonally appropriate meals with in-season foods and baking. One of the bakes I have been slowly perfecting for myself is barmbrack. The recipe I have is rather old and super spare so I went online to find something a little easier to get a good product out of.
What I found was a lot of recipes for yeast-less ‘barmbrack.’ That sounded great and much easier, but then I found this post by the Irish American Mom pointing out what is and is not actually barmbrack. I love her soap-box (delivered in a completely enjoyable way) and the history she provides on this bake, so I wanted to make sure and share in case anyone else is becoming as obsessed with variations on fruitbread/fruitcake as I am.
I’ve become a little more regionally inclined in my recent vintage recipe book purchases and I was extremely happy to find that some of these books included recipes for materials that usually have to be grown or obtained directly from someone who grows them.
Each of the books above yielded at least one recipe that I consider more for the gardener trying to figure out what to do with their new harvest than for a cook who normally gets materials from the store.
Papaya Butter from Florida’s Favorite Foods by the Florida Department of Agriculture
Calamondin Conserve from The Gasparilla Cookbook by the Junior League of Tampa
Yaupon Tea from American Indian Cooking & Herb Lore by J. Ed. Sharpe and Thomas B. Underwood
Monstera Deliciosa from Louise’s Florida Cook Book by Louise Lamme
Surinam Cherry Jelly from Florida’s Favorite Foods by the Florida Department of Agriculture
While my calamondin tree bit the dust (I suspect greening) and my papaya is far from producing fruit, I do have a handful of established surinam cherry bushes. I am super familiar with the monstera deliciosa as a garden plant but I do not have one of those either, and I would love a yaupon holly.
However, I do have a sea grape, that I understand produces human edible fruits, and a volunteer loquat tree. I have also been following Eat the Weeds and Other Things Too, trying to figure out an offensive against some of my most pernicious garden adversaries. I will have to experiment some and see how these things can be worked into daily food.
I know I am not the first person to ponder the frequent incidence of the word ‘cooky’ in old cooking pamphlets and recipe books, but no one has yet explored this ‘alternate spelling’ on the internets to my edification. And ‘alternate spelling’ is what is given as a reason for the existence of ‘cooky’ in dictionaries. I thought maybe cooky’s etymological history would explain it, but no. The Online Etymology Dictionary says simply that ‘cookie’ is possibly derived from a 1730 Scottish term meaning “plain bun,” but it’s definition in 1808 as a “small, flat, sweet cake” is more similar to the Dutch koekje “little cake,” a diminutive of koek “cake.”
The etymological histories didn’t even get into how British English calls the same types of confection ‘biscuits.’ Michele Debczak at Mental Floss (2012) points out that the two ‘sweet baked goods’ actually refer to two different types of confection, but does not explore why, even if they have been categorically described as either slower cooking soft thick dough (cookie) or a thin crisp baking stiff dough (biscuit), the terms are more often used based on country and not on type of bake.
I was foolishly hoping to find some online search or service that could comb through historical resources for word popularity similar to how Google Trends combs through the internet search history, but alas. The closest I got was the Google books ngram viewer, which can report on the frequency of words within the Google Books catalog (Wikipedia).
The graph that resulted confirmed what I was seeing in my recipe books and cooking pamphlets, that ‘cooky’ was used most during the mid 20th century, but it didn’t feel like the whole story. After all, Google Books doesn’t really have a lot of recipe books, and recipes were also popularly shared in newspapers.
Chronicling America at the Library of Congress returned massive results when searching for ‘cooky’ that I thought were bogus at first. It seemed to me that the results interchangeably included both ‘cookie’ and ‘cooky.’ This can happen sometimes when search engines are smart enough to correct for misspellings but also not smart enough to search misspellings when quotes are included.
But then I realized that the results were not because of spelling corrections! Both spellings were used in most of the results! From the earliest result I could find in my (definitely not exhaustive) search: 1826, to a mid-century result in 1948, ‘cooky’ was being used as the singular, while ‘cookies’ was the plural.
Phenix gazette. [volume] (Alexandria [D.C.]), 10 Jan. 1826. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.), 26 Sept. 1948. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
The 1826 mention that I found, above, also calls the collected confections ‘cakes,’ bringing to mind the Dutch koekje. The earliest I could find ‘cookie’ used as the singular was in an 1895 poem about a ‘Cookie Man.’
The next time I found ‘cookie’ in the singular sense was also a name. I am not quite sure when ‘cookie’ became an alternate for ‘cooky’ but it seems safe to say that instead of simply an alternate spelling, ‘cooky’ is actually the old use singular of ‘cookies.’
My friends and I started up a book club to get us reading, and among other titles, we are reading books from Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series. Hoffman’s books are full of mentions of curative foods and drinks, yet very few full recipes are included. Fan’s of the series have already jumped in to fill this omission and have created recipes in an attempt to approximate those mentioned in fiction. One of the best versions of Aunt Isabelle’s Chocolate Tipsy Cake, as is mentioned in the Rules of Magic is the one on Potpourri with Rosemarie. True to form, I changed the recipe a little when I made it, and I flubbed the icing, but it is one delicious cake!
INGREDIENTS:
1 c unsweetened cocoa powder + additional for dusting pan
1 c fresh coffee
1/2 c dark rum
1 c salted butter
1.5 c brown sugar
2 c flour
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
2 large eggs
1/2 c buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
pinch clove
1/2 bar dark chocolate (chopped)
Preheat oven to 325 while you grease and dust with cocoa powder a large bunt pan. Add to a saucepan on medium-low heat: coffee, rum, butter, cocoa powder, chopped chocolate bar, and sugar until all is melted and combined, then cool. Once the coffee and chocolate mixture is cool add buttermilk, eggs and vanilla. Sift in flour mixed with soda, cinnamon, and clove a little at a time until well combined. Pour into pan and bake 40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.
The rum icing, in the recipe on Potpourri with Rosemarie was made with chocolate chips, butter, half and half and dark rum. I had only the darkest chocolate on hand so I wanted to sweeten it. While I should have just added white sugar, I was lazy and dropped in simple syrup, which is why my glaze in the picture looks all lumpy and weird. It tasted lovely though.
I haven’t shared any recipe posts for a while, and this one is as simple as they come. I had a request for a lemon cake and after combing through the ideas and scraps that I have gathered I landed on a recipe that seemed right. As I always do, I tweaked it a little and have recorded it here for you in case you, like me, collect recipe ideas and scraps.
INGREDIENTS:
3/4 c salted butter
1 c sugar
3 large eggs
3 large lemons (unwaxed and zested)
2 c flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 c Greek yogurt
Heat oven to 340 F and grease and line the bottom of a loose bottomed 8 in cake pan. Beat butter and sugar together until pale in color then add eggs one at a time. Stir in lemon zest, baking powder, and then yogurt. Spoon mixture into tin and smooth. Bake for 50 minutes or until golden and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Cracking on top is a-ok. For this I just did a simple lemon sugar glaze. It is wonderfully fresh. Dense like a pound cake and moist.
Until ten years ago, Abby Fisher was known as the first African American woman to publish a cookbook in the United States. The details now known about her life give only the faintest sketch of a woman who worked her way from enslaved cook on the east coast to business owner and author on the west. Much of what we do know was unearthed by Karen Hess, southern cooking historian, who studied Abby Fisher and encouraged the reprinting of her book after a rare copy of Fisher’s book came up for auction (“What Mrs. Fisher Knows About…,” 2021). Because I am a lover of old cookbooks and have been on a hunt for all the fruitcake recipes, and of course Mrs. Fisher had one, I was elated to find Mrs. Fisher’s book online courtesy Michigan State University: https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m5tt11. I have selected the recipes that look especially interesting to me in order share them here, but do go and check out the whole book!
Abby Fisher was born Abby Clifton to Andrew James, a white farmer of French decent, and Abbie Clifton, an African American, in South Carolina (“Abby Fisher,” 2021). During her research Hess could not find direct evidence that Abby Fisher was born into enslavement, but many have made that assumption based on Fisher’s date and location of birth (Rae, n.d.). An ad for her cookbook in the The San Francisco call from 1897 seems to support this assumption by indicating Abby Fisher was “raised in the family of the late Newton St. John of Mobile, Alabama (“An Excellent Cookery-Book,” 1897). Newton St. John was a prominent merchant and banker in Mobile prior to and after the Civil War. So, it must have been in the St. John kitchen where Abby Fisher first became a cook. Before the beginning of the Civil War, in the 1850s, Fisher met and married Alexander C. Fisher in Mobile (Rae, n.d.). After the Civil War, in 1877, the couple moved to San Francisco (“The African American Women of the Wild West,” n.d.). The 1880 census shows them on Second Street with four of their eleven eventual children. They are both listed as mixed race; Abby was working as a cook while her husband was a pickle and preserves manufacturer (“Abby Fisher,” 2021; “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About…,” 2021).
Taking an inherited recipe binder and making an easy to manage book
My Grandmother kept her recipes in a recipe binder fitted out with envelopes for the various categories. She had never used the blank pages for each section, instead relying on the envelopes to hold all her scraps of paper. She had recipes written on old envelopes, on drug advertisement notepads, clipped out of newspapers and magazines, and sent to her in letters by friends. I was lucky enough to get a hold of this binder and had the fabulous idea to scan them all and make a kind of recipe zine for easy navigability. I’m not sure why I thought that a bulging binder would fit easily into a zine sized book. Even squishing as many recipes as I could onto each half sheet page, I ended up with 333 pages.
This isn’t the first time I played around with sewing sections of papers together to make a fat book, but it is the first where the pages were already printed up. I shoot from the hip when it comes to book making. I’ve read some articles, handled a lot of books, but I haven’t studied technique, so I made a lot of mistakes. But, the final product is exactly what I wanted: an easy to flip through, organized, collection of my Grandmother’s recipe clipping collection.
Scanning the recipes also gave the the opportunity to tweak the coloration on some of the oldest handwritten notes so they were just the tiniest bit easier to read. I already know the recipes I want to try out first based on the splatters, finger prints, and wear alone. And, though I included the recipes in this book, I will be avoiding all the molded jello salads. I just can’t.
This past year has felt frustratingly un-productive, but I did finish a thing. Though I have been dragging my feet on taking pictures and getting it listed in my Etsy shop, I am happy to say that I completed the ‘Un-Authorized Recipes of Doomed Moviethon’ zine!
So, if you ever wanted to follow along with Richard Schmidt’s excellent book, eating and drinking what he did (because I fed him), then here are the recipes you need to recreate those insane moments. I also slipped in some movie inspired comic strips.
First off, this is a learning journey where I ramble about a thing I tried. If anything, maybe it will help ya’ll get ideas or learn from my mistakes, but it is so not a tutorial to replicate.
I received three weak looking stalks of grass from a co-worker one spring. I planted them and by the next spring had a sizeable spray of pleasant smelling and surprisingly fierce lemongrass. This stuff will cut you up, seriously. So, I pulled it up and divided the clump into three, harvesting a handful of it without really knowing what I was going to do.
After pondering for a while, I decided to make a tea that I could add to moisturizers, astringents, and facial refreshers that I was making.
A.) not ready yet B.) this is fragrant and ready C.) this is too far and smells like old tea
Of course I looked online for ideas and no, I wasn’t going to make a hydrosol or attempt to extract the essential oil, because I didn’t have the equipment or the patience for all that. A tea would be good enough. It wouldn’t necessarily have the shelf life of other permutations but I would deal with that.
And all of this would’ve been fine if I didn’t start by over steeping the tea. I don’t think it really ruined it for what I wanted, but it got way past the point where it smelled lovely like lemongrass cosmetics. The first thing I did, of course was clean the stalks off. Then I bruised them and chopped them up and put them in a big ole pot of water to simmer slowly. I can’t even tell you how long but I did remember to take pictures of the process. Pic B would’ve been perfect. Pic C was overcooked, really, but was like tea that you’d get from a teabag when making the concentrate for iced tea, complete with the oils that sort of float on top before you dilute it with an equal amount of water.
So, in the end I did use it, but not all of it, to make a nice facial wash and it was sort of pleasant. Lemongrass is an anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, and fungicidal herb, so it is really good at warding off infections, acne, rashes, etc. Lemongrass tea can also be drunk, of course, but I made it a bit too strong and that lovely aroma just sort of ends up tasting like soap in large quantities.
The three bunches of lemongrass that I replanted after dividing are now as big as the original clump and it’s only been a season. I’m going to have to get better at using it for all sorts of things. And, I’m going to need to get some gauntlet gloves probably. The cuts from lemongrass aren’t quite as bad as when a pineapple gets ya, but they are much harder to avoid.
While making my yearly Rock ‘n Rye infusion, I got the idea that a similar process would work to make J&B more enjoyable in my house (we find it very difficult). I cut out the horehound, but kept most everything else the same as I would for Rock ‘n Rye. The effect is much more cinnamon forward, and definitely improves the J&B flavor. I gave rough measurements, but you can put in as many or as few infusing agents as you like.
Ingredients:
J&B (one 750 ml bottle)
1 string Rock candy or about a 1/4 cup loose rock candy
1/2 to 1 full orange peel (dried)
2-3 dried apricots, sliced
3-4 dried cherries
3-4 dried mandarin slices
1 whole clove
1 cinnamon stick
Instructions:
In an empty wide mouth glass container (could be anything, jar, pitcher, etc with a lid) add J&B, dried fruit, dried peel, and cinnamon stick
Allow mixture to infuse in a cool dry place for 3 or 4 days
Add rock candy and clove
Allow mixture to infuse one or two more days based on taste
