Recipes from Old Cookbooks

Updated to include the recipe for frozen pudding from the 1908 cookbook, especially for Kate Chiconi. 🙂

Mixed in with the needlework books that I got in my awesome auction haul, were some apron patterns from the 1950s!  As I have noted, sadly I did not bid on any cookbooks or recipe boxes in this auction, since I already own a lot of vintage cookbooks.  So I thought I would dip into those to see what Minnie and Olive, the original owners of these patterns, might have been cooking as they wore their aprons.

Simplicity Pattern 4492, 1953

I will start with one of my oldest cookbooks.  It is a revised edition from 1908, but sometime around 1925, someone protected the cover by gluing newspaper ads on it, and I’m going to guess Minnie, who got married in 1917, might have had something similar. (The original 1882 edition is available here at The Historic American Cookbook Project.)

I love it because it throws in some opinions along with the (minimal) directions.

Cover of my copy of Maria Parloa’s New Cook Book.

Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book and Marketing Guide

Revised Edition of 1908
With Up-to-date Treatises on Food, Working Appliances, and Sanitation

Roast Goose

Stuff the goose with a potato dressing made in the following manner:  Six potatoes, boiled, pared and mashed fine and light; one table-spoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of pepper, one spoonful of sage, two table-spoonfuls of onion juice, two of butter.  Truss, and dredge well with salt, pepper and flour. Roast before the fire (if weighing eight pounds) one hour and a half; in the oven, one hour and a quarter.  No butter is required for the goose, it is so fat. Serve with apple sauce.  Many people boil the goose half an hour before roasting, to take away the strong flavor.  Why not have something else if you do not like the real flavor of the goose?

Eve’s Pudding

Six eggs, six apples, six ounces of bread, six ounces of currants, half a teaspoonful of salt, nutmeg.  Boil three hours, or steam four. Serve with wine sauce.

Marking Cakes in Gold

Bake round cakes for the children, and when the frosting on them is hard, dip a small brush into the yolk of an egg, and write a word or name upon the cake.  It pleases the little ones very much.

Menu for Supper for Fifty, 1908

I like how halfway through the recipe, it gives a step that should have been done an hour ago.

 

Moving closer to the era of these apron patterns, we have —

The Way to A Man’s Heart/ The Settlement Cook Book

Compiled by Mrs. Simon Kander
Tested Recipes from The Milwaukee Public School Kitchens
Girls Trades and Technical High School,
Authoritative Dieticians
and Experienced Housewives
Twenty-eighth Edition
Enlarged and Revised
September, 1947

The Settlement Cook Book, 1947

One of the recipes that caught my eye was this one:

Tamale Loaf

  • 1 cup corn meal
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 can tomato sauce
  • 1 can corn
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon Chili powder
  • 1/2 lb. chopped meat

Brown garlic or a little onion in butter; add meat and salt.  Mix with first four ingredients.  Bake an hour in pan of water in oven. When serving, pour Chili powder over all.

 My comments:

What size cans of tomato sauce and corn?  What size pan?  What temperature oven?  And what?  Just sprinkle the “Chili” powder on top after it’s all cooked?

Egg Salad (Apple or Pear-shaped)

Roll hard cooked eggs, while still warm, between palms of the hands until they are the shape of a pear or round as apples.  Place stem of an apple at one end and head of clove at the other.  Sprinkle with paprika or tint with vegetable coloring.  Serve cold, surrounded with mayonnaise.

My comments:

First of all, this is not a salad.  Secondly, I don’t want to eat anything that someone has been rolling around in their hands while it is still warm.  I think Maria Parloa would say, if you don’t want to eat something egg-shaped, don’t eat an egg!

The Tamale Loaf recipe and the fact that the trade school girls tested the recipes, had me thinking that maybe this was a cookbook that stressed economy, but other recipes in this book seem pricy enough:

  • Macaroni and Oysters
  • Shad Roe and Cucumber Salad
  • Lobster Thermidor
  • Egg and Caviar on Celery Root

This cookbook also tells you how to pasteurize milk, how to pluck and dress a chicken, and how to make port wine out of beets.  (I wonder if the public school students tested that recipe!)  Out of 623 pages, 240 of them are dessert recipes.

500 Recipes by Request, 1948

500 Recipes by Request
From Mother Anderson’s Famous Dutch Kitchens

Jeanne M. Hall and Belle Anderson Ebner
1948

This cookbook collected the recipes that were used in the kitchen of the Hotel Anderson in Wabasha, Minnesota. ( The hotel is still in business and it looks wonderful!)

When Grandmother Anderson retired, she had a house built across the street from the hotel, and she used to look into the dining room with binoculars to make sure everything was done right.

Pennsylvania Dutch Corn-meal Mush

  • 1 cup yellow corn meal
  • 1 tablespoon flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup cold water
  • 4 cups boiling water

Combine the corn meal, flour, and salt.  Add the cold water and stir to a smooth paste. Add the boiling water slowly.  Then cook for thirty minutes on top of the stove, stirring frequently, or for three to four hours in the top of a double boiler.  Pour into a bread pan to mold.  Chill. Slice as required and fry slowly in fat until brown with crisp edges.

Or place the slices in a buttered dripping pan.  Brush the top of each with cream and sprinkle with bread crumbs or crushed cornflakes.  Bake in a moderate oven until brown and crisp, for about thirty minutes.  Serves six.

One thing I love about this cookbook is that, unlike the apron models, the people illustrated look like people who like to cook and eat!

Paring
Roasting
Relaxing
Pouring

Simplicity Pattern 1756, 1956

With the acquisition of Minnie and Olive’s pattern book collection, I have been telling myself that I need to get rid of some things to make room.  Obviously these cookbooks will not be the things that go; I just get too much enjoyment paging through them!  🙂

Category : Books, Cooking, Old Books, Vintage Clothing
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