The other day we were at my mom’s house, and mentioned that we were thinking of doing a blog about old recipes. I said “I wish I had more of my grandma’s recipes.” My mom said “Oh? You mean like the ones in her cookbook?” and went to the cupboard and pulled out a little blue book stuffed crazily with newspaper and magazine clippings.

I had no idea this book existed.

I talked her into letting me borrow it to scan, and found a mother lode of old recipes. The book was given from my grandfather to my grandmother in February 1934, when she was still 16 years old. (They married later that year, when she was 17.) It has a bunch of handwritten recipes in with the printed ones, and then there was the collection of clippings (not photographed here; I took them out of the book and stored them separately because their deterioration was damaging the book). It looks as if, for most of her married life, she kept recipes in this book one way or another.

We will be using this as a recipe source, but I thought you might enjoy a peek inside as well:

Carnation Chocolate Malted Milk, 1950s,
photo by Roadsidepictures.

In the right menu of this page, you can see a list of some of the recipe ideas Kristen and I have been thinking about trying. On the top of the list is one that sounds wonderful: Malted Milk Cake. I am a huge fan of malt flavor, particularly chocolate malted milk, and I have a recipe all lined up for it.

But there’s a catch. I can’t find the chocolate malted milk anywhere in Seattle so far. I used to buy it occasionally at various local grocery stores, but now they only seem to carry the plain malt. Safeway and Albertson’s don’t even go that far. A search for “malted milk” on the Albertson’s website only brings up these.

The one grocery store that does have the product is Amazon Fresh. But they do not deliver to us. No one I know seems to use Amazon Fresh.

So alternatives must be found.

These are the alternatives I know of:

• Ovaltine chocolate malt drink powder: I think this is probably too sweet and has too many extra ingredients, though maybe it would work
• Milo chocolate malt drink powder: this should be available at Uwajimaya, I think, and might be similar, though I’ve never tried it
• Making a homemade version from the plain Carnation Malted Milk

Currently I’m leaning toward the latter. I think that malted milk, cocoa, and sugar might do the trick. Another malted milk cake recipe online seems to do it that way.

Edited to add:

I’ve just done a little experimenting. The following recipe gives me a relatively decent chocolate malted milk mixture, not overly sweet. A bit more sugar could be added, I suppose, but I get the idea that the stuff was perhaps less sweet back in the day anyway:

2 parts Carnation Malted Milk (plain)
1 part unsweetened cocoa
1 1/2 parts sugar

Recently I found a reference to Betty Crocker’s Gold-N-Sno cake, in the book Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food. It sounded scrumptious. The book didn’t include a recipe, so I had to find one. It did include a list of ingredients, which made it easier.

Since we hadn’t started Resurrected Recipes yet when I tried that recipe, the full story of the search and the recipe I ended up using can be found at my personal blog, Slumberland. Future projects will be posted here on Resurrected Recipes instead.

The resulting cake was fabulous, though we were a little short on frosting, so the cake looked weird. I would gladly make this cake again.

Hey Folks!  This is actually my very first blogging experience and I can’t think of anything more fun than FOOD, glorious food!  I’ve been cooking for as long as I can remember–from licking the beaters to cooking my very first Thanksgiving meal all by myself–and have long held a fascination for foods from the past that no longer appear in our day-to-day cooking habits.  As a medieval history enthusiast, redacting recipes from the 13-1500′s is a very entertaining hobby as well.  Occasionally, Wendi or I may wander into that territory to include it in our blog. Thanks for reading and check back often to see what we are up to.

Currently, I am thinking a bit about the food we ate when I was a little kid in the 70′s.  I am excited to be poring over my mom’s and grandmother’s old cookbooks in the search for old recipes that might be made new again.

Cheers!

Hi all! Welcome to Resurrected Recipes. Kristen and I have been talking for a while about creating a blog to post experiments with old recipes. I’m a long time blogger, with blogs at slumberland.org and beaconhill.seattle.wa.us. I’m also a historian with an interest in pop culture, so old cookbooks and recipes have always fascinated me. I’ve noticed that just in my own lifetime, foods that were common have become rare and vice versa. In some cases, the foods have become rarer for good reason, but lots of old recipes are wonderful. We’ll be posting our experiments with old recipes here, along with interesting links, scans of old ads and cookbooks, and other fun stuff.

Warning: my personal favorite category is baking, so it could be dangerous. I do love the sweet stuff.