Ready to go

The supplies are here. The lettuce is in the fridge, and I didn’t bother photographing the salt and sugar, etc., but the items pictured here are the rest of those needed to cook the 1930 Tomato Jelly Salad recipe. Stay tuned to see how it goes.

In the meantime, here’s an old recipe for Tomato Jelly — not the same one I’m going to use, but sort of similar. I kind of like that this one has Tabasco in it. Makes it a little more like spicy V-8.

And a bonus illustration of another aspic recipe that I believe I will avoid:

Both of these are from Practical Cooking and Serving: a Complete Manual of How to Select, Prepare, and Serve Food by Janet McKenzie Hill, 1902. (These are Google Books clips, so you may not be able to see them if you’re outside the US. I apologize.)

The “Silent Hostess”

The vintage-style stove was only the beginning of my kitchen’s transformation. With the cast-iron stove, came a farmhouse sink, wooden countertops, red Marmoleum floors, and a restored faux-tile wall. How could we put a modern stainless steel — or even white — fridge into what was turning into a relatively period kitchen?

We couldn’t. Our fridge is now one of these:

(Photo by Phil Urwin)

…a late 1920s or possibly early 1930s GE Monitor Top refrigerator, the fridge that made it “safe to be hungry.” Seven cubic feet of frosty cold storage, and I do mean frosty. We have to defrost frequently, though it’s not terribly difficult.

For most people who acquired one of these Monitor Tops when they were new, it was the first electric refrigerator they ever owned. Even if they had an ice box before, they couldn’t have used it the same way a refrigerator would be used; ice boxes weren’t good at keeping consistent low temperatures. They certainly couldn’t have easily made ice cubes to cool their drinks.

General Electric came to the rescue with cookbooks/manuals like this one:

This “Silent Hostess” Treasure Book was published by GE in 1930, and includes illustrations, recipes, and instructions on how to properly use (and defrost) a Monitor Top refrigerator (though they never use that phrase). Read More

Recipes for your Hotpoint Electric Range

A few days ago I ordered something from Etsy (I’ll be posting about that something later) and the seller sent along a free gift:

…a very cool 1949 cookbook for new owners of Hotpoint ranges. It has some recipes and a few very cool vintage pictures of that mid-century type with colors that don’t really seem real.

Read More

Grandma’s cookbook

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:

Resurrecting the Gold-N-Sno cake

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.