Hashed Leftovers

     Many times after the holidays we're left with mounds of leftovers from an overindulgent feast of Brobdingnagian proportions and we're completely flummoxed as to what to do with them.  I didn't even cook this much for Christmas but I did have a rather large turkey and now I'm left to decide what to do with the leftovers.  Part of it is getting mixed up into turkey salad using the Chicken Salad Recipe but with the rest I'm left to get creative.

Oven Roasted Pork Shoulder

     Roasted pork has been around ever since we started killing wild boars in the forest in the dim beginnings of humanity so in that sense this is a "vintage" recipe but for our purposes here this recipe is all my own.  It is based on a Filipino recipe called Lechon sa Hurno which translates into "roasted in the oven".  It's a home based version of the popular party centerpiece Lechon Baboy or roasted pig where a whole pig is gutted and roasted for hours on a spit over an open fire.

The First Efficient Lightbulb

     The light bulb has gone through many incarnations throughout it's lifetime from the early carbon filament Edison Bulbs up to the curly fry CFL bulbs we have today.  Those who know me know that I have no love for either CFL's or LED bulbs for various reasons I don't feel like getting into today.  I'm here to talk about the Mazda bulb, the first energy efficient bulb.

Ad: 1905 Tabasco Sauce

     Ah Tabasco Sauce, love it or hate it, it's been around since just after the Civil War.  This fiery pepper sauce is the backbone of Louisiana cuisine and graces tables all over the world.  So what are the beginnings of this iconic brand?

Recipe: Creole Mixed Greens

Mixed Greens have been a staple item on Southern dinner tables for decades.  Collards, along with Kale, Mustard Greens and Chard fill a very necessary role in proper nutrition providing Vitamins A & C along with Selenium and a whopping 25% your daily fiber (5.3g).  I have cooked green this way for years never really realizing that it is a traditional Creole Recipe dating back to the 1800's.  I've modified the recipe to reduce the sodium per serving.  The liquid on the bottom of the pan is called "pot likker" and is full of nutrients.  This dish is served with bread used to sop up the juices or my wife likes to have it over rice.

1919 Grape Nuts, Making Girls Round and Rosy

Little girls don't want to be round and rosy today.  They'd rather be thin like the girls that grace the pages of magazines but that is an impossible kind of beauty to achieve since it's all done with computers today.  This ad is from 1919 when the world was well... certainly more innocent than it is today but having just gone through The Great War it certainly had lost the idyllic innocence of the pre war years.  100 years ago this year World War I started, the first but certainly not the last war to be started by an act of terrorism.

I See You Tonight, Tonight...

Today I have for you a 1904 ad for Bausch and Lomb Camera Lenses.  I love this ad because it has a look similar to the Smashing Pumpkins Video for "Tonight, tonight" which in itself was a tribute to an early century movie about going to the moon.

Pickled Eggs and Beets

I love making pickled eggs for Easter and Christmas, their red color is reminiscent of the red dyed eggs used at Easter in Ukrainian traditions.  They are extremely easy to make just requiring a few days to sit in the brine and get well flavored.

I have tried to trace the history of adding beets to pickled eggs but I have been stumped every step of the way.  Here in the USA we tend to call them "Amish Style" pickled eggs however variations of the same recipe exist in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries.  Pickling eggs in a vinegar brine has been around forever and I think the beet variation isn't that much younger.  This recipe is good for 14 eggs.  You'll need 2 quart size mason jars along with lids and rings.  Keep them in the refrigerator after they cool.

Note: This was a recipe I had posted about before Easter but I tried them again except omitting the shortcuts such as using canned beets.  The end result was far beyond my expectations and made me embarrassed that I had ever put the original recipe on this blog.  Here is the modified recipe using fresh ingredients.

Country Captain Southern Chicken Curry

I chose a rather laborious title for this post because most people don't know the Americanized version of chicken curry is rightfully called Country Captain Chicken.  Now the origins of this dish are veiled in the mists of time as it has been around since before the Civil War and quite a few towns make claim to Country Captain as being "their" dish.  After looking at literally dozens of recipes dating from now all the way back to 1822 I can say with a high amount of confidence that this dish is a New Orleans Creole recipe.  You can usually tell the background of a recipe by it's base ingredients and Creole cooking is one of the easier ones to spot as almost all dishes start with at least 2 of the "Trinity", bell peppers, onions and celery.  These ingredients showed up time and again in each recipe I looked at, albeit with some variations as time went forward.  I picked a recipe that was simple and stayed close to the original in terms of ingredients and flavor.

Holladaise Sauce and Her Daughters

I wrote about Mother Bechamel and her Daughters some time ago and promised to pass along a recipe for Hollandaise Sauce in due time as it is a mother sauce in and of itself.  I finally had the opportunity to make Hollandaise the other day when I made a rather rich dinner of Eggplant Creole topped with a poached egg and Hollandaise sauce.  To tell you the truth I don't really recommend the combination as the relatively light flavor of the sauce was drowned out by the heavier flavor of the eggplant creole.  However if you get back to basics and use the Hollandaise for such things as dressing aspargus or steamed cauliflower or the legendary eggs benedict then you will see the flavor of the sauce shine through into the whole dish not dominating or being dominated in turn.

Welches Grapelade

I find that I haven't written in a few moons about old ads, which used to provide much fill material back when I started this blog and I didn't have as many recipes to write about.  Also I used to have time to write every day back then but with a full time job now my time is limited and tend to concentrate on the recipes, saving the ads for the Facebook Page devoted to this blog.  This ad just piqued my interest though as I knew there was a story behind it.

Beauty Without Airbrushing

Sometimes I come across some really amazing artwork for vintage ads like the one above from 1910 for Kelloggs Cornflakes.  The artist is B. Tichtman and unfortunately his information was not available online but he apparently was an artist in the style of Gibson and his famous Gibson Girls that were so popular in the early 1900's.  Tichtman was prolific in his work producing not just ads but calendars and postcards as well.

What strikes me most about this artwork is the beauty without the use of airbrush makeup that is so prevalent today... or am I dating myself there?  I think photoshop is used more often these days to make impossible beauty out of the models used.  Such things upset me because it changes societal perceptions of beauty into something that has women spending untold amounts of money in the pursuit of flawless beauty.

Kelloggs  seems to have used this ad style for only a short time and I have not seen it used by any other advertisers.  As for Mr. Tichtman, it is unfortunate that he is relegated to obscurity since his art still fetches a decent price when it comes up for auction.

A Hannibal Lecter Smile

Creepy Armour salesman guy would positively love to sell you some of his sausages, just don't ask what they're made of... really.  With that Hannibal Lecter smile would you buy processed meats off of this guy?  Apparently this was a 1917 version of an award winning smile but nowadays it's a "You're going to the funny farm smile".  From the look of the ad Armour used to be into salting, curing or canning anything they could get their hands on.  Not surprising really, it's 1917 and refrigeration was just getting off of the ground.  Everyone still used iceboxes and foods had to be preserved in a non-refrigeration manner.  Of course this also involved the copious use of salt in preservation which meant the average person consumed roughly 5x the present day RDA of sodium.  Oddly enough though, for sodium being the great bugaboo of heart attacks that the FDA says it is, I rather think people back then had them less often than is currently the case.

Bacon-ey Goodness By Swift

I wrote about this awhile back and since then found another one of these Swift ads for Bacon in a jar.  The ad tells us that there are "5 extra slices in every jar".  Swifts must have spent a fortune selling this product because I've never seen any ads for canned bacon from other producers like Armour.  It also seems to me that this bacon is not cooked, instead it is wrapped in wax paper and sealed in to be removed and cooked in an oven by the consumer.  Of more interest to me would have been pricing of canned bacon vs fresh back in the early 1900's.  Most people would have bought fresh bacon when it was needed, hence the term "Bringing home the bacon" was coined.  I know that about 30 years ago canned bacon disappeared entirely from store shelves due to increased costs and just a lack of demand in the face of improvements on refrigerators and freezers in homes.  In my research I found a company called "yoder's" that sells canned bacon.  Yoder's bacon is fully cooked and wrapped in wax paper in a standard size can and hermetically sealed.  It's rather expensive at $12/can but it's mainly marketed to the "survivalist" weirdos who seem to think they can put away enough food to live out the rest of their lives after whatever disaster their tinfoil covered brains has concocted comes to pass. 

Karo Corn Syrup

Wow, people used to get married young back in the old days... ok, not really.  This lovely ad for Karo Corn Syrup is from 1910 and coincides with an ad campaign launched by the president of corn products refining board.  He believed so fiercely in the dependable high quality and flavor of corn syrup that he spend an astonishing (for the time) $250,000 in ads for Karo corn syrup.  This ad is one of the most famous and the Karo Kids are featured again in full color on a Karo Cookbook initially released the same year.  Karo itself was invented in 1902 and name came from either the chemist that invented it who named it after his wife's nickname or was from an earlier syrup called "Kairomel" depending on who you ask.¹

Vintage Razors and the Art of Shaving

I haven't had the chance to write about vintage shaving yet.  Most things I own and use are vintage so of course, I also shave with vintage razors blades.  In this day and age it can be quite daunting to find the razor that best fits your personality and face.  Since we are all different there is no one do-all razor that will be the best for you.  However I have found that in this case, vintage is often better.  You can get you 3, 4, or 5 bladed razors promising the closest shave ever and if that works for you then that's great.  However most men find these razors lacking when trying to live up to the wild claims they throw out in order to get us to purchase their products.  Such razors are great for the first 2 shaves and then what happens?  They start pulling or irritating and ofttimes the blades are spaced so closely together that a heavy growth of beard defeats the best blades modern science can throw at us.

Toast of the Town

I had to laugh when I first saw this bit of wartime propaganda from 1918.  Much of the food that was being harvested in that year was being shipped to Europe for the war effort (World War I).  So there were a number of drives to get people to eat fresh fruits and veggies instead of canned.  This one has to take the cake.  "Eat plenty of green corn..."  I'm assuming in this case they're referring to young corn.  If you eat plenty of that you better take a good book into the bathroom because you're going to be there awhile.  The ad is actually making a point of cooking and how it makes the corn palatable.  True, but cooking tends to do that with alot of things but I digress. 

Southern Recipe Buttermilk Fried Chicken

Buttermilk has 2 flavors, true buttermilk, sometimes called sweet buttermilk is the water extracted from cream during the process of making butter.  Cultured buttermilk has been treated like yogurt and allowed to ferment.  All recipes that I have encountered, even the old ones, refer to cultured buttermilk which is well because sweet buttermilk is impossible to find unless you make your own butter.  The secret of good buttermilk fried chicken is the soak in the buttermilk itself.  The acidity helps to tenderize the chicken making it oh so juicy and delicious.  The chicken can be pan fried or deep fried but there's no getting around the fact that you need hot oil to cook it.  If you have an aversion to fat I can't really give you a low fat recipe for buttermilk chicken as it will not truly be Southern style any longer.  My advice is to live your life.  Eating fried foods once is awhile isn't going to kill you, eating them every day on the the other hand is not healthy.

Vim & Go With Coca Cola

I don't know what the guy in this Coke ad from 1907 is looking at, perhaps checking if anyone is around before licking out the glass. Or maybe he's ashamed of being a coke addict.  Who knows?  I love how Coca~Cola will "Quench your thirst and put vim and go into your tired brain ad body".  There's a word that has fallen out of the vernacular... vim.  I remember my grandmother sometimes using vim & vigor but she had to be the last one I remember doing so.  Even myself, Captain Vintage Vernacular, never uses vim... although that can change in the near future. 

Canned Crab

Crab meat must have been much cheaper than it is now back in the old days because I see quite a few recipes that use it, even in the Depression Era.  Few of these recipes are anything resembling a crabcake, mostly they are some sort of deviled crab in a can doctored with more butter and a few spices.  I come from Maryland so I certainly like crab but the thought of canned deviled crab gives me the heebee-jeebee's.  This particular ad is for a company that I can't even locate anymore.  The ad is from 1912 so it's not surprising.  The company is located in Hampton Va. so it's almost certainly Smith Island crabs.  There's been a bit of a "war" down there for over a century between Marylanders and Virginians over crabbing rights in the waters around Smith Island.  These days I don't think it matters much anymore.  The last time I purchased a can of claw meat it was sourced from the Philippines, sad... really sad.