The Only Bread Recipe You'll Ever Need

Back in the old days, home cooks didn't trouble themselves trying to make artisan breads.  Sure you can spend a fortune on pans, rising baskets, flours, enhancers, etc trying to bake loaves like the professional bakeries put out but I have to ask why?  Most artisan breads are entirely unsuited to the one thing we will most be doing with them, making sandwiches.  I have many vintage cookbooks in my collection now and while here and there you encounter a recipe for French bread, noticeably absent are the ciabatta breads, sourdoughs, challah  breads and other loaves that are outside of the purvue of most home bakers.  Instead is a more practical approach meant to be frugal not topple you off the fiscal cliff in a unforgiving quest for the proper crumb size.

Amish Style Apple Sausage Stuffing

     I'm from Maryland originally, just outside of west Baltimore to be more exact and the traditional recipes for a holiday table are as varied as the many different cultures that make up the citizenry.  The 1940's saw a surge in interest in Amish style cooking, probably because it was frugal and filling, 2 things that were necessary on a wartime rationing diet.

Scalloped Apples & Sweet Potatoes

     In the realm of sweet potato recipes lives the Southern style marshmallow baked sweet potatoes that seem to occupy space on every holiday table in America... right next to the green bean casserole.  I have fought with this denizen of overindulgence for many a year as I cannot abide this sticky sweet concoction yet I love sweet potatoes and yearned to be able to set them free from a syrupy, gooey, marshmallow laden fate.  At first I tried mashed sweet potatoes with a praline topping, better but equally as sweet and almost akin to an uncrusted sweet potato pie.  Luckily this year, thanks to the Gutenberg Project, I was able to find this recipe.

A Christmas Story Meatloaf Dinner: Braised Sweet & Sour Cabbage

     I was in the mood for meatloaf after receiving my vintage Universal Chopper and my mind was immediately drawn to the movie "A Christmas Story" where the family is seen eating the same dinner every night, namely meatloaf, mashed potatoes and braised red cabbage.  So what better way to break in my new kitchen gadget than by recreating that dinner.

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.

Diner Style Hashed Browned Potatoes

   I love writing about diner style and old sub shop recipes.  Part of it is the thrill of reconstructing a recipe that may have been lost to time had I not saved it, the other part is because this is the world I grew up in.  Being almost 43 I am allowed to have a hindsight perspective on life.  The world we live in now is not the world I grew up in and I'm not entirely sure we've progressed while marching to the never ending tune of progress.

Adult Tartar Sauce

   
     I made this recipe while playing around one day trying to come up with something better than regular old tartar sauce.  I consulted a couple of my old recipe books for ideas and revisited some of the better ingredients in my remoulade  recipe I wrote oh so long ago.  I like remoulade, it's just a pain to make and involves tarragon which goes brown quicker than an avocado in a heat wave.  Dried tarragon has no flavor because it doesn't dry well so it was off to come up with something that has the flavor of remoulade but not the headache.

A Chicken Salad Recipe to Rule Them All

     When I set out to create a chicken salad recipe it was for an idea I've been tossing around for some time, a sandwich/sub shop modeled after the ones that used to be in every neighborhood of Baltimore when I grew up.  This is not high end food, this is not hipster food, this is not $100 hamburgers.  What this is is just good old fashioned working man's food eaten for lunch or after a good time at the local bar.

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.

Harley's Sandwich Shop Tuna Salad & a Double TT Diner Club

     Harley's Sandwich Shops were a landmark in Baltimore from the 1940's to the 1980's when they were bought up by Shane's.  I was really young when this happened, maybe 8 or 10 years old but I do remember the couple times I went with my grandparents to Harley's.  He was well known for his subs and his burgers simmered in a secret sauce, a recipe I'll get to another time, but it was his jazz show on local Baltimore radio that really made him famous.

Chicken Soup Recipe, Depression Era

     I've tried many ways of making chicken soup over the years and while they were all good they weren't fantastic I was always looking for something else.  This started as a research project into Depression Era cooking.  One of things that Herbert Hoover promised as president was "A chicken in every pot" and there's a reason for this, chicken was expensive, especially young chickens.  Chickens were kept for laying eggs and after 5 years when they stopped laying that's when they ended up as dinner.

Dragon's Blood Sauce

I posted before about how I had some business cards printed up for the blog.  These were mainly for use at work where I could give them to customers in need of a recipe.  Since I had them printed I think I've given out about 100 of them so far and I hope that at least some of the people I gave them to found this site helpful in their kitchen endeavors.  The handing out of business cards has reaped other benefits though.  I came to have a nice talk about vintage recipes with a couple of wonderful ladies and in the course of conversation the one lady who was visiting from up north stated how she had these old cookbooks and she would love to give them to me to help me with the blog.  Fantastic!  I love old cookbooks and according to her they were church compiled cookbooks which is even better because they often comprise of family recipes that are much better than the advertiser recipes I usually deal with on here.

Playing Doctor and Nurse

This is a child's play set that would not fly today in the prevalence of PC attitudes.  I find it a great item and believe it or not, I had a similar set to play doctor with in the 70's when I was growing up.  My mother was a nurse and of course she encouraged anything to do with medicine.  This set was a bit different however in that it actually contained candy pills... ugh those have definitely become as dead as the Dodo because little miss or jr might actually take a real pill by accident... kind of like how candy cigarettes have disappeared from shelves since it encourages smoking (and big tobacco said they weren't targeting kids).  At any rate this wonderful cart includes "everything needed to pull the patient through until lunchtime"... well except for the ekg.  And little Billy isn't left out since he has the Jr Doctor Case at his disposal.

Potato Chip Cookies

Now here's an interesting recipe.  I'm not really sure of the history of these but they date back to at least the 40's and probably before.  They originated in the Baltimore area with the Hutzler's Department Stores where they were sold at the lunch counter and bakery.

Gift Baskets Galore

Man they don't do gift baskets like they used to.  In this 1947 ad/order sheet, we can get the mother of all fruit baskets, a crate of goodies really, weighing 90lbs!  Holy goobers that's alot of fruit!  I guess they could afford to be generous back then because labor and fruit were cheap.  Even the simple fruit basket, weighing in at a measly 27lbs, only costs $6.  I can't even go to the store and buy 2lbs of fruit for $6 let alone a fruit basket today.  Such is the march of inflation though.  It's a sad fact of my life that when pouring over all the vintage ads that I do in search of something for the blog, I often run across ones with prices.  Ridiculously low prices compared to today, inflation is the culprit, slowly eating away at our wages and our fortunes.

Coffeematic Makes Me Ecstatic

Yes, all brides swoon at the gift of a Coffeematic percolator.  Well I would swoon at least, this thing is an Art Deco dream.  Now here's the truly amazing thing, I just saw one on Ebay the exact same model and it was priced at $25, pretty much the same as what it sold for in 1948 when this ad was made.

A Uniform Nurse

My my, how nurses uniforms have changed over the years.  In years past they were crisp, snappy and form fitting, not at all practicable for the chores associated with your nursing duties.  My mother would tell me stories about having to wear uniforms such as this when she was in nursing school.  I rather get the impression she hated it, but today we have a much more efficient alternative... scrubs.  Scrubs are baggy rather than form fitting, not flattering to the figure but certainly easier to move around in than the old starched uniforms.  With all things there is progress, sometimes this progress is a bad thing, eliminating what was old and useful in favor of the new fad.  In the case of nurses uniforms though, progress was a good thing.

Also it's like the changes in health insurance, you need a good agent for health coverage to find the best insurance... if that's even possible anymore.

Guide To Good Nutrition (1942)

Since the dawn of the 1900's the Government has been subjecting us to "guides to good nutrition" highlighting what what we should be eating in our daily meals.  It's interesting how health modes have changed so much since the 1940's to today.  When I first grabbed this ad it was the meat at the top that caught my eye.  Wonderfully marbled meat with a nice bit of fat to give the meat flavor and to make the consumer full.  Yes, you didn't need to eat as much meat back in the old days because the meat was more filling owing to the fat content.

Eggplant Creole

Note: This recipe has been edited 12/18/14 from the original as I finally got it to come together the way the original was supposed to look like when finished.

This recipe is from a Crisco sponsored cookbook printed in the early 1920's.  When I first saw it I expected something spicy, after all it's Creole and Louisiana is known for it's fiery foods but in this case Creole seems to be mean cooked with tomatoes.  I made this recipe the way the original was laid out but immediately saw the need for some changes as the cooking directions are rather vague as vintage recipes are wont to be and it also calls for the boiling of the eggplant which was something of a disaster (We now boil the eggplant, see below).  Keep this in mind when you make it that this is the modified, kitchen tested recipe which is what sets this blog apart from other vintage recipe sites.  This recipe was a side dish in it's original form but by the 1930's the Great Depression had turned it into a main dish.  I ate it with a poached egg on top and it is both a nutritious and filling meal that doesn't cost that much.  This recipe lived on into the 1960's where it appears again in another of my cookbooks returning to it's roots as a side dish.

Italian-American Meatballs, From a 1940's Recipe

There are as many "authentic" Italian meatball recipes on the web as there are stars in the sky with each chef making slight changes to their recipe to differentiate it from the others.  Of course my recipe dips back into the hallowed mists of antiquity to come up with something that an Italian would be proud to claim as their own.  Italian food was introduced into the US during the 1890's during the great wave of immigration from Europe.  It really didn't come into it's own though until the depression era when "Italian" food usually meant spaghetti with ketchup or some thin sauce and meat when it was affordable.  This recipe is adapted from "The St. Mary's Square Cookbook", St. Michaels, Maryland.  It was printed in 1966 but the recipes are older having been treasured family heirlooms shared with the museum to help in the restoration of the little old house built c.1700.