digging up vintage recipes

Baby Shower Baking: Banana Espresso Chip Mini Muffins

This is another Baked recipe – but miniaturized! Warning: muffins in the picture may appear larger than they actually are.

These look like big muffins, but in reality they were wee, wee muffins – so wee, in fact, that they got gobbled up quite quickly.

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Sunday Tips: Makin’ Bacon

Some very experienced epicures and cooks, think the old-fashioned way of preparing bacon is troublesome and useless. They say that legs of pork placed upright in pickle, for four or five weeks, are just as nice as those rubbed with so much care. The pickle for pork and hung beef, should be stronger than for legs of mutton. Eight pounds of salt, ten ounces of salt-petre and five pints of molasses is enough for one hundred weight of meat; water enough to cover the meat well—probably, four or five gallons. – Mrs. Child, The American Frugal Housewife

Yes, our topic this week is bacon. Specifically, homemade bacon. Sorry, not a full leg of pork (I don’t have a barrel or room for one in my apartment). Rather, this piece of pork belly:


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Sixties Salads: “Dutch Salad” with Herring

Sixties salads are really something else.  Those ladies (puh-lease, no gender neutrality necessary here – the gents were all off sippin’ old fashioneds) were willing to chop up anything, put it in mayo, and serve it up.  OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating.  But seriously, salads and canapes were a staple of any wife’s party repertoire, and there are many varieties of both scattered around the books on The Collection.  Sometimes you find some with interesting flavor combos we might not necessarily think of in the 21st century.

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Some LA Travels

So…I just got back from visiting a friend in LA.  Here are some things we ate and saw…

First, all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ at Hae Jang Chon.  The quality at this place did not suffer for quantity.  We started out with some pretty conventional stuff – pork and bulgogi…

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Beer Soup

OK, so this isn’t as pretty as the root beer cupcakes, but…come on, guys!  It’s soup made of BEER!  Besides, I’m traipsing around LA, putting up fun pics on Twitter, so I just whipped up a little something to tide everyone over.

When I saw “Beer Soup” in The Country Kitchen Cook Book, I must admit there was part of me that thought, “YES! Lager in a bowl for dinner!” I’m reeeeally into beer: I love wine but I go nuts for craft beers, and have been known to tipsily email myself from the bar about especially good brews. This soup has a few other things besides beer, but it’s still pretty damn good. And really comforting for a winter’s night.

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