A blog dedicated to Early American History Lovers, Civil War Reenactors, Living Historians, and people that love the past. Lots of Historical Recipes and Patterns!
This recipe is from the Settlement Cook Book (1921). Written by progressive reformer, Elizabeth Black Kander, the book was so popular, it went through 35 editions from 1901 to 1940.
Kander, was the daughter of Jewish, English and Bavarian immigrants. She was a member of many charity organizations, such as the Ladies Relief Sewing Society, the National Council of Jewish Women, and founded the Settlement House in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Settlement House was part of the Settlement Movement which was a philanthropic response to Nativism, racism, and calls for restrictive immigration policies in the early 20th century. Followers of the movement lived and worked among the poor with an aim to reform society by working for better labor standards, education, living conditions, and healthcare. The Settlement House provided Eastern European immigrants, classes on English, sewing, and cooking. The Settlement Cook book was used in their cooking classes and also raised money to fund their mission.
The earlier editions of the cook book were focused on helping immigrants assimilate and contained many Eastern European recipes, but specifically Jewish and Kosher recipes were added in later editions including holiday recipes.
I was interested in trying this recipe because "bagel pretzel rolls" intrigued me. I always thought making bagels was too hard but it ended up being easy and it cost less that a $1 for 12 bagels. Seeing the process done in the home and not in a bagel shop really demystifies the process.
Vintage Jewish Bagel Recipe
Ingredients:
- 1 cup warm Milk - 1 Yeast Cake or 1 Tablespoon of Yeast - 1/4 Cup Butter, melted but cool - 1 Egg, seperated - 1 1/2 Tablespoons Sugar - 3 3/4 Cups Flour - 1/2 teaspoon Salt
Instructions:
Stir the sugar into the warm milk . Pour yeast on top of the warm milk, let sit a minute and stir in. Pour Flour, yeast, egg white, butter, and salt into a mixing bowl. Mix until it is too hard to mix with a spoon then use hands. Knead for about 6 minutes. Place in a greased bowl and let rise, covered for 1 hour. Punch the dough down, cut it in two. Set aside half covered. Cut the other half into 6 pieces and roll into bagel shapes. Seal with water and place on a greased baking pan.
For the cinnamon version, roll out the other half of the dough, coat the dough with water and sprinkle with a mixture of 2 Tablespoons of sugar and 1 Tablespoon of Cinnamon. Cut into 6 pieces an roll into bagel shapes and put on a greased cookie sheet.
Preheat your oven to 375 F.
Bring a large, shallow pot of water to just below simmering. Put your bagels in a few at a time and cook for 20 seconds. Flip them over and cook another 20 seconds. Remove to a greased cookie pan. Lightly brush the bagels with a mixture of egg yolk and water. Add your toppings ( I used poppy seeds and almonds on top of the cinnamon ones as the recipes called for). Bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.
For those asking where I got my tray, it's this one painted.
This is an early version of The Settlement Cook Book:
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This year has been weird, to say the least. My sister is a nurse so I have been spending most of my time being Nanny-Auntie to my nephew who is bouncing-off-the-walls energetic and starting 3rd grade next week.
It’s been mostly exhausting and I’m sure others are feeling this way. We have been finding crafts and projects from the past to stay busy and paper poppers was a fast, easy history craft that kept him busy for hours. All you need is a sheet of paper.
Everyone who knows me know I LOVE tacos. I was excited and intrigued to find this early recipe for guacamole. The recipe is from Ramona's Spanish-Mexican Cookery. The author spent 20 years in Mexico learning Mexican recipes and sharing American ones. She wrote this cookbook for Americans who visited Mexico and missed the mouthwatering food.
This recipe was so good! I've literally made it 3 times since first trying it a few weeks ago and it looks so cute served in the shells and made it easy for everyone to have a personal bowl of guacamole by their plates without dirtying more bowls.
Ramona's Spanish-Mexican cookery: the first complete and authentic Spanish-Mexican cook book in English (1929).
- 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil - Salt and Cayenne Pepper to taste - Tomato slices and quartered Lemons for garnish
Instructions:
Cut avocados in half and remove the pits. Set peels aside. Mash the avocado meat. Mix in the tomato, onion, jalapeños, cilantro. Salt to taste. Spoon the avocado filling into the avocado shells and garnish with a slice of tomato, slice of lemon and a dash of cayenne pepper. Refrigerate until time to serve.
You can skip the olive oil and not notice the flavor difference. I added another tablespoon of cilantro and onion, and a bit more jalapeño. Click here to watch Tanya Muñeton make a very similar recipe in Spanish.
I'm babysitting and puppysitting this week. It's been a lot especially with the pandemic and tornadoes we've been having in Pennsylvania. I'm not saying that this is a good recipe but it's probably the recipe you ate as a kid and the picky eater ate the whole plate.
This is something fun for the kids to do if they're bored. Spritz cookies are not only for the holidays!
Vintage Depression Era Spritz Cooky Recipe
Ingredients:
- 2 1/4 Cups Flour, sifted
- 3/4 Cup Sugar
- 1 Cup Shortening (Crisco or similar)
- 1 Egg
- 1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder
- 1/4 teaspoon Salt
- 1 teaspoon Lemon Extract
Instructions:
Preheat your oven to 400 F . In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar, lemon extract, and salt with the shortening. Add your egg. Sift the flour with the baking powder. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Mix with your hands until well combined and fill your cookie press. Bake for 10- 12 minutes on an un-greased cookie sheet.
Why won't my spritz cookies stick?
Cookie Sheets must be cold and the dough must be slightly sticky. If your dough is too dry, add a little water, remix it in your hands and put it back into the press. You may have to experiment how many squeezes or turns you have to use per cookie. It changes based on the shape you pick. Also, never grease the pan. They won't stick, I promise.
When all of this started, everyone looked at their pantries and came to me and said “Now we need some of those ration recipes!” I struggled to recommend anything. This is unprecedented. Some people couldn’t find bread, others yeast. Some people had plenty of fresh fruit and others nothing.
While I did find ration recipes that helped me, it was impossible to help everyone.
This isn’t like WWII, when you knew a lot of the variables. Hindsight is 20/20 and we know most people would appreciate recipes that contained less of rationed ingredients and more of substitutes. I haven’t been posting much. It seems silly and dangerous to make special food and grocery trips right now.
This is a recipe that you can make with stuff already likely in your house. The beets are not necessary and you can stretch this a lot further if you use the picked eggs to make egg salad sandwiches. Historically, pickling eggs was a way to preserve them for future use before refrigeration. Kept in a cold place, pickled eggs can last up to 4 months! I added a little bit of water to the vinegar to remove the sharpness. They had no way of knowing the acidity of their homemade vinegars and they were likely not as acidic as ours is today.
Pickled Eggs
Ingredients:
- 6 Eggs, Hard boiled and peeled
- 1/2 teaspoon Salt
- 1/2 teaspoon Pepper
- 24 Cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon Mustard
- 2 Cups Vinegar (2/3 Cups Water, 1 1/3 Cups Vinegar)
- Boiled Beet Slices, if wanted
Instructions:
Press 4 cloves into each egg, place in sterilized jar. In a medium sized sauce pan over medium heat, bring vinegar (and beets) to a boil and add the salt, pepper and boil for one minute. Carefully pour the vinegar mixture over the eggs and let cool. Cover and store in the fridge for at least two days before eating.
Things are going to look a little weird on my site for the foreseeable future. Due to the Covid-19 Quarantine, I am stuck in New York without my camera gear, and kitchen implements.
For those of you who don't know, I volunteer with the Chester Historical Preservation Committee and was very excited to find this book that was printed in Chester, Pennsylvania while I was on vacation in Massachusetts last year. Drive 4 and a half hours for some local history? Yes, Please.
What the heck is Chester, PA? It's the first European City in Pennsylvania. It's where William Penn actually landed. It's where the wounded were sent by rail after the Battle of Gettysburg. It was home of the Eddystone Rifle Plant, during WWI. It was a major shipbuilding site during WWI and II. It's where Martin Luther King Jr. went to school. It's really historic, you'll just have to trust me.
I was very excited to get to try some local recipes from this time period. This book, The Kitchen Guide, was originally published in 1913 in Philadelphia and had only 3 recipes with Chester in the Title. Sometime during the 1913 printing and the 1927 Chester printing, "Chester Jumbles" were added to the text. Jumbles are one of the earliest forms of cookies.
Chester Jumbles
Ingredients:
- 2 Cups Sugar
- 1 Cup Butter (2 Sticks)
- 1/2 Cup Flour
- 1/2 teaspoon Salt
- 4 Eggs, beaten
- 1 Tablespoon Vanilla
- 1/2 Cups Shredded Coconut
- Almonds, sliced
- About 4-5 Cups of Flour
Instructions:
Cream the sugar and the room temperature, butter together until smooth. Add the vanilla, 1/2 cup of the flour, the salt and the 4 eggs and coconut. Add flour until the dough does not stick to your hands. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to 1/4 of an inch. Cut out with round or donut shaped cookie cutters and top with sliced almonds. Bake on a cookie sheet in a preheated oven at 375 degrees F for about 15 minutes. Remove from cookie sheet and let cool.
For whatever reason I did not think I was going to like these but they turned out very good. They're soft with a light coconut flavor and nice crunch from the almonds. I only made a half batched and it made about 14, 3 inch cookies.
This recipe is from the book Allied Cookery (1916), a book written to raise funds to support World War 1 victims in France. It contains recipes from the allied nations. It was the work of Gertrude Clergue and her sister Grace Harrison who were born of a French father and American mother. Clergue, was awarded the Medal of French Gratitude in 1920 fr her efforts. The funds would help rebuild farms and eventually the food supply in the war torn areas:
Unfortunately the list of calamities that have melted on France does not do not stop there: all the territory invaded by the German troops, from which they have been driven, which goes from the Marne to the Aisne, and that covered hundreds of prosperous villages in one of the regions the most fertile and richest in France, was ravaged by enemy troops. The owners of these thousands of farms - old men, women and children - have returned to their homes destroyed to raise their houses and have the land produced food they need. They lost everything: houses, furniture, clothes, animals, farm implements.
The book was reprinted in 1917 and 1936. I'm not an authority on Serbian cooking and I can't claim that this recipe is the most "authentic one." The book was published in mostly English and intended for American and Canadian audiences but looking at the recipes they do seem to match up on a basic level with foreign foods at the time. Some recipes use picked cabbage instead of relying on sauerkraut for the kick.
It is delicious and I can't wait to make this again. I walked in with the cabbage and my Grandma told me to bring down the extra because she would make stuffed cabbage. I said I was making stuffed cabbage and she was way more interested in having me do it. :)
WW1 Serbian Sarma
Ingredients:
- 1 Head of Cabbage
- 1 Cup of Rice
- 2 Pounds of Ground Beef
- 2 Pounds of Ground Pork
- 5 Onions, chopped
- 4 Egg, beaten
- Sauerkraut
- Salt
- Pepper
- Spoonful of Flour
- Spoonful of Paprika
- Lard/ shortening
Instructions:
Boil a pot of water,remove from heat and carefully add your cabbage. Fry your onions in a large frying pan in a spoonful of lard/shortening. (Remove one onion's worth to a separate bowl to use for the sauce.) Mix in the beef, pork, eggs, salt, pepper and uncooked rice until well combined. Set aside.
Carefully remove your cabbage from the water. Pat dry and remove the leaves.
Fill each cabbage leaf with two spoonfuls of filling and fold in the two sides and the top and bottom to form a little packet.
Fill the bottom of a deep casserole dish with some sauerkraut and the juice. Place the filled cabbage leaves in the dish, layering sauerkraut and cabbage leaves. Cover and bake for 45 minutes at 325.
Put the remaining onion into a frying pan on medium heat. Saute the onions in a spoonful of lard and add a spoonful of flour, a spoonful of paprika, and a cup of water. Cook until it thickens. Pour over the cabbage leaves and bake for another 15 minutes. Top with sour cream when serving, if desired.
***I used Impossible Burger meatless and Vegan Field Roast Frankfurters for this. I also halved the "meat" in the recipe, used vegetable shortening instead of lard and smoked paprika. You certainly could bake or cook it on the stove for the full two hours.***
Here's a video if you want to see the "pot" sarma is supposed to be baked in. I didn't have one so had to make do with a good ol' casserole dish.
Harrison, Grace Clergue, and Gertrude Clergue. Allied Cookery, British, French, Italian, Belgian, Russian. New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1916.
Over the weekend we went antiquing and I found this really pretty booklet on sealing wax art. Sealing wax art involves melting sealing wax, originally used to seal letters, and shaping the softened wax into different beads and pendant shapes. I had seen wax flowers and pearls before but this was new and I never thought to try and make some myself.
DIY Your Own Vintage Style Jewelry with the whole book here: Sealing Wax Art
Some of my friends and I have been mailing each other letters with wax seals so I already had the materials and thought I might as well try and get some practice in before all those Roaring '20s parties start happening. I still need a lot of practice but it was fun to do. The book shows some very pretty, intricate examples.
My attempt. I still need more practice!
The only advice I can give so far is that the harder, wax pellets that are melted in a spoon were giving me better results than the sticks with the wicks in them.
