"Oatflake" instead of oatmeal. "Sweet milk" instead of just milk. Sweet milk was just regular milk, you had to say so because buttermilk was common enough in baking that "milk" alone was ambiguous. I've seen that phrasing on maybe a dozen cards now, and they all seem to be pre-1950s.
At the top, underlined once 'Best'.
EDIT! Apologies - cookies not cake! I hadnt had any coffee!
Beef Bourguignon. A full bottle of red wine, salt pork, fresh mushrooms, serves 12-16. This card has been in a kitchen — the stains prove it.
I wondered what 'salad oil' was. Its was a more common way to describe vegetable oil in the 60's
There’s something oddly perfect about finding a recipe card that was never meant to be a recipe card.
Not an index card. Not from a proper recipe box. Just a slip torn from a 1950s insurance notepad, because someone needed to write down the ranger cookies before they forgot.
Found this folded up in a auction lot recipe box.
"Boiled Salad Dressing" "Butter size of egg."
That's it. That's the measurement. No tablespoons. No grams. Just — you know the one.
Probably 1940s, found folded up in a box of recipes from an estate sale. After a bit of research i discovered boiled dressing is also called 'cooked dressing'. It's not a vinaigrette. It's not mayonnaise. It's a cooked emulsification of egg, milk, vinegar, and flour, thickened slowly over a double boiler and finished with butter.
Anyone ever made boiled salad dressing?
**BOILED SALAD DRESSING**
2 tsp. salt | 6 T sugar
2 tsp. mustard | 1½ c. milk
3½ T. flour | 1 egg
½ c. vinegar | butter size of egg.
Mix dry ingredients. Add milk, beating in with egg beater. Add egg & continue beating till combined. Add vinegar and cook in d. boiler till thickened. Remove from fire and add butter. Makes about 1 pint.
Bev, Judy, Annie, Dawn, Julie, Estella. Six names on six cards, each one a kitchen that existed before we found it. All from different recipe boxes i've found at auction, estate sale and vintage stores.
Happy Mother's Day.
Bev's California Marinade
Judy's Apple Cake
Mix ingredients in a baking pan. Bake 350° for 35 to 40 minutes.
Topping: 1 cup sugar, ½ sour cream, ½ tsp baking soda. Keep stirring; bring to a boil.
Annie Laurie's Cheese Squares
Most of this card has faded. What survives:
Continued on a missing page. Whatever the rest was, it stayed with the cook.
Dawn's Chilled Carrot Soup
Cook carrots, onion, and celery in the broth until tender. Purée. Stir in the cream. Chill before serving.
Julie's Flank Steak
Marinade:
Pour over the steak and marinate 15 hours or more.
Estelle's Salad
Then add:
Mix, pour into a mold, chill.
Bev, Judy, Annie, Dawn, Julie, Estella. Six names on six cards, each one a kitchen that existed before we found it. All from different recipe boxes i've found at auction, estate sale and vintage stores.
Happy Mother's Day.
Bev's California Marinade
Judy's Apple Cake
Mix ingredients in a baking pan. Bake 350° for 35 to 40 minutes.
Topping: 1 cup sugar, ½ sour cream, ½ tsp baking soda. Keep stirring; bring to a boil.
Annie Laurie's Cheese Squares
Most of this card has faded. What survives:
Continued on a missing page. Whatever the rest was, it stayed with the cook.
Dawn's Chilled Carrot Soup
Cook carrots, onion, and celery in the broth until tender. Purée. Stir in the cream. Chill before serving.
Julie's Flank Steak
Marinade:
Pour over the steak and marinate 15 hours or more.
Estelle's Salad
Then add:
Mix, pour into a mold, chill.
Bev, Judy, Annie, Dawn, Julie, Estella. Six names on six cards, each one a kitchen that existed before we found it. All from different recipe boxes i've found at auction, estate sale and vintage stores.
Happy Mother's Day.
Would love to know everyones favorite recipe their mom made!
Bev's California Marinade
Judy's Apple Cake
Mix ingredients in a baking pan. Bake 350° for 35 to 40 minutes.
Topping: 1 cup sugar, ½ sour cream, ½ tsp baking soda. Keep stirring; bring to a boil.
Annie Laurie's Cheese Squares
Most of this card has faded. What survives:
Continued on a missing page. Whatever the rest was, it stayed with the cook.
Dawn's Chilled Carrot Soup
Cook carrots, onion, and celery in the broth until tender. Purée. Stir in the cream. Chill before serving.
Julie's Flank Steak
Marinade:
Pour over the steak and marinate 15 hours or more.
Estelle's Salad
Then add:
Mix, pour into a mold, chill.
Bev, Judy, Annie, Dawn, Julie, Estella. Six names on six cards, each one a kitchen that existed before we found it. All from different recipe boxes i've found at auction, estate sale and vintage stores.
Happy Mother's Day.
Bev's California Marinade
Judy's Apple Cake
Mix ingredients in a baking pan. Bake 350° for 35 to 40 minutes.
Topping: 1 cup sugar, ½ sour cream, ½ tsp baking soda. Keep stirring; bring to a boil.
Annie Laurie's Cheese Squares
Most of this card has faded. What survives:
Continued on a missing page. Whatever the rest was, it stayed with the cook.
Dawn's Chilled Carrot Soup
Cook carrots, onion, and celery in the broth until tender. Purée. Stir in the cream. Chill before serving.
Julie's Flank Steak
Marinade:
Pour over the steak and marinate 15 hours or more.
Estelle's Salad
Then add:
Mix, pour into a mold, chill.
"Next Best Thing to Robert Redford" A recipe named after Robert Redford. Written in cursive. Layered with cream cheese, instant pudding, grated candy bar.
The moms that moms in the 70's. They were onto something.
I like these pre-printed folk art recipe card. Since collecting 2,000+ cards I've seen lots of them now, but not many that were typed on a typewriter.
The recipe was typed onto the card, not handwritten. Someone sat down at a typewriter and transferred this recipe with the formality that implies — each ingredient in its column, instructions in neat paragraphs. It's the kind of thing you did when you wanted a recipe to last.
But there is an odd contradiction in the middle. "Knead until satiny." followed by "I don't knead it". No starting over the card, Just a correction made in real time and moved on.
Anyone else familiar with the folk art style card?
Someone wrote TOP SECRET at the top of this card and double-underlined it. For butter cookies. The sizing instruction says to roll each ball of dough "to size of a large marble", not approximately one inch, not a teaspoon's worth. A marble. It wasn't until seeing that note that i realized this was likely written by a child and thats why the handwriting is also a little untidy.
Found this in an eBay lot of around 450 handwritten recipe cards. mostly from the 70's
Its not the first time i've found a child's hand written recipe before, i always find them so charming.
**BUTTER COOKIES** *(TOP SECRET)*
*Bake 350° | 20-30 min. | Makes 24*
- 1 stick butter
- ½ cup sugar
- 1 cup flour
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- Good pinch salt
Soften butter and mix all ingredients together. Use beater if too sticky; use spoon to roll to size of a large marble. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Make a small depression in each, fill with tart jelly or preserves. **Watch while baking.**
I posted one of these yesterday but it was removed for not having the full recipe written. All of these came from a much larger collection i found in an estate sale of recipe cards. I love the little illustrations taped on and the fact that they were typed up by hand.
I've got to assume the water in the gin rickey is soda water though?
Anyone else seen cards like this before - i'd love to collect more.
**St. Louis Cocktail**
1 peach or apricot
½ Pre-chilled Southern Comfort
Put fruit in sherbert or champagne glass; add crushed ice. Fill with S.C. Serve with small spoon & a cocktail straw.
**Bloody Mary**
2 jiggers tomato juice
1/3 jigger fresh lemon juice
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
Dash of hot sauce
1 jigger (1½ oz) vodka
Salt & pepper to taste. Shake with cracked ice; strain into 6 oz glass.
**Gin Rickey**
1 jigger gin
Juice, rind 1/2 lime
Water
Squeeze lime over ice cubes in an 8 oz glass. Add rind & gin. Fill with water & stir
Found this recipe card along with 20+ others in a estate sale lot.
Six ingredients. And then "strain into 6 oz glass."
This was decades before the Bloody Mary became a garnish tower, before the bacon strips and pickle spears and whatever else. Just tomato, lemon, vodka, shake it cold, strain it clean.
Also, 6oz feels incredibly small by todays standards.
Somebody needed to write this Asparagus Casserole recipe down and grabbed whatever was at hand. Roadway Express freight company letterhead. Orange truck illustration, "Dedicated to Better Service" across the top. The recipe was worth writing down, right now, on this.
Also, Ham - 6 pounds...
After my last post about a diabetics nightmare 'Junk Yard Salad'. I present: A diabetic fruit cake recipe from the 1960s.
*Each slice equals 1 Fat, 1 Bread + 1/2 Fruit.* That's the exchange system, how diabetics tracked what they ate before carb counting became dominant apparently. Tracy didn't just adapt this recipe. She calculated it, portioned it to exactly 18 slices, so whoever was eating it knew precisely what they were having.
This came from a different lot of around 150 loose cards.
Someone looked at a bowl of canned cherry pie filling, crushed pineapple, pineapple, marshmallows, and Cool Whip — and named it Junk Yard Salad. Not Fruit Fluff. Not Party Salad. Junk Yard.
A Christmas cookie secretly disguised as a plain ball. You don't know what's inside until you bite.
The secret is a candied cherry hidden in the center, dipped in chocolate, rolled in nuts. Found in an estate sale lot of about 250+ recipe cards.
Someone clipped this from the Herald Journal in 1945 and wrote - no sugar
This recipe does something I love. it acknowledges the trade-off, right there in the text. 'Not one grain of your precious sugar need be used for this custard. The corn syrup in the custard will not give as fresh a flavor as the old sugar recipe — but the maple syrup will add a new note that makes you forget the old.'
Its really interesting to see someone trying to make the best of it sound like an upgrade. And maybe it was.
After doing some digging, I learnt sugar was the first thing rationed in America and one of the last to come back.
Pulled this from an eBay lot of about 150 cards. Most are handwritten from the 70's, but this one was a photocopy of a typed recipe.
A First Prize winner from the Circleville Pumpkin Show. Some quick research suggests that Circleville Pumpkin Show has been running since 1903, one of the longest-running food festivals in the country. Nina Small entered the pie competition and must have won first prize - her recipe handed down and photocopied to inspire others.
Has anyone heard of the Circleville, Ohio Pumpkin Show?