My Vintage Recipe Box

A few years ago, I found this old wooden recipe box at an auction. It is full of  hand-written recipe cards from the 1920's and 1930's. After years of daily use, it now rests humbly on a shelf in my kitchen. Every once in awhile I get it out and enjoy just looking through these cards from another time. My grandmother would have been a young mother then, raising her three boys in a little house on Chadwick Street in Bradford, Massachusetts.

We wouldn't find a category highlighting "Toast Dishes" today but our grandmothers were doing their best to provide meals for their families during the Depression years; toast was clearly an inexpensive recipe starter. Even when I was a little girl, I remember being served dishes like "Chipped Beef on Toast" and "Welsh Rarebit".

And who could forget puddings made with cereal? Here in New England, "Indian Pudding" and "Grape Nut Pudding" were favorites. I'm not so sure about using cereal in soups...

"Putting up" vegetables and fruits from the garden was another way that women living through the Depression stretched their meager food dollars. And who could resist the sweet taste of Watermelon Pickles on a hot summer's day?

I think I might not have minded living back in a time when sweets were "needed daily" and considered an integral part of every menu.

This cake tin is from the 1930's. I love the color green that was used on so many kitchen items at that time. I'm sure it held its share of  "delicate, attractive desserts" .

And "Icings" were so important that they were considered a "food group" in this recipe box. I love that this card compares them to "the trimmings on a dress...not necessary but adding to the general attractiveness".

By the late 40's and 1950's, my mother was starting her family in a more prosperous time...the years following WWII.  Although I was little, I can't remember a kitchen at that time that did not have a set of these four Pyrex bowls sitting next to a white stand mixer. My mother used hers every day.

Mom was still writing her recipes by hand, or clipping them out of Good Housekeeping, Women's Day and Family Circle. And newspapers still had a daily recipe column.

By the time my sisters and I had our children in the 1970's and 80's, Tupperware was the staple in our brown and orange kitchens and bright colored plastic recipe boxes had replaced the old wooden ones. And we could run our recipes through the "mimeograph" machine at school to share with one another...or even "xerox" them. We thought we were pretty high-tech compared to our mothers and grandmothers.

My sister, Nancy, was the baker in our family. She kept the same two recipe albums all along and just kept stuffing more into them. When she passed away in November, the only things I wanted were these two albums...each recipe brings back a memory of her standing at the counter with her can of Tab, telling stories and making baking look easy. Sometimes I just like to run my fingers over a hand-written card she has touched.

Now most of us get our recipes off the Internet and many of us keep our recipes filed on our computers. We have come light years from the days of hand-copying recipes for "Chopped Beef on Toast" and "Grape Nut Pudding". We count points and calories, no longer consider "Icing" a food group, and often grab frozen meals on our way home from work. We've come a long way, Baby!

But sometimes, in a tiny little corner of my mind, I just wonder...what we might missing in our rush to eat fast and stay thin. I wonder what it might have been like to put on a faded apron with rick-rack trim and spend a whole afternoon making "Alice Spencer's Tomato Soup Cake" or "Grace Tibbets' Fort Western Pie" like the woman who once owned my little recipe box did. Maybe that is part of the charm of vintage objects like these...through them we can identify with women from another time, imagining what their lives were like.

And wonder...

I hope you will visit some of the amazing blogs to which this post is linked:

Nifty Thrifty Tuesdays at Coastal Charm

Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia

Twice Owned Tuesday at The House of Grace

Wow Us Wednesdays at Savvy Southern Style

Rednesday at It's A Very Cherry World

Open House Party at No Minimalist Here

Second Time Around at A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words

Vintage Thingie Thursday at the Colorado Lady

Thrifty Thursday at Tales from Bloggeritaville

Time Travel Thursday at Brambleberry Cottage

Show & Tell Friday at My Romantic Home

Vintage Inspiration Friday at Common Ground

Home Sweet Home Party at The Charm of Home

A Few of My Favorite Things Saturday at Bargain Hunting With Laurie