Grandma's recipe box isn't the only place old recipes survive. This page collects recipes I've found in old newspapers and in cookbooks that belonged to other families: newspaper food columns, holiday recipe contests, spiral-bound church cookbooks, and books with someone else's notes in the margins. None of them came from my grandmothers or great-grandmothers, but somebody once thought each one was worth sharing.
For every recipe, I include where it came from, the original wording when I can, and an updated version with today's ingredients and measurements. Some are delicious. Some are a little strange. All of them show how people cooked and ate back then.
This recipe caught my attention because it treats sweet potatoes very differently from the sugary casseroles that often appear on holiday tables today. There are no marshmallows, brown sugar, syrup, or warm spices. The filling is seasoned simply with butter, salt, and, if needed, a little cream.
This recipe comes from a February 21, 1980, article in The Salt Lake Tribune titled “Make Lovely Yorkshire Pudding for Family.” Food editor Donna Lou Morgan had joined seven sisters from Bradford, England, for one of their regular gatherings in Salt Lake City.
In November 1951, the Norfolk Daily News ran a Thanksgiving Recipe Contest in its "Kitchen Nuggets" column, edited by Blanche Pease. Readers mailed in their holiday favorites, and one of them came from a new mother who admitted she'd been meaning to send something for ages. She said she clipped every recipe in the column, hoping to try them someday, but a new baby kept her too busy to cook much. So she sent the two she knew by heart. This was one of them.
In October 1940, the Evening Star called this "a recipe from 16th Century Old England." Take that date with a grain of salt. The earliest English pumpkin pie recipes anyone has found are from the 1650s, about a century later.
This ran the day after Thanksgiving 1947, which makes it feel like a note to self for next year. The "new style" seems to be the method: cook the potatoes in just a little water, let most of it cook away, then warm them in the milk and butter right in the same pan before mashing. There's no draining and no second pot.
This ran in an Ontario paper on the day Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten in London. The Associated Press sent it out from New York, and it describes a cocktail an American hotel chain created for the wedding. Philip was born a prince of Greece. My guess, and I could be wrong, is that the Scotch, Greek vermouth, and ouzo were chosen as a toast to both the bride and the groom, finished with a lemon twist shaped like a British lion's tail.