For All Our Pin-Ups in Pinnies Out There

This is a lovely post from Jessica over at the fantastic Chronically Vintage. You can see the original post here

It features three 1950s soup recipes for all you budding domestic divas! Ideal for all those wild, wet, and windy days we’ve had lately!

As Jessica puts it…

“This is not a day for complex meals or anything that involves reams of intense activity. It’s the sort of damp springtime Wednesday that calls for, to my mind, one food perhaps more than any other: a steaming, alluringly fragrant, delightfully tasty bowl of warm soup.

Whether on the coldest of winter eves or a drizzly May afternoon, there’s nothing quite like soup to comfort, nourish, and relax the mind, body and soul – which no doubt accounts in part for why this dish – in its countless iterations – has remained such a beloved classic the world over for thousands of years.

While we aren’t reaching anywhere near that far back in time today for today’s vintage soups, this trio of 1950s recipes (quartet if you count the suggestion of cooking frankfurters in your soup) featuring Lipton soup mixes that one jazzes up to turn into more exciting lunch or dinner fare, certainly harkens back a few decades and brings with it all the timeless appeal that soup has held since day one.”

“Of the three recipes above, I think that the Chinese Noodle Soup appeals most to me at the moment, but the Tomato Fish Chowder and Milky Way Soup both certainly have their merits, too (I’m not the biggest seafood fan though, so I’d be included to turn that recipe into Tomato Chicken or Turkey Chowder if I was cooking solely for myself).

Aside from the ultra easy mid-century soup recipes themselves here, I’m drawn to – and just adore – the wonderful ice cream and coral inspired colours of this charmingly illustrated cookery page. Talk about fabulous vintage decor – or wardrobe – inspiration!”

Thanks so much for sharing, Jessica, we’ll get our pinnies on and give it a go!

For All of you Pin-Ups in Pinnies Out There

A lovely vintage recipe has just made it to my eyes from the ridiculously inspired Jessica Cangiano over at Chronically Vintage

You can read the original post here

A zesty, crowd pleasing 1950s creamy coleslaw recipe

It’s interesting, depending on who you ask, most people generally think of cabbage as either being more of a winter, or conversely, a summer vegetable. It’s easy to see why this is the case when you compare the various dishes that cabbage is often included in.

During the dark, bitingly cold days of winter, one may turn to hearty cabbage rolls, soups laden with stringy strips of cabbage, or perhaps a warming helping of that fabulous Irish classic, colcannon. When the mercury starts skyrocketing, cabbage quickly appears in fresh green salads, Asian rice paper wraps, on veggie platters, and sometimes even as a Jell-o salad ingredient.

While tied a little more closely to summer, it’s safe to say that coleslaw is one cabbage dish that does a particularly good job of transcending the seasons. It can be served as part of a barbeque spread, picnic lunch, supper of cold cuts in when the sun is shinning, or alternatively with roast meats, alongside grilled sandwiches, or as a refreshing side dish partner for any number of warm foods during the frosty fall and winter months (if you’ve not tried it before, I highly recommend making yourself a coleslaw and turkey sandwich, it’s heavenly!).

Today’s vintage recipe for coleslaw is a creamy one centered around Miracle Whip (you could easily use store bought or homemade mayonnaise instead, if you’d prefer) and the tangy, wonderfully yummy inclusion of tarragon vinegar (if you don’t have any on hand, simply add some finely chopped fresh tarragon to white vinegar).

Tarragon – which deserve far more play than it gets, if you asks me – is an alluring, deeply flavourful herb that pairs well with everything from fish to eggs, chicken to lamb, so you can can easily saddle this 1950s coleslaw alongside a wide range of savoury dishes.

{Fabulous with hot meals – like grilled meats, burgers, or ears of piping hot corn – or cold supper alike during the sweltering summer months, coleslaw is a side dish that deserves some love all year long. Vintage Miracle Whip Coleslaw recipe by way of salty cotton on Flickr.}

If however, you (or other members of your family) are not huge tarragon fans, there’s no reason you couldn’t use a different herb vinegar (I’ve made also a similar recipe before with mayonnaise and the zest of from blood oranges, that is thoroughly delicious alongside all manner of grilled meats and vegetables), and by all means, feel free to toss in some carrot, celery, fennel, or spring (green) onion, if you’d like to up the veggie content in this great dish even further.

So while certain cabbage dishes are indeed most often associated with certain seasons, I’ve never felt like coleslaw needed to be tucked away on the proverbial shelf and only brought out when the dog days of summer arrive.

In fact, come to think of it, I probably eat more coleslaw (alongside roasted or pan-fried meats and veggies) in the winter than I do in the summer. No matter the time of the year though, I’m always up for a fantastic, creamy coleslaw like this great 1950s classic.

Some More Tips for the Domestic Diva!!

There is a super post over at ‘Chronically Vintage’ from the lovely Jessica Cangiano to get the domestic divas amonst you in your vintage pinnies and into the kitchen to bake!! This recipe from 1951 is for ‘Colorvision Pink Swirl Cake’. Happy Blogiversary, Jessica. You can read her original post here

More Crafty Cooking for Domestic Divas

This comes from the lovely Jessica Cangiano over at ‘Chronically Vintage’- You can find her original post over here

A lovely, citrusy 1940s muffin recipe for any time of the day

When making people look back, waxing nostalgically about the foods of their youth, many remember of cookies as being the primary sweet treat of their youth. Indeed, for lots of folks such was the case, yet around my house – while cookies did certainly appear sometimes, especially around the holidays – perhaps the number one sweet snack that I remember is muffins.

Yes indeedy, whether they were zucchini and pineapple, classic blueberry, bran, apple cinnamon, chocolate chip, banana, pumpkin spice, or any other of a myriad of favourites, there was scarcely a week when one type of muffin or another failed to make an appearance at our table. Variety and great recipes helped ensure that we never got bored with these darling quick breads, but rather that we were always eager to see a piping hot tray of them being pulled from the oven.

Eaten generally for dessert, we’d sometimes get a muffin with breakfast or tucked into our school lunchboxes, too, and as I grew older and began cooking in the family kitchen myself, muffins were amongst the first foods I can remember cutting my culinary teeth on as I learned to cook and bake.

Jump ahead a couple of decades and I still adore muffins every bit as much as I did as youngster. Though these days I need to ensure I use gluten-free recipes, I still have a hefty stack of muffin recipes that I love pulling from, and that I bake on a regular basis.

A number of mine and my mom’s muffin recipes include raisins (golden have always been my faves) or currents, and as I’m always on the look out for others, when I spotted this subtly zingy, appealingly tasty looking 1940s Orange Raisin Muffin recipe, I just knew I had to add it to my collection and share it with all of you as well.

 

{If you’re a fan of raisins and citrus flavours, you’re bound to want to give this super easy to make 1940s muffin recipe a spin. Vintage image via tonto–kidd on Flickr.}

Great as this recipe sounds as it is, I’d be very tempted to add a little vanilla and perhaps a sweet spice such as cinnamon or nutmeg. Ginger, likewise, could be really, really nice with the cheery orange hit in this muffins.

If you wanted to elevate them almost to cupcake status, you could also whip up a thin orange glaze to drizzle over top once they’re out of the oven and have cooled for a tad. For a trendy modern (and yet, especially around the Mediterranean, timeless) spin, you could use blood orange juice and zest, though do keep in mind, that doing so will tint your muffins a soft shade of pinky-red.

As I sit here writing this now, it strikes me that perhaps, in addition to cookie jars, we should have specially designated (airtight) muffin jars or containers to give pride-of-place to our our kitchen counters, too – especially if your family adores muffins as much as mine does.

Wherever you store, eat and enjoy them, I hope that you have oodles of fun whipping up a batch of these great vintage Raisin and Orange Muffins.