Check out Greg Patent's book, Baking in America. I've baked from it many times and also used it to help decode other vintage recipes.

My husband and I love lemon meringue pie. We also love grapefruit. So when I was looking through my grandmother's first cookbook that she got in 1928 and saw a recipe for grapefruit meringue pie I got really excited and made it. It was terrible. Neither one of us could eat it and we ended up throwing the whole thing out.

A friend was recently trying to do the same thing. There was a lot of guesstimation involved...as you can see from his blog posts.

http://pastrepasts.blogspot.com/

I use my great grandmother's recipe for baked beans. It's very basic--dried beans, onions, molasses, brown sugar, a ham bone, water, salt and pepper. Bake it in a beanpot for hours and hours--magic. And it gets better the next day. It's kind of like a hug across the generations...

Yikes. My very first cookbook is probably considered "vintage" now. As for cooking from vintage recipes, at holidays, my husband and I like to cook from his mother's folder of family favorites, something she put together for each of her children. You know, things like green Jell-O with cream cheese, canned pineapple, and walnuts. While some of the can sizes aren't the same anymore, we just fake it, using what we can find. I'm guessing that many of those vintage recipes used ingredients that were new and exciting at the time (like Jell-O), things I don't necessarily cook with today.

I feel the same about my Better Homes and Gardens "New" Cookbook from 1952. Butter must have been very expensive because EVERYTHING is made with shortening. In addition to the mystery ingredients, it's a delight to see that vintage books assumed a level of cooking skill that we would never dream of today.

One of my favorite vintage baking books is a little plaid on entitled All About Home Baking, published in 1933 by General Foods, the makers of Calumet baking powder and Swan's Down cake flour. You might spot it at used book stores. Here's a photo I posted, along with a vintage Crisco book from 1913. In that the author says that "no other food supplies our bodies with the drive, the vigor, which fat gives." Which was probably true in 1913 when we lived in an agrarian society. Here's a photo of the books.
http://www.rustickitchen.com/blog/?p=406

Sorry to not offer actual cooking tips. I'm looking forward to your posts!

I bought myself the Agnes Jekyll book as a Christmas present from Mrs. Dalloway's! To be honest, I have no idea what she's talking about half the time, but it sounds delicious anyway.

I have a 1942 edition of "America's Cook Book" (Special Wartime supplement included!) that has the best recipe for devil's food cake in it. Sadly, I've lent the book to a history grad student, so I don't have the recipe at the moment.

My hub bought me really old cooking book from an estate sale 2 summers back and we use them from time to time. Testing out dishes before we cook them for parties. It's still pretty good :)

Thank you Wikipedia!

Ammonium carbonate is the commercial salt, formerly known as sal volatile or salt of hartshorn. Ammonium carbonate is used when crushed as a smelling salt. It can be crushed when needed in order to revive someone who has fainted. It is also known as "baker's ammonia" and was a forerunner to the more modern leavening agents baking soda and baking powder.

I found an neat little cook book/pamphlet that must have been from a manufacturer of mazola in my grandfather-in-law's house. Of course, I had NO CLUE what mazola was [a canola-like corn based oil] and most of the recipes honestly weren't too appetizing.

Instructions for "Pasta with Red Sauce" included boiling the noodles for a whopping 30 minutes. The sauce was made with another unfamiliar shortening/fat and canned tomatoes, no onions or garlic or herbs at all.

It seemed a well worn book, illustrating to me just how much more trust our ancestors put into the corporate food industry.

I always turn to Escoffier when in need of inspiration. I love my Le Guide.

"The Way to a Man's Heart" aka "The Settlement Cookbook" is a treasure. I have the 30th edition, enlarged and revised in 1951.

If you can find it, get it. The recipes are short, easy and you can learn so much about how to cook. For instance there are 7 pages on dumplings and garnishes for soup!

Right on the front page, it tells you these are the "tested recipes from the Milwaukee Public School Kitchens, Girls Trades and Technical High School, Authoritative Dietitians and Experienced Housewives."

I do! I found a rad New Orleans cocktail cookbook at my favorite antique shop. I also have a vintage 1950's scandinavian cookbook I use often.

I have a cookbook written by Wallis Simpson!! She's the little tart who got King Edward VIII to abdicate the thrown. From the look of these recipes, it certainly wasn't her cooking that won him over!

I often use "vintage" recipes for the very reasons that the modern ones are so much easier and convinient. Where I am located many of the cooking staples simply aren't on the shelves. Refrigerator biscuits? Bisquick? No way - I have to make them from scratch. I have found my grandmother to be the best source of recipes - as opposed to my mother, despite my mother's recipes being to die for.

Wikipedia is INDEED a wonderful tool and I use it often.

When you know the reasoning behind certain terms it will allow you to make better decisions and possible subsitutions where practical or necessary.

I enjoy checking http://www.recoveredrecipes.com/ which also has a <A HREF="http://www.recoveredrecipes.com/2009/03/vintage-recipe-terminology-and.html">terminology & definitions page</A>

If you are feeling adventurous or enjoy the history lesson (like me) I enjoy: http://www.theoldfoodie.com/ and for those just wanting some history: http://www.foodtimeline.org/

I love vintage cookbooks! My favorite is a Pennsylvania Dutch cooking pamphlet put out by a county extension office in the early 70s. A lot of the recipes were things my grandma told me her mother used to make, like raisin pie and saurkraut. I also enjoy the "recipes" recorded in the Foxfire books. Rodale Press books during the homesteading revival of the 60s and 70s are great, too. I have a recipe for ice cream that calls for all-uncooked ingredients, and grouses at some length about the fact that commercial producers cook their ingredients and then call the result "ice cream" when it should be "frozen custard."

I wish I had some even older cookbooks. After reading MFK Fischer my love for cookbooks is only stronger.

I have several "V" for Victory cookbooks and canning books, circa 1943. I use my mother's Gold Medal flour recipe (ca.1938) for oatmeal cookies. Our family considers it the gold standard by which all oatmeal cookies should be judged. It is thin, delicately crisp, and doesn't have raisins (horrors) or cinnamon in it.

I have a cookbook that was created by White Castle years ago. I'm thinking of taking it on Antique Roadshow!

Originally my trysts with them were limited to a couple of my mom's old cookbooks. But then I discovered Omnivore Books and bought a couple more there. I love them! They afford a glimpse into a different time. Even though they are in English, they sometimes feel like they are in a foreign language I don't understand. Mine sent me scrambling to Google to find out what references to salad oil meant, among other things. :)
Here's one of the recipes I tried out from my buys. The post describes more about this vintage Lemon Chicken recipe and why I adapted it a bit.
http://bit.ly/bBiNwd

I love vintage cookbooks but I rarely cook from them. Mostly I just love to read them and marvel at some of the stranger notions out there. "Ethnic" foods in particular often get such hilarious treatment (e.g. WhiskAway's boil pasta for 30 minutes example). If I pull any recipes they're usually simple desserts -- less of a chance that things will go wrong. :)

bocadelperro and sunny blue, I too have a Wartime cookbook! I bought the American Woman's Cookbook (Wartime Edition, Victory Binding) for $10 at a flea market, and I absolutely love it. I am not too big on bacon fat chocolate cake, but I love that I can finally know what to do with D grade eggs. (Realistically, though, I love making "end of the month I have no money" dinners with this thing, since it's all about what you have on ration.)

My mom's family actually collected recipes and printed their own cookbook back in the 80s. My favorite recipe was for my great-grandmother's weekly bread:
3.5 cups warm water
1/2 cup sugar
3 heaping tsp. salt
3 good tablespoons melted shortening
yeast
2 sifters flour
Let rise. Punch down. Makes 4 loaves.

Plenty of recipes call for lard or oleo and have vague instructions from the oldest aunties. There are also three recipes for gingersnaps which vary by about 1/2 tsp. of spices but are all in there with different mixing instructions!

Ummm...YES! My husband and I cook vintage recipes every single week and post about it on our blog! Collecting vintage cookbooks is an addiction, and once you start cooking from them it is even harder to stop buying them...

www.midcenturymenu.com

My grandma's recipe for Swedish Coffee Bread was published in "From Our Grandmother's Kitchens," by America's Test Kitchen. That's one breakfast treat I will always love. And I'm so glad I was able to share it with the world!