Food History: Tips From Grandma's Recipe Archive

On a recent visit home, I received a wonderful collection of my great-grandmother's recipe booklets and clippings spanning the 1920s through the 60s. As I paged through the old recipes and cooking tips, two things stood out…

First, did you know that butter was once its own food group?! In 1943, the United States Government released the National Wartime Nutrition Guide, which highlighted seven food groups, among them butter and fortified margarine. (The other "Basic 7" included green and yellow vegetables; oranges, tomatoes, and grapefruit; potatoes and other vegetables and fruits; milk and milk products; meat, poultry, fish, or eggs; and bread, flour, and cereals.)

However, few cooks at that time were smearing thick slabs of butter on their bread or whipping up decadent pastries and sauces — which brings us to the second big theme in Great-Grandma's clippings: frugality.

Wartime homemakers had to be creative with less. As described in Your Share, a Betty Crocker booklet from 1943, women of America took their positions as "soldiers on the Home Front," which required being ever-mindful of scarcity while ensuring the nutrition of their families. My great-grandmother's cookbooklets and clippings are filled with tips for stretching and substituting ingredients, using leftovers, and storing foods properly to avoid waste.

Not all of these materials are relevant to how we cook and eat today (yikes, all those jellied creations!), but they do have some real value besides curiosity or amusement. I had already begun a stronger effort to curb food waste after reading American Wasteland and now, thanks to Great-Grandma's clippings, I'm considering things even more carefully. Here are a few of my favorite tips:

Your Share (General Mills, 1943)

• Spread the butter thin — prevent the waste of little dabs that cling to plates and are washed off

• Save fresh milk — rinse milk bottles with water, and use in cooking

• Use all of the vegetable — celery leaves in bread stuffings, stews and soups, and roasts

• Roll out leftover pastry, sprinkle with cheese, cut into fancy shapes, bake, and serve with salads or tea

• To decorate a wedding cake, place a single rose across the top or arrange a heart shape in the center using delicate blossoms in season

Metropolitan Cookbook (Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1948)

• Save the water in which vegetables are cooked to make stock

• In cakes with chocolate, raisins, or nuts, replace the sugar with honey, cup for cup

Beyond these particular tips, I've found that my mindset has shifted. I look at the food in my refrigerator and pantry with greater appreciation and perhaps even creativity. My Great-Grandma passed away many years ago, but I am grateful for her recipe collection and the inspiration it brings!

(Images: Emily Ho)

Comments (11)

Love this -- great post! I was lucky enough to "inherit" my husband's grandmother's collection of cookbooks and recipes. It certainly is fun going through this old stuff, very eye opening. I love your comment about "yikes, all those jellied creations!" -- makes me wonder what hot food trends now will give our grandkids a "yikes!" moment.

Also, I *love* that butter was it's own food group! Can we please bring that back? Not really seeing the logic of how the f+v were carved up, but still interesting.

I have indeed cooked from vintage recipes finding them thrifty and nutritious.

I was surprised you didn't allude to the photo of a page on your post about the importance of retaining vitamins in vegetables. Often, we tend to think this is some recent discovery, but as your photo shows, this knowledge has been around a long time.

I don't have the opportunity to grow my own veggies, but I do appreciate the variety that shows up in vintage cookbooks. Again, veggies that are now considered trendy or new discoveries have been around a long time - often in gardens of immigrant or rural families. It was commonplace for city home owners to grow gardens (The Victory Garden of WWI, e.g.), and to keep chickens or turkeys.

I have a cookbook from just after WWII that teaches American wives of the military how to interact with the Japanese people, appreciate and cook their food and try the "exotic" ingredients of the "Far East."

I love collecting older cookbooks because they are really historical documents of how people really lived and often showcase discoveries and trends better than a texbook. For example, I have a few cookbooks that highlight recipes suitable to be served when entertaining in the "rec or recreation" rooms that were just being introduced into average American home building plans and mirror the changing surburban vs. city or rural lifestyle as it developed in the late forties and throughout the fifties. What fun.

I have two russian cookbooks one from 1960's that my great great grandmother gave to my grandmother, and my mother used to like to clip pictures from it. When I was little I liked to sit in the bathroom and read it ^_^

And then there is another one from 1907 written by a Czar's cook. So many wonderful frugal recipes, and descriptions and old ways to do things. It's wonderful.

Everytime I read these, I get a big smile

I have a cookbook from my grandmother (publish date - 1943) and I just loving reading it. I don't know that I could make anything out of it - I think meat is leaner now? but I love reading about how (and why) to pasturize milk.

What a wonderful post! Aside from considering butter as its own food group (our arteries could probably do without that), we could learn a lot from the simplicity of the cooking and the common sense tips of that era.

LOVE this post. I really enjoy reading these types of things about cooking and homemaking 'back in the day'. Thanks for sharing-those little booklets and clippings are gems.

I have a 1923 cookbook from the Franklin Sugar company that was published right at the time packaged foods were beginning to be offered. They have a whole section on the hygenic nature of Franklin Sugar because it was bagged at the factory and not dipped out of a barrel in a dusty store. The treats take some guesswork to make ("Bake in a moderate oven" no times, no temps) but are tasty.
@ilovebutter, I believe the v&f were divided by the vitamins in that group, that also tended to correspond to the color of the veggie or fruit.

@ks sunflower I didn't mention it, but I was really struck by that, too. I read many tips on eating fresh fruits and vegetables, buying produce in season, and growing your own food – these "new" ideas have been around a long time!

You should scan those badboys and share them online! (legally of course... call it archiving or something like that)

Too bad meat rationing ended with the war. Sugar too, for that matter. That would be the best thing that could happen to us as eaters these days.
OTOH, I wonder how much of our overconsumption of these things came about as a result of previously imposed limitations?

Those are fantastic! My gram recently passed and I found myself in possession of a large number of vintage cookbooks from the 40s through the 80s. I mean, like every church cookbook in the tristate area. Some of the real winners are a jello cookbook from the 50s where everything is made into a mold. And a wartime polish cookbook.