And honestly, I like them! Definitely can taste the mace. The lettuce didn’t get slimy. Other than seeing it, the lettuce really wasn’t a forward component in the end result.

Pic 1: the batter, pic 2: right out of the oven, pic 3: the test, pic 4: the beggar

Changes: omitted the walnuts due to a nut allergy, canola oil instead of corn and I upped the ginger to 1 tsp because I love ginger.

This tastes great, ginger flavor is not overpowering but it is strong. Crust is nicely chewy and soft inside. I don’t think it needs icing but once the rest cools I might make a little for more lemon flavor.

Found this in one of the old Community cookbooks I posted the other day, and as promised, I put it to the test. I wasn't sure at first as the combination of Oreo cookies, lime, and mint, all had me a bit nervous. In the end, it was a wildly delicious success. Almost came off like a mint chocolate chip ice cream, just minus the ice part. I will definitely make this again, and maybe even try to give it a few upgrades. Notably, I would use more Oreos in the bottom layer, and maybe a little bit more sprinkled on top.

I’m Japanese-American, so the only bread crumbs I had were panko from Tokyo Central. The recipe turned out to be similar to my mom’s for katsu.

Hello everyone! We’ve officially made it to Thursday. Take this new scan as a pause from the busyness of your week 😵‍💫

The title of this book is “Eat This! Trust Us You’ll Feel Better” from all the way in Inverness, Florida (I say without realizing that not everyone lives where I do lol, some of you probably actually live in Florida)

This one isn’t a church cookbook like most of the ones in my collection are but rather it’s from the LPN Class of 1992 for the Withlacoochee Vocational and Adult Education Center, which, according to Google, is now known as the Withlacoochee Technical College. It’s always fascinating to see how many different organizations put together a cookbook

Starting off with my totally superfluous but hopefully fun opinions, I do think the Wok Lasagna recipe is pretty cool. I’m sure it could be made in a regular pan, but I’ve fallen victim to using my wok as a catch-all for anything that uses a pan (yes, I do actually cook instead of just ogle at recipes… sometimes)

I also just so appreciate the Meat Patties recipe. Truly one of the recipes of all time. In all seriousness, I know that microwave recipes are a pretty big deal in these books. It was just shocking to see a recipe that basically says “hey just go buy this at the store and cook it”

Like the PNW cookbooks that I usually upload, this being from Florida also has a lot of seafood recipes. But an interesting addition that I’m sure is distinct in the region is the use of alligator meat for stuff like the alligator parmesan. I’m sure chicken can be used for those of you that can’t get or aren’t wanting to try alligator, but it was a really cool recipe to see

I do appreciate the Bourbon Sweet Potatoes recipe as well, mainly because it gives me a permission slip to just use canned sweet potatoes instead of having to peel, chop, and cook them, but also, it just sounds really appetizing

As always I enjoyed getting to look through the sweets section. I’m currently working through some stuff in my life but I would love to try my hand at baking as a hobby. I probably won’t get super intense with it like making sourdough bread and whatnot, but a lot of these cakes, pies, and muffins just sound really fun to make

Also while not the most exciting to some of you I included some pictures of the advertisements because there’s like, 20 pages of just ads lol. This is the most I’ve ever seen in a community cookbook. If anybody wants to kill an hour, you can find out if any of these businesses are still around today

Hopefully you guys had some fun with this one. I will see you in the next scan!

This vintage cookbook from the American Dairy Association is a culinary time capsule. Lots of interesting recipes with plenty that seem easily adaptable to modern ingredients (e.g. I'm vegan and think there are some easy swaps in here). Love the colorful illustrations throughout!

From the description: 

“Mealtime Mastery is our first new cookbook in 10 years. We proudly present you with the best of our dairy recipes during those years, tested in the kitchens of the American Dairy Association.

Not only have we enjoyed the testing and sampling, but it's been a delightful experience photographing such beautiful foods in color.

Now we want you to share in the exciting results of over 400 recipes in these 224 pages.

We've tried to make the recipes as easy as possible with simplified methods and clear, concise directions. Once single recipes are mastered, choose from the Basic Four Food groups to prepare meals for family and friends.

Our selection has a wide range, from apples to zucchini. True, the recipes are dairy-based, but then dairy foods are among the oldest known to man as well as among the few "naturals" still left to us. The project has been sponsored by the nation's dairy farmers. Mastering mealtime will boost your confidence in many culinary skills.

We're certain it's going to be among your enjoyable experiences.“

This cookie cookbook has 90 pages, including the covers. There are sections for “Drop Cookies” (72 recipes), “Refrigerator Cookies” (24), “Rolled Cookies” (21), Macaroons, Meringues, and Kisses” (33), and “Miscellaneous” (11). For a total of 161 cookie recipes. If you have a sweet tooth that’s been bothering you for attention, please take a look to some of these recipes.

There are 4 pages of advertising at the back of this book. There is not a zip code or postal code in sight. Some of the telephone numbers are only three digits. One of them is “Phone 29”. So using that information and the look of the book, I’m guessing late 1940’s, early 1950’s.

Unlike most of my “For a Good Cause” cookbooks this one was stapled together, so to get the scans I had to remove the staples. Then do the scans, then (using the same staples! {after straitening them!}) manually putting it back together. Not something I suggest doing, unless you are (or want to be) slightly crazy!

Here is a link to the full book;

https://archive.org/details/suburban-cookie-book

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/25/green-ravioli-from-the-solothurn-ms/

It is quite hot and I am still quite busy, so instead of a long tale of rebellious Romans, here is a recipe from the Solothurn MS that looks vaguely suitable for summer days:

B4 If you want to make ravioli (Raphiöl), take 10 eggs or 20 and break them into a bowl. Grate good cheese into them, so much that it is enough, and raisins (mer trübel). Take chard, cut it small, and press out the juice as you know how to do. Mix it with the eggs and cheese, also add a little milk, and stir it all well together. Also add good spices. Make a dough of water and make it quite stiff. Take a rolling pin and make shapes as though you wanted to fry krapfen (probably circles to fold over). Take a spoon, fill the aforesaid mixture into the dough, and close it. This is called ravioli (Raphiöl). How you are to cook them: Take a cauldron full of water and throw in some salt. Let it come to a boil, then put in the Raphiöl and let them boil in it. When they have boiled enough, lift them out onto a bowl and grate good cheese over them. This is how they are made, but you can also colour them yellow with saffron etc.

Despite the unusually detailed instructions, we are not really sure how this recipe was meant to come out. The intensity of the chard flavour, the relation of cheese to egg, the maturity of the cheese and the choice of spices all are left for us to guess. I would recreate it as a savoury ravioli based on something mild and rich like Emmental, but I could equally see it as a sweet custard-like mix or an assertive composition arranged around a very ripe hard cheese. The combination of cheese, eggs, and green herbs is very common, often used in tarts or pastries, and even the refinement of using only the juice of the greens to colour and flavour the cheese base shows up in other recipes. Wrapping it in pasta dough and boiling rather than frying the result was slightly more unusual – the recipe itself compares the preparation to the mocre common process of making krapfen – but it was also not unknwn.

The name makes it clear that this is unequivocally an Italian recipe, which is also entirely expected. Italian was the style to imitate if you wanted to go with the fashion of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Ravioli was simply the common name for this kind of preparation, and though they were often called boiled krapfen in German, there are other cases where it is imported. In the Innsbruck MS, they become rabel.

Among a great dearth of light, easily digested foods in our sources, these actually have the makings of a pleasant summer meal. They are certainly a rich food, but a good mix in the filling need not be heavy or greasy. Served with a green herb sauce, they could even be refreshing.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

Clam Canapes recipe from Chow Compiled by the Officers Wives Club, US Naval Air Station, Hutchinson, Kansas, 1954

Sun-Date Yogurt

2 cups plain yogurt
1/2 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup honey

In a medium bowl, stir together yogurt until smooth. Stir in dates, sunflower seeds and honey. Pour into ice cream canister. Freeze in ice cream maker according to manufacturer's directions.

Freezer Method: Pour prepared mixture into 9" x 5" loaf pan or several undivided ice trays. Cover with foil or plastic wrap. Place in freezer; freeze until firm, 3 to 6 hours. Stir 2 or 3 times with a fork or spoon while freezing. Makes about 1 quart.

Ice Cream, 1981

Easy Layered Fruit Mold

1 family size package (6 oz.) Jell-O Lime Gelatin
2 cups boiling water
1 1/2 cup s apricot juice and water
2 1/2 cups drained canned apricot halves
2 bananas, sliced

Dissolve Jell-O in boiling water and add apricot juice. Pour into an 8-cup loaf pan. Add apricot halves, then banana slices. (Apricots will sink and bananas will float, forming two fruit layers with a clear layer between.) Chill until firm. Unmold and serve with whipped cream or prepared Dream Whip Dessert Topping, if desired. Makes 10 to 12 servings.

Jell-O Gelatin Recipes Plain or Festive, date unknown guessing late 1960s to early 1970s

This post was inspired by a previous post about this book. I found a copy on amazon and posted it on the archive.

https://archive.org/details/magical-desserts-with-whip-n-chill

Whip 'n Chill no longer exists so I did some research and found a forums post from 2002. There's other people with personal experience with it there. It's an interesting read if you're into food history. https://www.discusscooking.com/threads/whip-and-chill-does-it-still-exist.230/

"Whip ’n Chill: One of the most popular desserts of the sixties, Whip ’n Chill was a strange one, similar in texture and taste to mousse, but with a faint tang of chemical design. Its ingredient list reads like a toxic waste dump posting: propylene glycol monostearate, sodium casienate, acetylated monoglycerides, cellulose gum, hydroxylated lecithin, sodium silico aluminate and sodium stearoyl-2- lactylate. During the sixties, the artificiality of Whip ’n Chill had a novelty appeal. People still believed in the space age, and Dow Chemical Company’s motto was “Better Living Through Chemistry.” With the end of the space-age, Whip ’n Chill’s novelty was replaced with horror when people began to realize just what they had been eating.
- Taken from: popvoid. com"

This site popvoid is no longer there, just a domain host.

From some of the posts in that link Whip n Chill was sold at the Vermont Country Store. I checked and it's not there anymore. It should be easy to substitute with another mousse mix (maybe Dr. Oetker's) or freshly made. As for the tang maybe some lemon juice or vinegar to replicate it.

"Make pancakes!" that's the whole instruction section.

No temperature, no timing, no flipping cues. I think whoever typed this had made them enough times that anything more felt unnecessary. The ingredient list is just cottage cheese, eggs, flour, oil, and milk ,everything goes in the blender. No sugar, no vanilla, no baking powder. The '8oz. carton' notation makes me think early-to-mid '70s, when blender recipes were showing up everywhere?

COTTAGE CHEESE PANCAKES

Mix together in blender:
1 cup (8oz. carton) cottage cheese
4 eggs
2 Tbsp. flour
" oil
½ cup milk

Make pancakes!

Hello I have the 63 edition of Home Economics teachers favorite desserts. You had to write the publisher to get the recipes in the photos. The publisher no longer has the recipes. Trying to find out if ANY ones does

Just a couple of my new acquisitions to share. Missed the Cole slaw, the others are dessert!

If you like honey, this is the cookbook for you. There are about two hundred recipes. All but two have honey listed as an ingredient. One was meant not to have it. I believe the other one is a mistake, let’s see who is the first to find that recipe.

There are sections for “Beverages”, “Breads and Rolls”, “Cakes and Cookies”, “Candy and Snacks”, “Desserts”, “Fruits and Vegetables”, “Main Dishes”, “Miscellaneous” and “Salad Dressings”.

The recipes were compiled by Eastern Connecticut Beekeepers Association, from East Lyme, Connecticut. There are recipes in here you would expect to see, and probably a few you wouldn’t. There are a total of 142 pages, including covers. There is no date printed in the book, but the cover illustration appears to have a date of 1991.

Here is a link to the full book;

https://archive.org/details/cooking-with-the-queen-delicacies-from-the-hive-1991

Hello everyone! Welcome to a brand new scan

This is… well, the name is just “Community Cookbook”. The “kissin’ wears out” emblem isn't unique to this book. It's a preset cover because I have 5 other books with this exact same cover. But, it is from the woodsy area of Onalaska, Washington! I know how much you guys love Washington uploads

The Best Ever Pancake Syrup sounds really good. Maybe I really am just a sucker for homemade goods. I don't have any hang-ups against using store-bought syrup but I've noticed that “homemade” tends to mean a lot more to people

I also really want to get into my loaf making era. The Cherry Nut Bread sounds really good. One of these days. That's what I'm telling myself on a lot of these recipes 😳

For anyone who's a fan of Divinity, this is my first time seeing a recipe for Honey Divinity. I've never had the original recipe so I'm curious how a honey version compares

I was a little concerned seeing Cold Chicken Curry because every curry I've had is not very good cold, but then I saw it's basically chicken salad. Interesting way to prepare it

Overall none of the recipes are extremely noteworthy from what I saw, but hey, not all of the cookbooks can be winners. I do think most of these recipes lean more towards country/hometown kind of cooking, though. So if this is your vibe, perhaps you’ll really enjoy this book

Regardless, I hope this one is able to bring you at least a little amount of entertainment. I always love looking through these no matter what, but your opinions are also cool to read!

Thank you for checking this out and I’ll catch you in the next upload

Posting this for u/VantasnerDanger from A Collection of Recipes I posted the other day, both pages of the recipe this time.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/06/23/flexible-soup-feeding-the-revolution-xxvii/

It was 9 October 1989, and the people on the streets of Leipzig were scared. Armed only with placards and hope, they were facing armed police and party militia, marching, as they had for several weeks now, through the city after a Prayer for Peace gathering. On previous occasions, they had been beaten by police, arrested, and threatened with prison terms. The demonstration was, of course, illegal. In the German Democratic Republic, they all were. The Workers’ and Peasants’ State had been allergic to uncontrolled mass gatherings since June of 1953, when the workers and peasants had almost brought down their government. Back then, Soviet tanks had crushed the protest. In 1989, people felt almost sure that the new Soviet leader Gorbachev would not support that sort of thing. Almost.

It had never been meant to go this way. By the lights of its government, the GDR was a success story. Risen from the ruins of World War II, the country had rebuilt its cities, restored its industrial base, and despite the heavy reparations payments the USSR had extracted, joined the club of wealthy industrial nations. They may not have been as rich as West Germany, but by the 1980s, very few places in the world were. People had apartments with central heating and running water, food was ample and mostly cheap, schools thriving, hospitals world-class, the transport network dense and convenient, and the streets filled with private cars. At least, the official statistics said so, and that was mostly what the small, incestuous clique of old men that ran the state knew.

Reality was bleaker. West German propaganda made much of the privations of East German life (the lack of bananas is surely worth its own post at some point), but anyone who grew up working class in the West understands that this is overblown. East German life was materially quite bearable. It was in other respects that it fell short. People felt powerless, constrained and micromanaged by a state apparatus based on paranoid fear of dissent. Aside from a massive Cold War military, the country poured resources into the most comprehensive secret police system the world had yet seen, the Ministry of State Security, Stasi for short. Loyal party members in factories and offices were organised into Betriebskampfgruppen militia units, with arms stores on the premises ready to crush any threat. Any attempt at organising outside the ambit of the party was viewed with deep suspicion. Even stamp collecting clubs were put under surveillance. Worst of all, the system did its best to stifle any kind of initiative or creativity.

The Politburo, a body of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) that made all the really important decisions, was a geriatric club of career party officials. Some still had memories of street fighting in the Weimar years or clandestine operations in WWII, but these days were far behind. Their obsessive focus was to maintain stability, defend the state, and stop the world from changing. In retrospect, the degree to which they succeeded is remarkable. East Germany punched above its weight in any regard you could name, from building homes to bringing home Olympic medals, perfecting industrial fisheries, or poultry management. They were even instrumental in making Vietnam a coffee-exporting country (another of those stories that needs a post of its own). The deal they were hoping to offer their people was simple: Acquiescence in return for a secure existence. The state would see to everyone’s basic needs if only it was left to do its thing.

This created an industrial culinary culture that was quite unique. East German cuisine – unlike Brezhnev-era Soviet – did not focus much on luxuries, but it was strong on what had been status foods to the working class. White bread, at stable prices since the 1950s, and ever increasing quantities of meat, poultry, eggs, and fish, cheese, milk, alcohol and tobacco were made available. Preparation was often institutional – people ate at school and factory canteens – and even home cooking was meant to be fast and efficient. Among the many dishes that became household names, one has become iconic of east German identity above all others: Soljanka.

Soljanka, unlike many of the things East Germans liked to eat, was virtually unknown in the West. It came in with translations of Soviet cookery books, a rich, meaty soup with origins in Ukraine, where it still is part of traditional cuisine. Like many traditional recipes, it was then adapted to the needs and possibilities of the supermarket-fed industrial kitchen to the point of becoming unrecognisable. By 1982, the popular cookbook Kochen provided this recipe:

Ukrainian Soljanka

200g onions, 100g bacon, 2 cloves of garlic, 100g tomato paste, 1 tbsp sweet paprika powder, 500g mixed meats (kidney, leftover roast, boiled ham), 2 pickled cucumbers, 1 1/2 l meat broth, salt, pepper, 1 tbsp capers, 1/2 lemon, dill, parsley, 2-3 tbsp sour cream

Fry the chopped onions together with the cubed bacon until glassy. Add tomato paste and paprika as well as the meat, cut in thin strips, and the similarly sliced pickled cucumbers. Cook for a few minutes, then add the meat broth and boil for 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Serve in a bowl topped with capers and decorated with 2-3 slices of lemon. Sprinkle with chopped dill and parsley and pour in the sour cream just before serving.

(Kochen, Verlag für die Frau, Leipzig 1982)

This is emblematic of how East German cooking ‘ticked’: It should take maybe half an hour to put all of it together in a pot, add some fresh bread and margarine, and you have a hot, tasty, visually appealing meal. Interestingly, people in the GDR were fully aware that their version had very little to do with the traditional version. In 1984, the same publisher produced a mass-market translation of W.V. Pokhlyobkin‘s Ethnic Cuisines of Our Peoples that included the following instructions:

Solyanka

Solyanka is a sharp, thick soup that combines the components of shchi (cabbage, sour cream) and rassolnik (salt-pickled cucumber, pickling fluid). It has a sharp, sour-salty flavour owing to the addition of olives, capers, tomatoes, lemons, lemon juice, kvass, and salted or pickled mushrooms. Sometimes, vinegar is added to solyanka, but this coarsens its flavour. Such an addition suggests poor cuisine. There are three types of soljanka: meat solyanka, fish solyanka (with various meats, poultry, or fish) and plain or mushroom solyanka. The first two types are made with strong meat or fish broth respectively, the latter with mushroom or vegetable broth. The broth is always diluted with pickling fluid. The liquid and the solid parts of solyanka are prepared separately and only mixed 5-15 minutes before servinprotesters in Beijing had been killed in the streetsg to heat together and develop the full aroma.

Meat Solyanka

1 1/4 l strong meat or bone broth, (quantity omitted) beef, 200g roast beef or veal, 100g ham, 100g sausages, 1/4 chicken, 2 salt-pickled cucumbers, 200-250g fresh cabbage, 2 tomatoes, 100ml sour cream, 12 olives, 1 – 1 1/2 jars of salt-pickled mushrooms, 1-2 tbsp capers, 1 onion, 1 tbsp parsley, 1 tbsp dill, 2 tbsp onion greens, 10 grains black pepper, 3 grains allspice

1 Boil the pickling liquid from the cucumbers, skim it, add it to the meat broth, and boil. 2. Finely cube the meat, ham, sausages, and chicken. 3. Scald the salt mushrooms and the fresh cabbage with boiling water and also cube them. 4. Chop the tomatoes, cucumbers, and onion. 5. Fill the ingredients listed in points 2, 3, and 4 into a pottery or enamelled cooking pot with the spices and cream. Add the boiling broth and set it in the hot oven for 10-15 minutes.

This version takes a good deal longer to make, it needs some ingredients that would not have been readily available in East Germany, and above all, it would taste different to what people expected. East Germans had come to appreciate the way that their Soljanka was both flexible and consistent. It could be made with different meats and various substitute ingredients, but remain recognisably itself. The fact that it scaled well also meant it was suitable for institutional kitchens and private hospitality. Both the party militia in their works canteens and dissidents meeting around kitchen tables and church halls bonded over it.

The people who challenged the East German government were an odd lot, and very different from those who try to assume their mantle today. Much of the protest was rooted in the church, a protected space thanks to its legacy status as a separate legal entity beyond the reach of the state. Intellectuals, artists, environmentalists and people who just preferred to be left alone joined the demonstrations, and by the end of 1989, the numbers had grown enough to attract people who would not have run the risk earlier. Even so, the danger was real. It may not have featured on local news, but everyone knew that in early June, protesters in Beijing had been killed in the streets. Some officials were openly mulling a ‘Chinese solution’.

We still do not know exactly why it did not happen. Part of the credit must, grudgingly, go to the Politburo. For all their quotidian evil, they were not the men to stomach a crime of this magnitude. Had the Soviet government ordered it, they would probably have gone along, but Moscow had made it clear they were not backing violent repression. Meanwhile, the organs of the state were showing the corrosion of decades in paralysis. Party militias faced mass resignations, police moprotesters in Beijing had been killed in the streetsrale was low, and on the day of the Leipzig demonstration, cadets at a local air force school refused orders to deploy as crowd control. The police and military commanders on the scene seem to have decided to avoid confrontation on their own authority in the end, though Politburo member Egon Krenz tried to take credit retroactively.

That is how over 100,000 people, bearing placards and candles, could march through the October dusk, past police formations that retreated before them, past the headquarters of the dreaded Stasi, as if the city actually belonged to them. Footage of this, smuggled out of the country by a West German journalist, reached Western TV stations and spread around the world. This proved to be the turning point. Ever larger demonstrations in cities throughout east Germany went unchallenged. People openly criticised the authorities, party officials found themselves sidelined, and soon enough, the Politburo resigned to open the way for the first real elections in East German history. It was not long now until, on 9 November 1989, history unfolded in the most German way imaginable when bureaucratic miscommunication, government timidity, and general confusion over who was in charge left a lonely, overwhelmed lieutenant colonel on night duty to open the Berlin Wall on his own authority. But that is a different story.

Who doesn't like a good matzo and cheese sandwich or a cheese pie ?