10centsofdates.com offers cooking tips and advice using vintage recipes as inspiration. If you are trying to figure out how to convert your family recipes that just call for a pinch of this and a dash of that, I can help.
The inspiration for this blog was my great-grandmother’s recipes.
Visiting my grandma always meant food. Even if she wasn’t cooking something, I’d pull a cookbook off her shelf and discuss the recipes within. One day, I pulled a wooden box off her shelf. Contained inside were recipes in her mother’s handwriting. I asked to borrow the box and told Grandma that I would bring it back. She agreed without asking me to explain.
At the time I had an idea forming, but hadn’t yet realized the full scope of that plot.
The idea was preservation (and not just because of the pickle and jam recipes). I spent the better part of the next couple of weeks scanning recipes, soliciting family pictures, and researching the best way to create a book where I could have both my great-grandma’s handwriting and a typed version of the recipe.
While scanning the recipes for the cookbook that I would later give to my grandma as a birthday present, my husband and I laughed. Some of the recipes were just lists of ingredients. Others had outdated measurements. One recipe for date cake listed “10 Cents Worth of Dates” as an ingredient. In 2016, we thought that might just be waving a date in the general direction of the bowl.
At the same time I was doing this, I decided to start making some of the recipes to see how they held up. I made a few, but generally gave up actually cooking them because Googling was easier than looking through a cookbook. I liked to read them, but but generally discarded the idea of using them because that just wasn’t the way I cooked. I rarely followed a recipe and tended toward fresh ingredients. There was never a mention of kale or quinoa in the entrees and sides.
But what if I was missing something?
I took my knowledge of cooking and got to work recreating every single recipe. Even the gross ones. As the oldest granddaughter, it seemed like I should give a head’s up to my cousins as to which recipes they may want to keep in the family and which they should ignore. I hope this helps.
As part of their “American Heritage” (our version of “because I said so”) my children got the opportunity to try each recipe. Sometimes it took more coaxing than others.
With all that being said, it’s time to eat something.
