What You Need to Know About Vintage Cookbook Recipes

What You Need to Know About

Vintage Cookbook Recipes

Recreating Recipes from the Past

With everything that a person can find on the internet, one of my favorite obsessions is vintage and antique cookbooks.  I would personally like to thank anyone who has spent time scanning these gems into pdf files so that I can spend hours browsing through them.  The older and more unique the better. 

Not only do they provide interesting recipes, but these books were also intended as tools for the housewife and include tips and techniques for cleaning, organizing the home, child-rearing and caring for invalids.  Many Victorian and turn of the 20th-century cookbooks include entire sections of recipes for the infirmed.  

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The recipes, themselves, give a good indication of the social and political times in which they were written.  Elaborate 10-course meals are included in Golden Age cookbooks, while Women's Suffrage and recipes that help aid the war effort are some of the subjects in the early 1900s.

Women's Suffrage Cook Book

Making recipes from old cookbooks has its own problems and issues.  First, many of the recipes lack explicit instructions, oven temperature, and cooking times.  Lots of times I have had to rely on what I know about cooking in order to make the recipe practical and achievable.

These are perfect examples of recipes missing key details

Food availability and taste in many vintage recipes are unappealing.  I know that is my personal opinion, but lack of seasoning, offal (the non-flesh parts of animals such as intestines, sweetbreads, and hearts), animals that shouldn't be eaten (turtles and songbirds), and lots of lard, has caused me to skip and avoid many recipes.  

Ris de Vean = Sweetbreads and Snipes???

When reading vintage cookbooks it is important to remember that they are full of outdated cultural depictions and stereotypes.  Most cookbooks were intended to assist a woman in staying at home and serving her husband and children. It was not unusual for them to be explicitly marketed towards women becoming the "perfect" housewife.  

Yet, with all that, it does not deter me from spending hours online looking through hundreds of old cookbooks to see if I can find recipes to recreate.

Here are a few of my favorite places to find vintage cookbooks:

Archive.org Cook Book Collection


Michigan State University: Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project

Historic Cookbooks Online Pre-1700 - 1923

Project Gutenberg Cook Books

And if you are looking for something very old, check out Medieval Cookery