Cornbread

 

Warm cornbread fresh out of the oven, placed on the table next to a big pot of hot ham and bean soup. You can’t decide whether to slather your first piece with butter, drown it in maple syrup or just scoop it out of the pan and eat it plain. This recipe makes a big enough batch you could do all three.

Muffins

 

Once again, I needed help deciphering a recipe card. I could not figure out what the B.P. stood for in this one. As usual, when I asked my wife she knew the answer immediately. It’s baking powder. The recipe is pretty straight forward, but the muffins would be anything but plain if your grandma made them for you. She would also know how hot a “hot oven” should be.

Good Refrigerator Dessert

 

I had to have help deciphering the name of this recipe, or I should say the middle word of the name. When I showed it to my wife she immediately said it was Refr, short for refrigerator, so that is what I am going with. Dessert is misspelled, but who hasn’t done that before? I am not quite sure how one would eat it when ready, either. Does it set up in the fridge? Or is it a drink, what with all of that fruit swimming in very sweet milk?

Macaroni Casserole Italiana

 

Our next recipe in the box is the first non-dessert recipe to be found. It was clipped from a magazine, and I have included the reverse because it holds a curious little quip from an article.

This recipe dates from when Boyardee was still hyphenated. According to the company website the founder was born in 1897 in Italy and named Ettore (Hector) Boiardi. He began as a chef, and then owned his own restaurant before founding and growing his company, which he did not leave until 1978. His name was spelled phonetically so Americans could pronounce it correctly.

The recipe it is both simple and quick to throw together. As for the article snippet on the other side one wonders what the writer would think of the world that an “ordinary wife and mother” lives in today.  

Peanut Butter Cookies

 

These peanut butter cookies would look the way I remembered them looking when I was a kid. It’s because of the ball and fork method mentioned at the end, giving the cookies their distinct wavy ridges once they had baked. 

7UP Salad

 

The combination of 7UP and lime Jell-O seems like a nice mix. I have noticed that pineapples were used in a lot of mid twentieth century recipes, either mixed in or spread on top. I know they are still used in some recipes today but back then they seemed to be everywhere, along with pimentos.

 

Molded Salad Tropicale

 

To Lessie from Marvel. This appears to have come from a list of recipes that were typed up on a sheet of paper then cut apart and distributed to the various participants of the banquet, with personalized instructions. After reading the innocuous ingredients on the left one is not prepared for the horror that lurks on the right. Any of that mixed with Jello would be bad enough…but ALL of it?! I wonder if eating this “salad” was some kind of a Methodist penance for bad cooking.   

Cherry Pineapple Cake Salad

 

Just a few recipes in and already we have run into a duplicate. This looks like the “official” version of the previously unnamed recipe that was jotted down on company notepaper. Once it was written out on a card and given a name why keep the other one? Oh well, I made the rule for this blog that everything in the box, from front to back, will be included. So here is the next one.

Banana Bread

 

This recipe for banana bread looks like it was either a much used favorite or suffered some kind of kitchen calamity. We save overripe bananas in the freezer (in just the skins, no freezer bag needed) until there are enough to make a batch of bread. The whole family loves it.

Ice Box Cookies

 

If you are of a certain age you know what an ice box was; if not here is a little primer provided by Museum Victoria:

An article in the New York Mirror from 1838 provides a clear definition of the standard icebox: it 'is a double box, the outside of mahogany or other wood, and the inside of sheet-zinc [or tin], the space between being three or four inches. By filling this space with finely powdered charcoal, well packed together, the box is rendered almost heat-proof, so that a lump of ice weighing five or six pounds may be kept twenty-four to thirty-six hours, even more, if the box is not opened too often, so as to admit the hot air from without. Of course while it is closed the air contained within it, being in contact with the ice, is reduced to nearly the same temperature; and meat is preserved perfectly sweet and good, the same as in winter. The interior of the refrigerator is provided with shelves for the reception of dishes, bottles, pitchers, etc.; and thus, by very simple contrivance, joints of meat are kept good for several days, wine is cooled, butter hardened, milk saved from 'turning', and a supply of ice kept on hand for the more direct use of the table.' (Quote in Ierley 1999, p. 168)
And where did the ice come from? From the Ice House, delivered by the Ice Man.

The very personal and, I think, kind of touching aspect to this recipe is the one word note in the upper right hand corner. 

Jello Cake

 

This second recipe does not have a name, but the stationary could help date it; to be honest that is what caught my attention before the list of ingredients. I have never heard of the company, the telephone number is from the alpha/numeric variety, which I knew of, but the “Des Moines 9, IOWA” left me stumped. I don’t recall ever seeing a number after a city, given before the state. What could this strange address mean? A quick call to my personal time machine (my Dad) explained it.  

The 9 after Des Moines was the Postal Zone, he explained, which was the precursor to Zip codes. According to Old Stuff Only:   

POSTAL ZONES - You may have noticed that many addresses during the period between 1943 and 1963 had a one or two digit number following the city name. These numbers were postal zones. It may surprise you to learn that postal zones were instituted in 1943 during WWII. They were necessary because many postal clerks had gone into the service and the new inexperienced postal clerks were having trouble sorting the mail. The zone system was put in place to make things easier.

ZIP CODES - By 1963, most of first-class mail in the United States was generated by a small number of large-volume mailers, so The Post Office Department devised a plan to speed handling and delivery of letter mail. By this time most businesses had automated mailing systems that could easily handle the 5 digits that would allow mailings to bypass as many as six mail-handling steps. Zip codes went into effect on July 1, 1963. ZIP stood for Zone Improvement Plan.

As for the recipe, how can you go wrong with a chilled jello, sugar, pineapple and cherry cake?

Ranch Dressing

It’s hard to tell if the first piece of paper in the front of the box is a grocery list or a recipe, but since it lists measurements we can assume it’s a recipe and, well, it is in a recipe box. It’s for ranch dressing that is 1/3 ranch dressing. Any thoughts on this one?

Introduction

The story behind this blog started a few years ago when I was asked to help clean out an old run down house in Villisca, Iowa. And no, it wasn’t the Villisca House. I would take home, clean-up and try to sell what I found, and split the money with the owner. This turned out fairly well over the next several months and both the owner and I were satisfied with the results. Among the many boxes I went through there were some items that seemed to have little or no monetary value, including an old, rusty green recipe box full of, well, old recipes. I sat it aside and didn’t think about it again for a long while.

Recently I was cleaning out a part of my basement office and there it was again, the little old recipe box. I got to looking at it, thumbing through some of the contents when the idea of what to do with it began to form. I remembered coming across a website that posted scanned images of found items sent in from readers. I think this is the site.

What I decided to do is scan each recipe, from the front of the box to the back, in the order that the box was found. I also decided I would not go through the box before writing this blog but rather explore it with the reader, week by week, until finished.

I would imagine most of these kinds of things, after fetching some momentary attention, are put in the trash. I have my own recipe box at home that I use with regularity, and after all the years of organizing and adding to it I hate to think that when I am gone someone would just throw it away, but such is usually the case for such seemingly unimportant things. Worth it or not, the contents of this old recipe box will not meet that fate.

I look forward to this exploration, and I hope you will join me!