Last weekend, we packed up the Vintage Kitchen, said bon voyage to Nashville and headed north on a big, new adventure. Replacing the city skyscrapers that have been our tour guides around town for the past five years, the tall highway trees fat and billowy with autumn color, escorted us north as we ventured 885 miles towards an exciting new future.
Four states and 15 hours later, we arrived! The destination…camp country. Also known as Phase 1 of a two-part plan, our temporary resting spot for the next two months is a 1940s-era waterside cottage in Pennsylvania. Here, some big little details will get sorted out that will eventually carry us onto Phase 2 – our final destination where a big surprise that has been brewing over the past couple of years will finally be revealed.
In the meantime, the cottage and the lake it sits on, is packed full of interesting things. There are kayaks in the shed, a fire pit in the yard, and plenty of wildlife to keep the binoculars busy. The lake is home to deer, ducks, geese, turtles, herons and a wide variety of songbirds. So far I’ve spotted chickadees, blue jays, cardinals, tufted titmice, woodpeckers and an unidentified grey and black-hatted bird that I suspect might be a nuthatch fluttering amongst the trees. At night, we can see the stars, clear and bright, for the first time in half a decade. The cottage comes with a dock too, which is endlessly fascinating for Indie who hasn’t stopped smiling at the lake since we arrived.
Not alone in her unabashed joy, as it turns out, this area of Pennsylvania is best known for its plethora (literally dozens) of summer sleepaway camps that have been attracting kids from surrounding metropolitan areas like New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. for the past one hundred years. These vintage postcards from the 1930s and 1940s hint at some of the fun that happens here…
I can totally understand the appeal. The rolling hills, the dense pockets of trees and the waterways that wind and weave their way practically around every corner are a paradise for nature lovers of all ages. Even in the off-season on a November day like yesterday, when it was 42 degrees and raining, there was a sense of refreshing exhilaration in the landscape. It might have been the exciting news that snow flurries were in the forecast for part of the day or the fact that its been half a dozen years since I’ve been surrounded by so much nature, but whatever the joy that has buoyed our spirits these days, this part of the state has turned out to be quite unexpectedly enchanting.
The cottage kitchen is a tiny one, but there is room enough to make and share a few vintage recipes while we are here in this pending place between past life and future dreams. So stayed tuned. Even though the shop is on a temporary break while we transition, the blog will be here sharing stories and snippets throughout the season.
Cheers to holiday cooking, cozy cottages and camp country!
Just as we are about to turn the corner into November, and ready ourselves to say goodbye to the entire climatic year of 2021, here in the Vintage Kitchen, we are also getting ready to wholeheartedly say hello to something entirely brand new.
If you follow us on social media this may be old info, as we announced our new adventure there yesterday, but I always feel like the blog deserves its own special day and time for such significant sharings. After all, this is where the whole love affair with storytelling began almost ten years ago. Since then, the blog has acted like a diving board launching us into history and the discovery of it from all angles and depths. It’s been habit over the course of the decade to save the best, most interesting stories for the blog, and this one falls right in line. After years of dreaming and planning, it is with complete joy, that I share our biggest (and best!) news yet. The Vintage Kitchen is relocating! Thanks to you and this wonderful vintage community, we have grown by leaps and bounds over the past five years and are now looking forward to expanding into a new (really old!) space that allows for more intricate layers of stories to be told.
Where are we headed? What does it look like? Over the next two months, I can’t wait to share all the details with you as we gleefully embrace this long-awaited and long-anticipated dream.
While we begin this new chapter in the life and times of the Vintage Kitchen, the shop will be taking a small break during November and December but will be back up and running in early 2022. We will truly miss not being a part of the hustle-bustle festivities of the holiday shopping season, but I am happy to say the blog will still be actively posting stories and recipes from history over the course of the next two months – not to mention sneak peeks of our new beginnings. I hope you’ll stop by to read about all things fun and delicious.
In the meantime, cheers to new adventures, to a holiday season that is full of love and life, and to being drunk in the best Baudelaire way…
“One should always be drunk, that’s all that matters… but with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue. You choose. But get drunk. – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
And P.S. If anything has caught your eye in the shop, the last day to place holiday orders for 2021 is Tuesday, November 2nd. Happy shopping and thank you so much for helping grow the Vintage Kitchen.
The groaning board. It sounds like a little bit of a fairy tale word, doesn’t it? Like some sort of subject the Brothers Grimm would have written about? Or maybe something along the lines of an object come to life – Disney style – just like Lumiere, the candelabra, and Sultan, the footstool in Beauty and the Beast. Perhaps at one point in time, tucked inside a book of Mother Goose rhymes there was a sing-song story about a grumpy kid and a clever drawing to match titled simply The Groaning Board.
Illustration by Blanche Fisher Wright from The Real Mother Goose circa 1916
Fanciful speculation aside, the groaning board is no flight of fancy. It’s a real term dating back to the medieval ages that describes a table (or in some cases a board balanced between sawhorses) that was filled to capacity with foods about to be consumed. The groaning part is in reference to the table itself and the noise it might make under the weight of all that hefty pewter and ironstone dishware that was popular in the 1600s and 1700s. Today, we’d think of this type of food presentation more like a buffet, where diners are given an array of delectable options all at once and encouraged to help themselves.
The timeless appeal of a table full of food;) Photo by Luisa Brimble.
Even though centuries have passed, and the way we describe such a style of eating has changed, both situations would be accurate in defining overall sentiment. Whether it is modern-day, colonial times, or medieval traditions, a table full of a bevy of dishes has always represented abundance, decadence, and a carefree spirit of unbridled eating. Cheers to that!
Throughout colonial times, special groaning board dinners were a tradition enjoyed every year during the holiday season. After all the hard work of harvesting had been completed, a groaning board dinner satisfied hearty appetites and celebrated a much-needed break in the yearly schedule.
Acting as a blank slate and a muse, the essential component of preparing any groaning board dinner is a big, empty table.
One of the few remaining places in America where groaning board dinners are still a part of the regular vernacular is in the historic Virginian city of Williamsburg. Each year a traditional groaning board dinner is still hosted in one of the hospitality venues within the historic district known as Colonial Williamsburg.
Giving visitors from all over the world a chance to experience a colonial feast of plentiful proportions just as their ancestors may have enjoyed centuries ago, is just one way the living history museum helps connect people to the past through food.
The start of a feast – groaning board style. Photo by Taylor Biggs Lewis Jr.
Fried chicken, prime rib, filet of fish, oyster soup, cherry trifle, Sally Lunn cake and an assortment of vegetables, puddings and casseroles were typical feasting fare when it came to groaning board menus. And Williamsburg never disappointed in that department.
Shields Taven. Photo courtesy of colonialwilliamsburg.org
A foodie town from the start in 1699, hospitality has always been a big part of this small town’s spirit. Some would even say it is the birthplace. In 1705, an Act Concerning the Entertainment of Strangers was in effect throughout the colony that extended courtesy, kindness, and hospitality to all visitors and travelers. This act was created in order to discourage greed and malicious intent from growing within the colony and to protect the colonists themselves from being taken advantage of by outside entities.
Back then, there was no kinder way to offer a warm welcome than to spoil a stranger with a hot meal, a comfortable place to rest, or a restorative beverage. This obliging, open-door concept and willingness to trust the goodness of people before suspecting the worst created a playground for food enthusiasts determined to offer others a gracious dining experience.
As Williamsburg grew and became an elegant epi-center for politics and progressive ideas, the colonists were very proud of the city they created and were anxious to show it off. It was reported by the mid-1700s that visitors were fought over and fawned over by Virginians from all corners of the city. Pleasantries and invitations were extended around every bend, a continual sense of hospitality floated in the air, and a convivial atmosphere especially surrounding food and the act of eating was present at each and every meal. “And this is the constant life they lead and to this fare every comer is welcome,” wrote a visitor to Virginia in 1746.
The St. George Tucker House circa 1718.
With an eye always focused on the spirit of those founding years, restaurant owners, tavern managers, and innkeepers throughout the past three centuries have strived to present and recreate a collection of authentic meals that represent America’s culinary roots. The first cookbook surrounding the cuisine of Colonial Williamsburg was Helen Bullock’s The Art of Williamsburg Cookery, published in 1938.
Helen Bullock’s Williamsburg Art of Cookery, first published in 1938. It was reprinted many times over the course of the 20th century with a variety of covers from plain brown to colorful patterns like this one. The contents have always remained the same including Helen’s choice to write the entire book in Colonial vernacular.
Since then, the staff of Colonial Williamsburg has continued to encourage home cooks to try their hand at making conventional colonial fare with a variety of publications, tutorials and a growing online recipe archive.
The Williamsburg Cookbook – 1981 edition
Because many of the foods featured in the Williamsburg cookbooks are traditional staples, especially in the southern United States (recipes include pot roasts, pies, stews, gumbos, stuffings, puddings, bread, casseroles, and more) they have traveled time flawlessly. Appealing to generation after generation of cooks and eaters, these long-lived regional dishes have become beloved mainstays in the hearts and homes of food aficionados around the country.
Dishes like this roast duck with fruit stuffing still grace holiday menus today. This photo is from the 1981 edition of The Williamsburg Cookbook.
Such is the case with one of our blog readers, Roberta, who recently mentioned a favorite recipe from a 1970s era Williamsburg cookbook that her family has made (and loved!) for decades. ”The Williamsburg Cookbook belonged to my mother and then was passed on to my sister, who frequently makes the corn pudding recipe during the holidays and for parties. It was a hit, the first time my mom made it in the 1970s and continues to be a party-pleaser to this day,” Roberta shared. This is exactly the kind of heirloom recipe that we love to feature here in the Vintage Kitchen – one that is trusted, adored, and anticipated year after year after year. So it is my pleasure in this post to present Roberta’s family’s treasured corn pudding recipe from The Williamsburg Cookbook, first published in 1971. It is definitely groaning board approved not necessarily in weight but because you’ll want to make a big dish of it and then share it with all your friends and family.
There are many different ways to make corn pudding. Some recipes call for more sugar, less eggs, more milk, less cream, or the inclusion of flour or cornstarch as a thickening agent. Some recipes call for creamed corn instead of fresh, sour cream instead of milk, creamed cheese to make it extra velvety or baking soda to make it extra fluffy. But all recipes contain the same basic ingredients of corn, eggs, milk, butter and sugar. And all produce a similar custard-style pudding in the end.
Helen’s 1937-1938 recipe!
This late 20th-century recipe is a slight modification from the original Virginia family recipe that was first printed in Helen’s cookbook circa 1938. The difference between the two is just an exchange of flour to bread crumbs but all the other ingredients remain the same.
So simple to make, it requires just a handful of pantry ingredients and is a little on the lighter side in comparison to other corn pudding recipes thanks to the use of light cream instead of heavy cream and just a smidge of sugar instead of several. Bake it in a casserole dish and easily tote it along to your next party, potluck, or buffet-style dinner, as Roberta’s family is apt to do, and we guarantee your dinner mates will love it too.
Corn Pudding (serves 6)
3 eggs
2 cups whole kernel corn (If using frozen corn, allow to thaw before incorporating with other ingredients)
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup dry bread crumbs ( I used panko-style bread crumbs.)
2 tablespoons butter, melted
2 cups milk
1/2 cup light cream * (see note below)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 1 1/2 qt. casserole dish. Beat the eggs until they are light and fluffy. Stir in the corn, sugar, salt, bread crumbs and butter.
Add the milk and cream (*Note: If you can’t find light cream at your grocery store, you can make it yourself using whole milk and heavy cream in a 1/3 milk to 2/3 heavy cream ratio. Always use milk to substitute. Do not mix heavy cream with water, as it will break down the fats and make your pudding runny).
Pour corn mixture into the prepared casserole and place dish in a pan of boiling water.
Bake for 50-60 minutes or until custard is set. Serve hot.
With a flavor like sweet cornbread and a consistency like fluffy scrambled eggs, it is no wonder this pudding/custard/casserole is one of Roberta’s favorites. Savory and delicate, it is comforting like macaroni and cheese, light and airy in texture like a souffle, and thanks to the whole corn kernels satisfyingly substantial without being heavy.
(Special note: For all those efficient holiday cooks out there , it is not recommended that you make this dish hours or even a day ahead of time with the intention of popping it into the oven just an hour before serving. The bread crumbs will soak up most of the liquid in that case and the finished effect will be much more firm than pudding consistency. The beauty of this recipe is its soft, pillowy composition so we recommend that you make it fresh right before you bake it).
Intended as a side dish, it is a perfect accompaniment to Thanksgiving turkey, roast chicken, or baked ham making it a dependable holiday favorite. Or serve it alongside roasted vegetables, carrot fritters, or stuffed squash for a meatless meal that is full of fall color. Adventurous cooks might also try adding chopped jalapeno for a little spice, bacon for a bit of smokey flavor, or a sprinkle of fresh herbs like rosemary, thyme, or sage for a bit of color. But really, this historic dish needs no special enhancements to make it any more delicious than it already is. There is a reason why this pudding has been a Williamsburg favorite for almost a century. We bet it will be a favorite for centuries more to come too.
Cheers to Roberta for recommending this wonderful new favorite and cheers to Williamsburg for not only paving the road of hospitality but also continuing to cultivate the good and gracious and delicious traditions of our ancestors!
For further fun, and an engaging historical experience, visit Colonial Williamsburg without ever leaving your kitchen by taking one of their beautiful virtual house tours and discover an array of unique sights and stories that made the first colony in America a place called home.
The Governor’s Palace is one of the historic houses available to tour virtually. One of the unique aspects of this tour imparticular is that visitors arrive by nightfall to the sounds of clip-cloppy horses hooves and torches illuminating the walkway. Don’t miss it – it’s quite spectacular!
Read more about the Williamsburg Cookbook in the shop here. Explore similar American historical villages and their recipes here. And bake the day away with two other 18th century recipes featured on the blog… election cake and Sally Lunn cake.
If you have any favorite family recipes that you’d like to share please send us a message for a possible feature on the blog. We can’t wait to hear all about the dishes that make your holiday table groan with delight!
{Spoiler Alert: This is a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost 13 years ago and how it found its way home in 2021. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrivesand Chapter 2: Meet Angela}
Juice joints, flapjacks, Model T’s, Kelvinators and Radiolas. Mass culture, Sinclair Lewis, giggle water and Gloria Swanson. The Harlem Rennaisance, votes for women and the woman – Edith Bolling Galt. Jazzy foxtrots, upside-down cakes, and the Great Depression. This week we are back with another installment regarding the story of the lost one-hundred-year-old item and how it is finding its way back home after a 13-year quest for answers and owners.
Welcome to Chapter Three of a Monumental Story of Real-life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts. If you are a new reader to the blog, you’ll want to start at the beginning with chapters 1 and 2. If you have been following along since the mystery package arrived, let’s do a little recap to catch up.
It’s been just over a month since the second installment was shared. This is what we know so far…
The lost item is 100 years old.
It was found by a random stranger named Angela, in an office supply store in a suburb of Atlanta, GA thirteen years ago.
Over the course of the following thirteen years, Angela searched for the original owner of the item, but to no avail.
In 2021, a Facebook group helped Angela eventually uncover some clues about the item.
In July 2021, Angela read an archived blog post that connected the item to the Vintage Kitchen.
A few weeks later the item arrived in the Vintage Kitchen via UPS in a cardboard mailer of medium thickness.
The lost item is valuable, important and definietly something that someone would miss.
The lost item is now in the care of the Vintage Kitchen where it will be couriered on to its final destination in the coming months.
The time period connected to the mystery item is the 1920s, so today I thought it would be fun to take a look at what life was like in that decade of American history to help give this piece of the past some context. Perhaps it will help all the armchair sleuths out there figure out some more clues as to what the lost item could actually be.
Known as one of the most dramatically diverse decades, the 1920s saw carefree decadence and life-altering depression. It was a dry decade due to Prohibition which lasted from 1920-1933. And it was the dawning of a new age for women as they fought for their independence thanks to the right to vote amendment passed on August 18th, 1920.
Clockwise from top left: First Lady Edith Boling Galt Wilson; 1920s fashion; Votes for Women badge; hairstyles of the 1920s; the awakening of feminism; actress Gloria Swanson.
The 1920s was the first time that a woman carried influential political power in the White House as Edith Bolling Galt assisted her husband, the 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson after he suffered a stroke during the last year and half of his presidency. Edith not only cared for him physically but also became his social secretary, his press liaison, and his political interpreter shuttling information to him about problems affecting the world. In short, Edith became a critical component in his decision-making process regarding matters of the country.
During the Roaring ’20s, hairstyles were bobbed, waistlines were dropped and the more fun and carefree your attitude, the closer you were to being called a flapper. On the big screen, Gloria Swanson was dazzling movie-goers in the silent movie Something to Think About. Released in 1920, it became the top-grossing film of the decade, earning $9.16 million dollars at the box office. Book worms were buried in the pages of anything and everything written by Sinclair Lewis – who authored not one, not two, but five bestselling books in the years between 1920-1930. Can you name which five those were? If you guessed Main Street, Dodsworth, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry then you get a gold star for your vintage fiction knowledge!
Clockwise from top left: bestselling author Sinclair Lewis; top song of 1920 goes to Dardanella; Prohibition signs posted at all bars and restaurants; black culture blooms during the Harlem Rennaisance; and everybody’s favorite automobile, the Model T.
The foxtrot song Dardanella, written in 1919 became the runaway hit of the 1920s just as the first radio stations were forming, bringing music, news, and special programming into homes across the country. Black culture was celebrated in art, literature, and jazz music, giving African Americans their first real opportunity for creative expression and social prominence during the Harlem Rennaisance. For thirteen years from 1920-1933, prohibition made it illegal to get a drink at a bar or a restaurant, but creativity reigned supreme when it came to cocktails disguised in teacups in speakeasies, juice joints, and underground nightclubs.
On the kitchen front, food favorites of the 1920s came in the form of flapjacks, pineapple upside-down cake, cod cakes, and anything served with wiggly, jiggly Jell-O. In the absence of legitimate cocktails due to Prohibition, restaurants got creative and served diced fruit in cocktail glasses, instantly coining the term “fruit cocktail” and making it a popular mainstay on menus for the next forty years. The vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, and the in-home refrigerator were all introduced as modern necessities on the domestic front and the kitchen sink and all kitchen countertops were standardized to a height of 36″ inches (which is still the standard height today too!).
1926 ad for Kelvinator refrigerators that appeared in the Home Builders Catalog.
In the 1920s, urban lifestyles were on the rise as more people fled the countryside and rural sections of America to live in fast-growing cities. Urbanization offered more opportunities in the way of advancement, both financially and career-wise. 50% of the American population traded in rural life for a city setting during this decade. As a result, a sophisticated and stylized cosmopolitan life emerged giving birth to streamlined design favored in the elegant Art Deco movement that mirrored the glitz and glam of affluent city dwellers and their cityscapes.
Throughout the 1920s, westward expansion offered new travel opportunities via railroad to parts of the country that seemed not easily accessible. It also allowed for products, produce, and consumer goods to move about the country at breakneck speeds introducing regional items to a new broader audience. And car travel, thanks to the affordable Model T, and the burgeoning automobile industry that followed, cars made road trips a new possibility, giving birth to an entirely new tourism-based marketplace that included roadside motels, diners, gas stations and repair shops. For less than $300 in 1924, you could buy a brand-new Model T (exact price: $265.00, which is equivalent to about $4,000.00 today), enjoy a turkey dinner at a nice restaurant ($1.25) and stay in a hotel for as long as you liked at $2.00 a night.
Even though the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression would close out the 1920s, overall the decade was viewed on a whole as being optimistic, creative, and progressive. With a focus on innovation and development as well as the arts, feminism, expansion, and a newfound bohemian spirit, the essence of the mystery item is wrapped up in several layers of 1920s pop culture mentioned here, especially surrounding new opportunities and new ways of looking at life. Several clues directly leading to the mystery item are hidden in this post, so keep your eyes peeled!
As discussed in Chapters One and Two, this item involves many more people than just Angela and the Vintage Kitchen. While the story continues to unfold, we will keep revealing new details about the mystery item as we get closer to reuniting it with the people and place where it belongs. In the meantime, If you would like to take a guess as to what the mystery item might be, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Join us next time for Chapter 4 as we talk travel, and set the wheels in motion for transporting the item to its final destination.
A couple of years before the words covid, coronavirus, and pandemic were ever a part of our regular vernacular, there was a school of thought that was running wild around the internet regarding personal belongings. It was a trend, at that point, to say that possessions no longer mattered. That experiences enjoyed out and about in the world were all that was important for an engaging existence. Fill your life with experiences not things. Have stories to share, not stuff to show. Do you remember this? These statements could be seen emblazoned on t-shirts and mugs, travel bags and inspirational posters, wall decals and photographs that ran all over Etsy and Pinterest. Collect moments not things.
It was an interesting, carefree idea. One that adopted a bohemian-type spirit and encouraged a minimal, slightly nomadic lifestyle cut down to the barest essence of tangible materials. Experiences not things was (and still is!) a popular catchphrase that could be hashtagged on social media (#experiencesnotthings) alongside photos of exhilerating experiences like friends gathered at a crowded restaurant laughing their way through a meal…
Photo by Kraken Images.
and snapshots taken of exotic travel to places like Iceland to see the stars or to the Maldives to snorkel or to Bali to find some inner peace. It was a mantra that valued people and places, conversations and connections, over the seemingly trivial day-to-day objects that shared the space of life in our living spaces.
Pekhri, India. Photo by Rahul Dey.
At first, it sounded like a liberating idea. Unburden yourself from the unnecessary stuff that was weighing down your life. It went beyond Marie Kondo and her idea of tidying up, of keeping only the things that brought us joy. This experiences-only viewpoint of life was a bit more enthusiastic. Devotees of this philosophy liked the idea of owning one bowl, one spoon, one plate, one cup. That’s all that was needed in the kitchen cupboard. They liked the idea of one lamp, one book, one plant, one couch. That’s all that was needed in the living room. Two pants, three shirts, two shoes, one suitcase. Life wasn’t meant to be lived at home after all, so how many things did we actually need anyway?
Photo by Annie Spratt
It an ambitious viewpoint. It meant a bland environment at home, but an exuberant, colorful experience out in the world. It placed meaning on an ever-changing horizon and made joy dependent on other people and other places beyond one’s own control. If you valued experiences over things it meant that you weren’t materialistic or a hoarder. It meant that you were adventurous, a thrill-seeker, a bon vivant and on the go-getter. It was exciting. The point of this school of thought was meant to propel you out into the world to live an exuberant adventure-filled life, somewhere between Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and a dogged travel journalist hunting down the next best place to visit, thing to eat, event to participate in. It meant a life that was awe-inspiring, sensational, and worthy of a beautiful Instagram feed.
Then Covid happened followed by lockdowns and a second-guessing of the safety of the outside world. Suddenly experiences weren’t happening. Home was happening. And suddenly the things in our homes mattered, more than ever. Possessions mattered.
Overnight, our interior spaces took on a sentimental glow and objects soothed and comforted our spirits. The wildly adventurous experiences out in the world from the “before days” dimmed and seemed like far-away fantasies tempting, taunting, reminding us of what we were missing out on. Memories of those past experiences enjoyed out in the exhuberant and colorful world were not propelling us forward during Covid with joy in our hearts, they were reminding us of what had been lost. During lockdown, I wondered about the devotees of the experiences not things philosophy. How were they coping in spaces that consisted of one spoon, one bowl, one plate? How was it going with one book, one, plant, one lamp?
Life in the pandemic kitchen!
During the last eighteen months of pandemic life, the things that have comforted me most, apart from my friends and my family and my pets, were the things that the experience philosophy easily dismissed. It was my pots and pans and my deceased dad’s apron. It was a seasoned tomato-red dutch oven and a pair of vintage green plates that look like lily pads. It was Edith Piaf singing on Alexa from far-away France. It was a cutting board put to work every day, a 100-year-old mixing bowl speckled with age, and my grandmother’s gold and green teacups, survivors from the Great Depression. It was fridge magnets that my neice made in the early 2000s – ones that now hold little love notes and words of encouragement sent between my husband and I. It was recipes bound in books from other cooks of decades long ago. It was this blog, and the hunting down of stories for it. It was heirloom items collected for the shop. It was finding connections to things from the past that signaled we weren’t alone in the present.
Fill your life with experiences not things. Have stories to share, not stuff to show. My one curiousity with this philosphy was in the riddle ran around my mind. Isn’t it the stories of our stuff that we want to share? Don’t our things lead to experiences and our experiences lead to things? My grandmother’s tea cups were part of her wedding china when she married in 1933. My tomato red dutch oven saw more action on the stovetop in 2020 then it had in its entire life. My dad’s apron was over 35 years old and contained more memories woven into its fabric than a photo album could ever hold. Each time I opened a cookbook last year, it ignited a new culinary adventure. One that led me down paths to other people and other places. Wasn’t that an experience in and of itself?
Take the pickles for example.
This pickle recipe is not the traditional refrigerated pickle recipe full of vinegar and dill and salt and sugar that gets passed around each summer when cucumbers are growing out of the garden at gangbuster speeds. This vintage pickle recipe dating to the 1970s is a touch more exotic. First off it comes from Indonesia – the next stop on the International Vintage Recipe Tour. Secondly, the pickles were not only a food to be eaten but also a travel ticket to explore a country, a cuisine and a culture that I knew little about. That exploration led to not only discovering a unique cultural Indonesian tradition but also shed light on a powerful understanding of the importance of posessions. How they add context, inspiration and value to our daily lives and our living spaces.
The Tour has been on hiatus for much of the spring and summer due to a special surprise that has been brewing for many months. Hopefully soon, I’ll be able to share more on that front, but in the meantime, when I passed the cucumber baskets at the farmers market each Saturday this summer, and saw them overflowing with pride, I knew it was time to dive back into the Tour with a recipe that featured a mighty grower from a country that understands the value and the power of preserving an abundant life.
Indonesia is home to many interesting things including the komodo dragon, the corpse lily, over 17,000 islands and the second-longest coastline in the world. But one of the most fascinating things about it has to do not so much with its beautiful natural landscape but with its artistic attributes.
In religious sculptures and icons, in the details of interior and exterior architecture, in giftware and decor items, in functional products and even in jewelry and fashion accessories, stylish craftsmanship abounds in Indonesia. Most eye-catchingly in the form of intricately carved art ranging in a variety of mediums from stone to bamboo.
Incredibly artistic in all formats, there is one special type of Indonesian wood carving that carries signifigant meaning in the form of a posession. In the hills of South Sulawesi, artisans make carved icons in the unique likeness of their ancestors.
A tau-tau ancestral portrait figure from the design book Tropical Houses by Tim Street-Porter
These icons, known as ancestral portrait figures, are part of a deeply-rooted funeral tradition that has been occurring in certain areas of Indonesia since the 1800s. Believed to protect the living, they usually stand guard at the entrance to gravesites or tombs signifying the spirit of a deceased person and the presence of a life that once was. Carved from jackfruit, sandalwood or bamboo, depending on the financial status of the person they represent, they are called tau-taus, each one completely unique. Many tau-taus from the past century can be seen in crowd-like fashion tucked into the nooks of cliffs in the South Sulawesi area, near where their human counterparts are buried. Tourists to this area of Indonesia have remarked that seeing all these faces poking out from the cliffs is both a strangely sobering but also comforting scene. Serving as everpresent reminders that past ancestors are always part of present day life, the tau-taus with their companding physical presence and life-like faces watch over, protect and bestow good wishes on the living.
Photo courtesy of Tropical Houses by Tim Street-Porter
In the late 20th century, looting of gravesites resulted in many tau-tau statues being illegally removed and sold on the open market where they have since become collectors items, sought after around the world for both private collections and public museums. It is a haunting notion to think that some of these spirits are now roaming the globe instead of protecting their families back home in Indonesia, but much like a treasured heirloom or an old recipe that gets passed down through generations or traded between countries and cultures, these relics of history have become valued possesions and stories in other people’s lives now. They offer a unique view on an old way of life. One that we may never have known about had they not been jockeyed about in the world. Like present day cultural ambassadors, they humbly illustrate of a way of life that is unique and specific to a particular place and person in time. These are posessions that propel us. They help us understand where we’ve been and where we come from, so that we know where to go in the future.
If we abandoned all of our posessions, all of our stuff, all the things that we identify with in the space we call home in exchange for experiences out in the world, how would we understand ourselves each time we finished an adventure and came back home? In the quiet times, when thrilling experiences are not coming at us from every angle, how would we keep true to what we valued and keep inspired to live a life that holds our interest? That’s the power of a good posession. That is the sentiment we would miss if we didn’t surround ourselves with objects, with things, with stuff that holds meaning to us. Experiences are fantastic, stories are important to share, but its the posessions that we select and care for and hold onto that glue these those two nouns together. If we didn’t have experiences we would not have things. If we didn’t have meaningful things in our life, we wouldn’t have meaningful stories to share. If we didn’t have meaningful stories to share we wouldn’t have meaningful experiences to seek.
This seems like a long road to get to one pickle recipe, but history emits light in unusual ways around here sometimes! And sometimes an abundance of things (whether it be cucumbers, or philosophical conversations, or ancestral artifacts) are exactly what you need to navigate the world during these pandemic times. If you agree or disagree, please send us a comment below so that we can continue the conversation. In the meantime, pickling awaits!
This recipe known as Atjar is a traditional staple in Indonesian cooking, but it is actually a popular componant of Dutch cusine as well. Dutch colonists had control and influence over Indonesia for three and a half centuries, which finally ended in the mid 1940s when Indonesia declared its independence. Up until then, Dutch influence seeped into all aspects of Indonesian life, including cooking. If you ate Atjar in the Netherlands, it would be made with cool season vegetables like carrots, cabbage and cauliflower, but those crops didn’t grow well in Indonesia’s heat and humidity, so the Indonesian version of Atjar evolved to include warm weather ingredients like cucumbers and peppers. Either way, essentially it is a pickled dish of vegetables. The Indonesian version has a simpler, more relish-like consistency while the Dutch version is more salad or chutney-like due to the inclusion of chunkier vegetables and additional spices.
A breeze to make (less than 10 minutes prep time), this recipe is best enjoyed cold from the fridge and can be modified as far as spice level based on your personal preferences. I used a purple onion to add a little additional color, but really any type of onion will do wonderfully well here.
Atjar – Indonesian Pickles
Serves 6
1 cucumber
1 small onion ( I used a purple onion for color)
1 clove garlic, finely minced
salt to taste
1/4 cup white vinegar
4 teaspoons granulated sugar
1 small hot red pepper ( I used a serrano pepper)
Peel the cucumber and split it in half. Scoop out the seeds with a spoon and cut the cucumber into thin matchlike sticks.
Peel the onion and slice it as thin as possible. Add it to the cucumber then add the garlic and remaining ingredients. Chill until ready to serve.
These pickles last in the fridge for a week or longer. If you use purple onions too, please note that they will eventually turn all the ingredients in this recipe a pretty shade of pink after a few days. The longer they marinate, the more dramatic the color change.
Just a little sweet, a little spicy and a little tangy, we loved these pickles best served on fish tacos and turkey sandwiches. Hope this recipe provides new inspiration as you celebrate the abundance of end-of-summer cucumber season!
Cheers to ancestors that protects us, posessions that inspire us, and pickles that add a little zest to life! Join us next time for Week 24 of the International Vintage Recipe Tour as we head to Israel for dinner and dessert – a special two recipe meal to make up for our long absence this summer. If you are new to the blog, catch up on our previous International Vintage Recipe Tour posts here, beginning with Week 1: Armenia.
{Spoiler Alert: This is a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost 13 years ago and how it found its way home in 2021. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.}
It takes a special person with a unique spirit to rescue something from the brink of obscurity and then commit to taking on the uneasy task of finding its home again. It is not lost on me that the word angel appears in the name of the random stranger, the delightful woman, who found the mystery item that began this story in our last blog post.
In Chapter One of this series with the impossibly long name (A Monumental Story of Real-life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts) we began with a few introductory details. There was a century-old item that was lost and then found over a decade ago and recently discovered to be connected with the Vintage Kitchen. It’s a curious case of luck, timing, and careful consideration that guides this whole story from start to finish. As it unfolds over many chapters, the mystery item will be revealed and the rightful owner declared. Each chapter of this series reveals new information, so if you like to solve mysteries, or guess at scenarios this story will be your cup of tea.
In case you need a little refresh, let’s recap all the info we have learned so far about the lost item and the mysterious set of circumstances that surround it…
The lost item is 100 years old.
It was found by a random stranger 13 years ago.
Over the course of the following 13 years, the stranger searched for the original owner of the item, but to no avail.
In July 2021, the stranger read a blog post that connected the item to the Vintage Kitchen.
Last week the item arrived in the Vintage Kitchen via UPS.
In today’s post, we are continuing on with new information about the 100-year-old item and the story surrounding it. I’m pleased to introduce you to the random stranger, the delightful woman, the angel, who changed the course of fate for a misplaced piece of history. One that would have been lost forever had she not intercepted it. Meet Angela…
Angela! Photo credit: Angela E.
Angela lives in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, in the same Southern town where she’s spent her entire life. It’s also the same town where she found the item thirteen years ago. At the time, she was 23 years old and working full-time at an office supply store.
There’s Angela, at work thirteen years ago, at the time she found the item! Photo credit: Angela E.
She remembers the day she found the item well. She was cleaning up an area of the store that sees a fair amount of daily traffic and she noticed that something had been left behind near a workstation. She took a closer look, and immediately sensed that the item had been left accidentally. It was valuable, important, and definitely something that someone would miss.
Angela, realizing the history that encompassed it, looked the item over for any owner identification information. Right away she did find a name on it, so Angela looked in the store’s customer database to see if it matched any work orders that had come in that day or at some point previously. Nothing matched. Next, she googled the name, just in case by random luck she’d find some contact details online. Again nothing matched. At this point, thinking that the person who left it would certainly realize their absentmindedness and come right back for it, Angela tucked the item away on a shelf in the back room of the store for safe-keeping. The day went by. The week by. The month went by. No one came for it.
Initially drawn to the item because of its personal value and historical significance, Angela felt a certain protectiveness over it. There was a vulnerability about it, not only in its physical appearance but also in what it symbolized. As it sat there on the shelf in the backroom of the store, the item spoke to her. So much so that she found that she just couldn’t treat it casually. It was not an item meant for indifference or carelessness. This item was special and unique, in ways that few found objects often are.
For a year, the item sat there on the shelf, unclaimed. Finally, Angela decided to take it home and see if she could locate the owner herself. Confident that it might not be that hard of a task in our digital age of information, she began searching and sleuthing around the internet.
Daydreaming about reasons why no one returned to the store for the left-behind item, Angela’s imagination was alight with possibility. The two scenarios that kept recurring most in her mind were that 1) the person who left the item behind was a traveler passing through town on their way to somewhere else. 2) That the person had died unexpectedly in the days or weeks after leaving it behind in the store. Both scenarios sensibly explained why someone might not return for their belongings. One, confusion as to where it might have been left, and two, a tragedy that would make it impossible to return to the store.
Angela’s ultimate goal for the lost item was always to try and place it back in the hands of the original owner, but should that not be possible, then to try and find someone else who may be connected to the item in some way. If tragedy had indeed struck as she supposed, then there would at least hopefully be someone else to pass the item onto. Perhaps a family member or a friend who would have some association with the name she was trying to search.
Angela’s initial confident, kind-hearted quest turned into a journey that would last more than a decade and was plagued with dead-ends and unanswerable questions. For thirteen years, the item lived with Angela, not only physically in her home among her things, but also in her mind. It moved around her life as life moved around her. In the time between when she first found the item and now, Angela fell in love, got married, had a baby. There were dogs and laughter and love and another baby. There were busy schedules and growing years and life unfolding. There was a third baby and homeschooling and travel adventures and full-time mom life caring for a family of five.
Thirteen years later… Angela with her beautiful family. Photo credit: Angela E.
During all that time that life and love were blooming, Angela never forgot about the item. It lived for a while in a storage box near her bed, and also for a time in a closet tucked out of harm’s way. Most recently it sat by her computer, a continuous reminder of her quest to find the original owner so that she could send it home where it belonged.
Finally, in early July 2021, a lead broke free thanks to a Facebook group that Angela had recently joined. It was yet another attempt to try and track down more information about the item and the owner. In this new group, Angela found a welcoming and knowledgeable community. Within days, thanks to their expertise, Angela was armed with new information about the item and new paths to explore. Like a light switch suddenly flipping on, the information the group shared allowed Angela to quickly find her way to the Vintage Kitchen after finding an old blog post from our archives. The blog post mentioned two very specific pieces of information that the Facebook group helped her uncover. Two weeks later, after confirming that yes, indeed there was a connection between the lost item and the Vintage Kitchen, Angela mailed the item off to ITVK knowing that although we were not the original owner of the item, we would be able to further it on to its final destination. And just like that, thirteen years of seemingly endless searching came to a close. Angela’s caretaking position that began in 2008 had finally been fulfilled in 2021.
The item arrives in the Vintage Kitchen!
I asked Angela what she felt like in that moment when she mailed off the item to the Vintage Kitchen. She admitted to tearing up a little. “I felt appreciated and blessed. To be able to provide so many people connected to this item a sense of joy and happiness makes this such a special thing to be a part of.”
It’s impossible sometimes to figure out why certain people come into your life at certain times but I really do think Angela is wrapped in the stuff of angels. Had she not cared so deeply about the left-behind item she found so long ago, it most probably would have been tossed in the trash. An unceremonious end to a wonderfully unique aspect of history. But thanks to her kind-hearted nature, her dogged determination, and her persistence, patience, and perseverance, she carried this item from the past gallantly into a new future.
As discussed in Chapter One’s post, this item involves many more people than just Angela and the Vintage Kitchen. As the story unfolds, we will keep revealing new details that will get us closer to understanding just how pivotal Angela’s role is in all of this. In the meantime, If you would like to guess what the mystery item is that Angela found, please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Join us next time as we dive deeper into the history of the lost item in Chapter 3 of A Monumental Story of Real-life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts.
The mystery item arrives! Personal information has been covered to respect privacy:)
In a cardboard envelope of medium thickness, a surprise arrived yesterday via UPS. This was the end result of a two week conversation that started with an inquiry into the Vintage Kitchen from a brand-new visitor to the blog. The visitor, who turned out to be a delightful woman, submitted an inquiry about an item that she had found thirteen years ago, and had hung onto ever since in the hopes of one day being able to track down its original owner. Over the years, despite many attempts she didn’t have much luck in connecting this one found object to any one person. Until recently, when a discovery altered her decade’s worth of searching.
As they say, timing is everything, and so is the case here, when one day, as if by magic or perhaps a little nudge from fate, the woman stumbled upon an old Vintage Kitchen blog post that had been roaming around the internet for several years now. Inside that blog post, she found a clue that matched some specific information regarding the item she had found so long ago. In early July, it took less than two emails back and forth between the woman and I for thirteen years of searching to come to a close. Her inquiry was validated. The information was correct. The Vintage Kitchen was indeed, strangely and uniquely connected to the object that had captured time and attention for this woman for so long.
What now unfolds is a tale so serendipitous, I can hardly wait to share the whole entire story. The woman lives in a different state unconnected to the provenance of the item. The item itself is 100 years old. The blog post is the only thing that connected us to each other. Doesn’t this sound like the start to a good movie or an even better book?
Clockwise from top left: The Hunt for the Date Accordions recipe; Charles Lindbergh; the search for the doughnut shop at Pike Place Market; the 1967 take-out window; the rare Chinese mug; the White House letter.
For anyone who has been a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know that we do love solving mysteries from history around here. Our most recent one came last Christmas when it became a community effort to hunt down an obscure Christmas cookie recipe long ago lost to a home baker and her family. But there have been other intriguing stories over the years to figure out too. Curiosity and the search for true origin stories to share on the blog has led to many fascinating discoveries… the decoding of letters written on a rare chinese mug… a west coast search for a doughnut shop… thoughtful speculation regarding civil rights and a 1967 take-out restaurant portrait… expert confirmation that proved a candid 1927 aeronautical photograph was actually Charles Lindbergh flying over Texas in the Spirit of St Louis… and the one that still captures my imagination – the mystery government staffer behind a letter written on vintage White House stationary that was found tucked inside an art book. Not everyone of these mysteries was solved (we are still searching for more info on the restaurant, the doughnut shop and the White House) but as proven in this most recent conversation sometimes it can take years (or decades!) for questions to find their way to the appropriate answer.
Because this tale of events involves more people than just the stranger and the Vintage Kitchen, and because it represents a swatch of history that occured a century ago, this is a story that will evolve over many months as more people become connected to it, and the item eventually finds its way home where it belongs. Like a good book that keeps you reading until the very end, this story takes time to be told properly, so I hope you’ll stay tuned as each new chapter unfolds.
As for the contents of the envelope… what’s inside? You’ll just have to wait and see! But please feel free to submit some guesses in the comment section if you like. We welcome all possibilities!
A cramped pub. Green beer. A parade. A contest for the best-dressed leprechaun. A rousing time. A silly hat. A limerick, a shanty song, a poem about lads and lassies. A wistful ballad sung soft and sweet. In America, that’s a pretty traditional take on St. Patrick’s Day in pre-Covid years, back when camaraderie and celebration could and would run rampant.
This year there will be no raucous clinking of glasses with strangers, no sweaty rock bands stomping out the pace of their songs, or tables stuffed so close together that the entire room sways like one big sea of elbows and shoulders and breath and beer. But there’s more than one way to celebrate the holiday, pandemic or otherwise.
As the only cultural heritage day that has been universally acknowledged and accepted throughout the world, this love of Irish heritage celebrated every March 17th, has meant different things to different people in different parts of the globe throughout time.
In St Augustine, FL in the year 1600, St Patrick (then known to Spanish Floridians as St. Patricio) was celebrated with a gunpowder salute and a day of feasting to honor their belief that St. Patrick was protecting the city’s cornfields. In Boston in 1773, St Patrick’s Day meant a quiet dinner party among a few of the city’s prominent businessmen who celebrated not the love of a country but the love of British-born St. Patrick and his contributions to the Catholic faith in Ireland.
In Ireland at the start of the last century, the national holiday was a day meant for quiet reflection spent in church. For many local, national and international businesses throughout the 1900s and 2000s, the holiday meant and still means a massive marketing campaign that floods the retail world with all things green, lucky and legend-loving.
Here in the Vintage Kitchen, the holiday means the kick-off to springtime cooking. In our Southern neck of the woods, mid-March welcomes strawberry season, onion season, and early leafy green season. The first signs of flowers start dotting the landscape with dancing daffodils and jonquils. The color green in an array of tender shades burst out into the world – on tree tips, on blades of grass, in fresh produce newly arrived at the farmers market. This time of year is when our climate most resembles Ireland’s weather – cool, rainy, sometimes sunny, oftentimes cloudy. It’s the exact weather I remember from my first trip to Ireland many years ago. March marks the month I want to celebrate the country most.
In today’s holiday post, we are featuring five unique recipes from the Emerald Isle that herald the arrival of spring and that will keep you fed, Irish style, from morning til night. Included here are foods fresh from the fields, the streams, and the sea. They are untraditional takes on traditional food gathered from Ireland’s history that I hope will help will inspire your March menus like they always do mine. There’s a stovetop jam you can make in minutes, a soup that spotlights one of the oldest green vegetables in the world, and a seafood dinner that will have you rethinking your love of pork in exchange for this new fare. However you choose to celebrate the day – whether rowdy and pub bound, quiet and thoughtful or fully outfitted in space and spirit with decorations that delight, I hope these Irish themed foods will tempt you into creating some new traditions in your kitchen not just today but for the whole new Spring season ahead as well.
Currant Scones with Strawberry Preserves
There is long-standing uncertainty in the baking world when it comes to England, Scotland, and Ireland. It seems no one can quite determine which country invented the scone first. Lucky for us, all three countries make wonderful versions. This recipe for currant scones is made even better with the inclusion of Irish butter and fresh strawberry preserves made on the stovetop from one carton of fresh berries. Since we are now entering strawberry season, this is the perfect time of year to make your own homemade jam with fruit at its most flavorful stage. If you are like me, and somewhat intimated by the home-canning process, and making your own jams and jellies seems daunting, this strawberry preserve recipe is the next best thing. Made in minutes from one carton of fresh berries and some added sugar, it is simple, quick to prepare, and gives any store-bought jam a serious run for its money. Not as shelf-stable as jarred jams and jellies, this version only lasts for about 7 days in the fridge but heaped on top of a warm scone it’s so good, you probably won’t even have it around that long. Pick the ripest, reddest, more fragrant strawberries you can find for this recipe and you can’t go wong.
Currant Scones with Strawberry Preserves
Makes 10-12 scones
1 cup wheat bran
2 cups unbleached bread flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup cold Irish butter, cut ino pieces
1/3 cup dried currants
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg, beaten
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. In a large bowl, stir the bran, flour baking soda, sugar, and salt until well blended. Using a fork mash up the butter in the flour mixture until the it resembles coarse crumbs. Mix in the currants, then quickly stir in the buttermilk and egg to form a soft dough.
Turn the dough out onto a lighlty floured work surface and pat it to 3/4 inch thickness. Use a glass or biscuit cutter that is 2″ inches in diameter, cut dough into rounds and place on a cookie sheet. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until golden brown.
Strawberry Preserves
Makes 1 1/2 cups
1 basket fresh strawberries
3/4 cup cane sugar
Rinse strawberries and remove green tops. Place berries in a medium saucepan and mash them coarsely (either using a potato masher or your hands). Cook the strawberries over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they begin to thicken (about 10 minutes).
Reduce the heat to low, add the suagr and stir until it dissolves. Increase heat to medium and boil, stirring frequently for 20 minutes or until the mixture thickens to thick jam-like consistency. Remove from heat and let cool. Store in an air-tight container in the fridge for up to one week.
Watercress and Lime Soup
Next up on the menu is Watercress and Lime Soup. Packed with nutrients, watercress is one of the oldest and healthiest leafy greens on earth dating all the way back to ancient times. Containing Calcium, Copper, Iron, Magnesium, Manganese, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, Phosphorus, Potassium, Riboflavin, Selenium, Thiamin, Vitamin A, Vitamin B6, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Vitamin K and Zinc, it grows wild in clear, slow-moving streams all over Ireland.
Often used in Irish cooking like spinach, it appears in all sorts of hot and cold dishes as well as fresh salads, and on sandwiches. Watercress Soup is a traditional heritage food that usually involves potatoes, but this recipe, adapted from the kitchen of Adare Manor in County Limerick changes things up a bit by adding lime juice and removing the potatoes.
Adare Manor is a 13th century Tudor Revival-style castle that has a long and storied history of family ownership. Now it serves as a luxury hotel and golf resort.
The result is a creamy soup with a lot of depth, thanks to the peppery watercress and the tangy lime juice. Like the optimal seasonal timing of the strawberry preserves, this is a lovely springtime soup that blends flavorful watercress with cream and butter. Thin but nourishing, it is ideal fare for the rainy weather March and April often bring and shows off the bright bouquet of spring onion sets that are now coming into season.
Watercress & Lime Soup
Serves 6
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 leek, white part only, chopped
3 celery stalks, chopped
1/2 cup diced celery root (if you can’t find celery root substitute 1 small white potato (peeled) and chopped and one extra stalk of celery, chopped)
6 cups vegetable broth
2 lbs. watercress
1 cup heavy whipping cream
Juice of 4 fresh limes
Salt & Pepper to taste
Freshly shaved parmesan cheese to taste
In a large soup pot over medium-low, heat the oil and saute the onion, leek, celery and celery root (or potato/celery stalk substitute) until tender but not browned, about 12 minutes. Stir in the vegetable broth and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the watercress, raise the heat to high ad bring to a boil. Remove from heat and puree.
In a deep bowl, whip the cream until soft peak form. Add the lime juice to the soup puree and mix thoroughly. Then gently fold in the whipped cream until well blended. Season with salt and pepper. Serve in bowls with shaved parmesan cheese and a sprig of watercress for garnish.
This recipe, like most soups gets better the longer it sits. The lime retains its flavor and helps keep the color of the soup bright and green even after a few days in the fridge. For a heavier meal, a nice companion is a baked potato or a few slices of rustic country bread.
Seafood Sausages with Chive Sauce
The last two spotlights on Irish cooking for the springtime kitchen feature two recipes in one, although they can both operate independently as well. Fish based in one and sauce based in the other, both feature go-to ingrediants (seafood and chives) favored by Irish eaters all over the country. Salmon and cod are the two most commonly enjoyed fish in Ireland. This recipe contains both, along with the addition of scallops, turning it into a trifecta of seafood-loving delight.
Originating from the kitchen of Caragh Lodge, an ideal nature lover’s getaway that has sat on the shores of Caragh Lake in County Kerry since 1875, the former house now turned hotel has been associated with good fishing and good cooking for more than a century.
The recipe, Seafood Sausages with Chive Sauce is similar to crab cakes but in a sausage shape. Protein-laden, it is an extravagant dish that you might reserve for special occasions or jubilant merrymaking holidays like today when you want to surprise your dinner mates with something out of the ordinary. Rich, filling, and full of flavor, the sausages are fun to make, and they involve a unique technique. Like a fleet of canoes bobbing on the Irish Sea, the sausages are simmered in plastic wrap where they steam and plump their way into shape before being rolled in bread crumbs and sauteed in butter. Once plated, they are drizzled with more butter in the form of a silky chive sauce. The result is a totally decadent dining experience that sits on the same level of other indulgent foods like lobster with drawn butter, Eggs Benedict, and Beef Wellington. Colorful and unique, this is a recipe that offers much in the way of interest and would be lovely for other spring-time holidays like Mother’s Day or Easter in addition to St. Pat’s.
Seafood Sausages with Chive Sauce
Serves 4-6
12 oz salmon
1 tablespoon butter
4 oz. cod filet, finely diced
4 oz. scallops, finely diced
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons fresh chives, minced
2 egg whites
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1 cup fine fresh bread crumbs
2 tablespoons butter
Finely dice 4 oz. of the salmon. In a large saute pan or skillet,melt the unsalted butter over medium heat and saute the cod, diced salmon, and scallops for 5 minutes or until opaque. Remove from heat and season with salt, pepper, and chives. Set aside.
In a blender or food processor, puree the remaining 8 oz of uncooked salmon. Add the egg whites, salt, and pepper and process until smooth. Place the pureed fish mixture in a bowl set inside a bowl of ice and slowly whisk in the cream.
Add the sauteed fish and mix to combine. Refrigerate mixture for one hour.
Remove fish mixture from fridge. Place one soup spoon size dollop of fish mixture onto a piece of plastic wrap and shape into a sausage.
Roll it up and tie a knot at each end with kitchen string. Repeat with the rest of the mixture.
Bring a large pot of water to a simmer and poach the sausages for 10-20 minutes depending on size and thickness.
When the sausages are done look for the plastic wrap to take on an air bubble shape. The sausages should be plumped up like hotdogs get when boiled in water, and the sausages should be firm to the touch. (The firmer the sausages are the easier they will be to roll in the bread crumbs and saute in the pan without breaking apart). While the sausages are cooling make the Chive Sauce.
Once the sausages have fully cooked in the water remove them to a baking rack and let them cool completely (about 30 minutes).
Roll the sausages in bread crumbs. Melt the butter in a large saute pan over medium heat and fry them until golden brown on each side.
Chive Sauce
3 tablespoons dry white wine
3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon minced shallots
One pinch of pepper
1 tablespoon heavy whipping cream
3/4 cup butter, cut into pieces
1 tablespoon fresh chives, minced
In a small saucepan combine the wine, vinegar, shallots, and pepper and bring to a boil over high heat. Boil until the liquid reduces to about 1/2 tablespoon. Add the cream and boil again until it begins to thicken. Whisk in the butter, a few pieces at a time keeping the sauce just warm enough to absorb the butter as you whisk. Add the chives. (If your sausages are not ready to serve at this point keep the sauce on low heat and stir occasionally until the sausages are cooked. Drizzle the sauce over the sausages and serve.
As mentioned earlier, both the sausages and the sauce are lovely together but also lend themselves to enjoyment with other foods. The chive sauce would be delicious drizzled over baked potatoes, eggs or tossed with pasta. The seafood sausages would be wonderful crumbled on top of a salad, stuffed inside a summer tomato or spread out on toast points. Kitchen creativity rules the day when it comes to these two recipes, including experimenting with different blends of fish for the sausage and different types of herbs for the sauce.
The thing I love about Irish cooking most, is the country’s ability to blend fresh ingredients with comfort foods. Cream and cheese and butter are rife in so many recipes but when balanced with fresh vegetables they don’t feel overwhelming in the gastronomy department. And I love how there’s a little bit of everything for everyone in Ireland – whether you prefer humble provincial food or fancy fare, there’s something to please every palate.
Cheers to Ireland and to Spring and to new foods and flavors on this happy St Patrick’s Day! Hope your day (and your season!) are the most delicious one yet!
Hello, dear kitcheners. Hope everyone is having a cozy holiday and enjoying something delicious. I wanted to send out a little Merry Christmas post last Friday with well-wishes for the holiday and a photo of the outdoor Christmas tree we made for the city birds this year, but the December 25th bomb explosion in our city waylayed those plans. The explosion happened just a half-mile away from where my husband and I live. Fortunately, everyone we know is safe and fine, but the whole event was pretty nerve-wracking. We lost internet service for three days, so that’s what stalled the happy holidays post, but that time offline gave me a chance to think about this post and all things that brought real joy to a year that can only be off-handly described as challenging.
The Nashville skyline as seen from mid-town. September 2018
To everyone who checked in on us over the holiday, I just wanted to say a special thank you. I don’t often write about our local home base of Nashville here on the blog, because I always like to think of the Vintage Kitchen as a universal place that defies roots in a specific city, state, or country. But on certain occasions, local events and local situations do affect the workings of the Kitchen and therefore require some recognition. Like the highs and lows that punctuated every week in this calendar year, the holiday started off lovely with a snowstorm on Christmas Eve. How rare and enchanting! Then in the morning, there was a bomb and the city was changed.
In other years, other Christmases, this is what 2nd Avenue looked like during the holiday season…
I’ve walked this street a million times on my way to the French bakery for baguettes, on my way to the library for research, on my way to dinner at some favorite downtown restaurants. With its sparkly trees and century-old brick buildings, the atmosphere on 2nd Avenue during November and December is usually a reliable guarantee. It always hums with cocktail fueled celebrations, Christmas music pouring out of the bars, and a sense of bustling adventure as merrymakers drift from one entertaining music venue to the next.
Renowned in town as the section of the city that contains the most concentrated collection of Victorian and early 20th-century commercial warehouses, it has an enchanting aesthetic that blends the contemporary with the historic. Horse and buggy carriage rides line the street as country bands croon and tourists from all over the world traipse up and down, in and out, and all around the brick structures that have lorded over this side of the city since the 1860s.
Unfortunately, that environment is no longer a guarantee anymore. This is what 2nd Avenue looked like this Christmas…
(AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
On the National Register of Historic Places since the 1970s, the buildings of 2nd avenue for the past 170 years have told stories of Southern history that date back to the steamboat days of the Victorian era. Located just one block from the riverfront, they are especially significant in regards to the role they played in the commercial trade occurring along the vital Cumberland River during the 19th and 20th centuries.
With loading docks on the riverside and retail sales space on the 2nd avenue side, these tall, elegant and imposing warehouses were all-encompassing, enabling entrepreneurs to handle all sides of their business including shipping, receiving, distribution, and retail sales all in one place, all in one space.
Evolving with the times for different needs and uses, most of the buildings along the waterfront have been able to retain the unique architectural details that hint at what wharf life was like in the 1800s. Rounded doorways, intricate moldings, barely visible painted signs peek out from their facades. Side doors, basement entrances, industrial windows, weathered wood, hand-forged hardware, rooftop terraces, even a secret garden in one stretch hint at activities that once occurred. It’s not hard to imagine different days and different eras. In a city that is constantly growing and changing, this set of buildings adds a comforting sense, a grounding blanket, to an urban landscape that grows taller, newer, every week.
But now the bombing has marked these buildings and left the fate of them hanging in a precarious state. All the damage has yet to be completely accessed, but it looks grim for several of the historic structures on 2nd Avenue.
Photo Credit: News Channel 5
It’s impossible to try and sort out the reasoning behind the whole bombing ordeal when information is still being gathered and one man’s mental state is still up to interpretation. Right now all I can do is chalk it up to a really terrible event in a year plagued with really terrible events.
It would be easy to slide into despair about everything that has gone wrong in these past 365 days, especially here in my city, but on January 1st, 2020 I wholeheartedly declared that this was going to be the year of joy and I’m determined, as the title of this blog post states, to wrap up these past 12 months by highlighting the things that did bring joy this year, no matter how big or small. So here it goes, pandemic and bomb explosions and race riots and tornadoes aside, here are the best moments of joy that occurred in the Vintage Kitchen this year…
If you are in a hurry and you need a nutshell, the year of 2020 goes something like this – we cooked, we read, we watched fun things. We donated, we crafted, we communicated. We treasured nature. We treasured life. We treasured any thing that grew in a positive direction. We laughed, we celebrated. We zoomed. We wrote about other times and other places. We researched. We discovered. We cherished anything that birthed a smile or spawned a good time, no matter how silly or fleeting. And we grew. This was the year for patience and appreciation. For understanding and for finding more meaning. This was the year for the Kitchen and for the comfort it brought.
If you have some time to spend over this holiday weekend, here’s a little bit more of an in-depth look at what made the land of the Vintage Kitchen most joyful this past year.
Kangaroo Island
When the wildfires broke out in Australia in January, we were on Week Two of the International Vintage Recipe Tour. Featuring a cake recipe popular in the land down under, we hosted our first-ever donation drive with a percentage of shop sales for the week going to the rescue efforts at Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park via their GoFundMe page. I’m so happy to say that the Vintage Kitchen raised over $100 for the cause. As a thank you on behalf of any and all donations, the Park sends out regular updates on how the animals are doing and the progress that they are making to get everyone back on their feet again. Every one of you who purchased a shop item during our drive in January, aided in this rescue effort, so I wanted to share two updates with you that really made me stop and smile this year. The first is this photo featuring a recovering koala that had been burned in the fires.
Weigh Day! April 2020. photo courtesy of Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park
The photo was taken on weigh day in April, which is an exciting progress report both for the koalas themselves and the rescue team. I just love that the koalas get weighed on a tree pole. So cute! And this one looks so happy and ready to be back on the road to healthy.
In July, the park sent out this 2-minute video. Koalas are not bears, but when they all sit together on their tree branches they look as cuddly as a favorite teddy:)
A Press Feature
In November 2020, our very first International Vintage Recipe Tour dish (Week One: Armenian Stuffed Meatballs) was featured both in print and online with the readers of the Armenian Mirror-Spectator, a weekly newspaper based in Massachusetts. Especially exciting because the newspaper reports on all things Armenia from around the globe including news, arts, culture and cooking, the feature introduced a whole new community of home cooks to the Vintage Kitchen and helped promote not only our love of heirloom recipes but also our love of traditional heritage foods.
Messages From You
One of the most consistent things that helped fuel the Kitchen this year were messages from you. Feedback from shop sales, inquiries about vintage kitchenware and chats about blog posts and recipes peppered email and social media conversations throughout 2020. Here are a few fun snippets shared from within our culinary community that brought an extra dose of joy to the year…
Melissa wrote into the shop with a question about the age of her grandmother’s nut chopper, which resulted in a lovely conversation about family heirlooms. She also shared a photo of her 5-year-old kitchen helper, who is now the fourth generation family member to use (and love) this vintage grinder. How wonderful!
Viktoria, who you may recall from the Recipe Tour’s Austrian interview, sent a note and photo to say that she finally made it to the top of the Stanser Joch mountain this year. In her interview published in late January, when asked about goals for the year she admitted that it was hard to plan given these uncertain times. But one thing she hoped to accomplish was climbing to the top of Stanser Joch. In the fall of 2020 she sent this photo and crossed that goal off her list. How exciting! She joked that it was pretty much the only goal she was able to count on accomplishing this year, but in my book that makes it her best goal. Cheers to Viktoria!
Photo credit: Viktoria Reiter
Blog reader Gwen, wrote in to say that she braved the flambe and made Bananas Au Rhum (featured in this Haitian post) and not only enjoyed the recipe but also was impressed by the fact that she did not burn her kitchen down in the process! Cheers to you and your bravery Gwen!
Fellow blog reader and Vintage Kitchen shopper, Marianne, purchased the 1965 edition of Farm Journal’s Complete Pie Cookbook and then got to baking in her kitchen. She shared this photo of her first vintage Farm Journal foray… Country Apple Pie. It’s a vintage recipe that contains two unusual ingredients – heavy cream and tapioca. She wrote “It was good! You wouldn’t really think there was cream in there if you didn’t know. It makes the juices from the pie into a silky sauce.” Sounds delish! And cheers to a beautiful dessert!
Photo credit: mariedge2033
Laura wrote into the Kitchen this month with a longshot request regarding the possibility of finding a very specific lost holiday cookie recipe that was a favorite of her 83-year-old mom. This humble inquiry opened up a world of wonder around the Vintage Kitchen for days, instigated a deep dive into vintage recipe archives, yielded two blog posts (here and here) and provoked a nationwide recipe search that connected a handful of people across a wave of different social media platforms. This 2020 search for the 1970s Date Accordions goes down as the most quickly solved (and most satisfyingly resolved) mystery of the year! Read more about it here.
The International Vintage Recipe Tour 2020
As you can see from some of the mentions above, the International Vintage Recipe Tour 2020 influenced and instigated many of the joyful moments of this year. The goal set out in January was to cook our way through the cuisines of 45 countries over a 12 month period with recipes that were featured in the 1971 edition of the New York Times International Cook Book. We didn’t make it all the way through the Recipe Tour this year, but I am pleased to say that we at least made it halfway. 21 countries to be exact! Not so bad considering the momentous sandwich of a year that began with a tornado, ended with a bombing and was stuffed with a global pandemic in between.
Highlights from the Recipe Tour!
I am happy to announce that the Tour will be carrying over into 2021, so that we can continue the fun of exploring heirloom foods from far off places. The second-half of the tour will be handled a little bit differently in the new year – it will no longer be the only focus of the blog like it was primarily this year. Instead, the recipes will get peppered in with other kitchen posts throughout the next twelve months. It was a pretty enthusiastic schedule laid out for 2020, with a new country and new recipe featured every week. While those plans were industrious, they left very little room (and time!) to write about anything other than the Recipe Tour adventures. So in 2021, I hope to open up the blog to more posts about a wider variety of subjects and recipes, most particularly bringing back some seasonality to the blog and highlighting holidays once again.
In January we will be kicking off the new year, and the new half of the International Vintage Recipe Tour, with a hunger for Hungary (pun intended!). So stay tuned for more adventures in the kitchen as we continue to cook our way around the globe. In the meantime, catch up on previous International Vintage Recipe Tour posts here.
The Kitchen Garden
Quirky gardening ruled the roost around here this year, thanks to the help of a flourishing experimental garden that included papayas, coconuts, avocados, grapefruit and a Liz lemon tree. Finding new things to grow, new ways to grow them, and new garden subjects to learn about meant a continuous stream of curious growing in 2020. Getting hands in the dirt, clipping, pruning, shaping and fertilizing every week, indoors and out, added a sense of hope and purpose to the pandemic, as well as reaffirming the fact that life continues to grow and thrive regardless.
The succulent garden in particular really grew by leaps and bounds this year, and had to be re-homed to larger containers a number of different times. Two of the homes included repurposed containers – a hollowed-out half coconut shell and a broken vintage Japanese sugar bowl. The coconut was a leftover cooking component of the Ceylon blog post. The sugar bowl was destined for the shop but suffered an unfortunate fall before it ever got there. Now they are both quirky containers that bring joy to the kitchen each day along with reminders that life isn’t perfect and home is what you make it.
The Wormholes of History
The reliable saving grace of 2020 was the research. Whether we were traveling down the wormholes of history for the Recipe Tour, learning about the backstory of shop items or discovering the biographies of true adventurers from the past, it was these curious moments that lent an air of much-needed escapism when the pandemic loomed too large or the political world seemed too crazy. This year I was totally enthralled with these past lives…
Julia and Paul, our resident city mourning doves visited the balcony every day throughout 2020 offering their consistent, reassuring, and calming presence in exchange for a seed tray and a lump of suet or two.
They turned out to be quite the ambassadors for the neighborhood, inviting a host of other feathered friends to dine with them as well. Throughout each day of 2020, we had visits from chickadees, wrens, cardinals, cowbirds, titmice, blackbirds, mockingbirds and an occasional brown thrasher. We loved all these visitors so much that my husband and I made them an outdoor Christmas tree for them on the balcony, complete with white fairy lights, homemade birdseed ornaments, orange slices, dried fruit cups and cranberry swags.
The ornaments were fun to make – requiring nothing more than birdseed, unflavored gelatin and some cookie cutters. I wasn’t sure if the birds who had been used to a full seed tray every day would be interested in these ornaments at all. If this year taught me anything it was to keep my expectations low. But to my surprise, after day two of the decorated tree, Julia and Paul got to pecking away at the ornaments and encouraged the other birds to do so too.
This whole birdseed ornament Christmas tree project was an unexpected reassuring wrap-up to a climatic year. Once you mix the birdseed with a mixture of gelatin and water it sets over the course of a few hours and eventually, the ornaments harden – petrifying into whatever shape they form to. This process kind of reminded me of the year of joy. In the beginning of 2020, I was determined to focus on joy, find the joy, feel the joy. Then one catastrophe after another happened and joy felt harder to proclaim. Harder to find. Somehow though joy found its way. Present in the little nooks and crannies that formed the year. Luckily, those moments, like the birdseed ornaments, petrified and have turned hard and lasting in my memory of 2020. For that I’m grateful. For the joy I’m grateful. And for you and the Vintage Kitchen, in this weird and wonky year, I am grateful. For anyone who bought a teacup or a towel from the shop, shared a story or a recipe, left a note of kindness or support on a post or a story I’m grateful. In the nicest way, you are the glue of joy that stuck this year together.
Now, with just hours left in 2020, I would like to say cheers to this New Year’s Eve. Cheers to the strength that made this year liveable, to the micro-moments of joy and happiness that carried us through from January to December. Cheers to a more calm, peaceful year ahead. Thank you for being a part of the Vintage Kitchen. Onwards and upwards in 2021.
{This is a follow-up post from The Search for the Date Accordion. If you missed that post, catch up here}.
In our last post, we left off with a plea for help in finding a lost cookie recipe for a woman named Laura and her 83-year-old mom, Betty. To quickly recap, the challenge was in finding a specific recipe called Date Accordions that was thought to have originated in a 1950s/1960s era women’s magazine. In her inquiry, Laura provided some details. The cookies contained a date and nut filling and a frosted top. They were baked in a long rectangular dish, cut on a diagonal, and enhanced with a decorative green gel.
Laura knew this whole cookie-finding endeavor was a long-shot. Betty was heartbroken over the fact that her recipe was accidentally thrown out last year, as it was a family favorite. One that they especially enjoyed during the holiday season. But the moment I read Laura’s initial email request, I was hopeful that we would be able to reunite Betty with her baking bliss.
If you do a general search for cookie recipes online, Google will return over 1 trillion of them in less than a second. Narrow down the search to 1950s cookies and Google provides over 2 billion options. Narrow that down again to 1950s date cookies and there are just under 3 million recipes to sort through. Match that with the vast number of cookbooks that have been written over the past century, and all the recipes that have been printed in a newspaper, magazine, circular, pamphlet, or advertisement since the 1950s and you can see how daunting this finding mission could easily become.
Searching through online resources and in my archive of recipes, I came up empty-handed, so the challenge was opened up here on the blog and on social media last week. Could the vintage kitchen community help find this recipe and make Betty’s Christmas wish come true?
Well, dear readers, I have a surprise for you. Of all the recipes in all the world and all the ways to discover them, I am so amazed and so happy to share with you the news that in less than 36 hours of the call going out for help, the recipe for the cherished Date Accordions was sought, found and confirmed. What a true feat of seemingly impossible proportions. Like a grand dollop of holiday magic delivered just days before the Christmas of this horrendously difficult year, the tracking down of this elusive cookie recipe was made possible (effortlessly it seemed!) by two very special people.
I’m a big believer in Christmas angels. I always like to credit them when something extraordinary happens during the month of December. And I love the whimsical ways in which they work. Mostly around for fun stuff, for things that make you feel merry and bright, I have found that Christmas angels tend to revel in mystery and prefer to work in ways that can never be predicted, anticipated, or even expected. Of course in this pandemic year, everything has been wonky and nothing has gone the way anybody thought it would. I think it must have been unusual for the angels too. This year, they visited the land of the Vintage Kitchen in a much more apparent way. This Christmastime, the angels came with names, Ken and Cindy, and they came with real-life identities.
Ken, who runs the Instagram account @housestories_ is a fellow researcher at heart. He was the one who found the initial lead via a brief mention in a Google books snippet. He sent this image to me over Instagram…
As you can see in the page 7 block – there is a mention of a recipe called Date Accordions. How exciting! This was the first reference that displayed both the word “date” and the word “accordion” side by side. This image also cited a source – Family Circle and the year 1972.
The Family Circle Thanksgiving Issue – 1935
Family Circle was a very popular women’s magazine that was published between 1932 and 2019. Originally offered for free at Piggly Wiggly grocery stores in the 1930s, the magazine grew to a readership of millions and was delivered to stores and mailboxes across the country for more than seven decades. One of the most favored parts of the magazine was always the recipe section which kept up with food trends, meal planning, evolving kitchen equipment, and festive holiday treats.
Ideas for Easter – a Family Circle article from the April 1st, 1938 issue
In 1972, Family Circle magazine published a 16 volume series called the Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking. This expansive set of cookbooks was intended as a ready reference guide on all things food, containing recipes that had been featured in past issues of Family Circle magazine as well as ones shared by readers from all parts of the United States.
I researched every angle online pertaining to this specific cookbook series and the Date Accordions, but nothing popped up that would yield the complete recipe. The next best thing was to track down the physical books themselves. Fortunately, I found this set on Etsy…
This is where I met Cindy. The entire FC Illustrated Library of Cooking was available in her shop, OftenForgotten. So I sent her a message explaining the situation including the personal mission we were on for Laura and Betty, and the speculation that the recipe might be found inside her book series.
More than happy to help, Cindy sent this photo less than an hour later…
And there it was. The Date Accordions. Green decorating gel and all! So excited to have an actual recipe to send, off it went to Laura with fingers crossed in hopes that indeed this was the one Betty remembered. Meanwhile, the blog post was making its rounds. Readers were sending in recipes featuring all sorts of date-related possibilities. So many of them were close to what Laura initially described but none of them were exact, and none mentioned the lynchpin – the green gel.
On Saturday afternoon, Laura emailed back…
OMG!!! Katherine!!
I just spoke with my mother and that’s it!!!! She is in tears! She wants me to tell you thank you from the bottom of her heart.
She wants you to know how grateful she is for all the hard work you did and to all your readers out there that helped in this effort!
I also, would like to thank you and all the people who helped with this. Our moms are so special, they sacrifice so much for their family throughout the years. Now being able to make my mother this recipe for Christmas is a small thing I can do for her thanks to you and your site.
Thank you for making our Christmas Miracle come true!
And that my dear readers, is how the Christmas angels work their magic. Or in this case how our Christmas kitchen angels, Ken and Cindy, brought surprise, delight and holiday cheer to an 83-year-old woman named Betty and her family this December.
This has been a rough year for the entire world, full of all sorts of terrible tragedies and sadness and seemingly endless feelings of being stunted, confined, and immobile. Here in the Vintage Kitchen, we are not curing Covid, eradicating hate, or righting all the world’s wrongs, but we did find a lost cookie, which instigated joy. Somehow that feels like a small step forward in the right direction towards a sweeter year ahead.
Cheers to happy endings, to Ken and Cindy who couldn’t have made this post happen without their selfless contributions, and to the rest of the kind-hearted gang (Diane, Corine, Mitchell, Agba, Flo, Marianne, Jorge, Jett, Sofia, Bradley, Pane, Karen, Constantine, Viv and Amy) for your all your efforts in helping to get this lost recipe found.
Most sincerely too, a very special cheers goes out to Betty and Laura and their family. Thank you for making us a part of your holiday season. Hope your date accordions turn out just as you remembered!
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 