Thousands of lives spend time in our kitchens. Every day, every week, every year. Even if your living situation is made up of just one or two people, dozens more move about your cooking space, unseen, whispering stories of history and heritage, of comfort and cooking secrets, of design and innovation, of hopes and dreams. I’m not talking about ghosts here, although maybe if you are an old home dweller you have a few of those too, but I am talking about the neverending inspiration brought forth by generations of cooks, inventors, gardeners, and artisans from years past that have made your kitchen and your cooking experience what it is today.
Hello and Happy New Year! There are so many exciting stories to share this year here on the blog, spanning centuries of history gathered from around the globe, that I can’t wait to get started. As the old adage goes, we have to look back in order to go forward, so despite challenging events occurring in the world on what feels like an overwhelming scale, this year, here in the Vintage Kitchen we are doubling down on sharing good stories about good cooks, making vintage recipes that provide comfort, connection and community, and highlighting moments from history that embrace the joyful celebration of food, friends, family and flowers. This inspiration to pack the year full of joy is thanks to an unlikely source who set the tone for the year on Day 1 of 2025.
Just as the sun was rising over our cold and frosty New England landscape on New Year’s Day, Liz, our seven-year-old potted lemon tree, presented her first, fully formed, sunshine-yellow Meyer lemon in four years. A major feat considering the many trials Liz has faced during much of her life, this gift of a sizeable, perfectly formed, perfectly ripe lemon was just the kind of joyful symbolism needed to set the Vintage Kitchen on the path to positivity and optimism heading into the new year.
Since she first became part of our plant family, I’ve written quite a bit about the life of Liz and the problems she’s encountered, but if you are new to the blog, here’s a quick recap. In 2018, Liz was a young sprout new to the world…
Fast forward a year later and Liz was happily growing bigger and more beautiful by the month, living the metropolitan city life in a sunny window down South. Her first harvest produced not one lemon, but three.
A year later in the spring of 2020, Liz suffered major wind damage from a tornado that blew through town not only breaking apart dozens of buildings in our neighborhood but also breaking a portion of Liz’s main branch and ripping apart 2/3rds of her underground root structure. She survived the ordeal, but just barely…
Not long after, she had a scale outbreak and just after that, she embarked on a South to North move that introduced her to an entirely new climate. By the time she landed in New England in 2022, Liz was looking pretty beleaguered.
Once the greenhouse was constructed in April of that same year, Liz was the first resident to call it home. Even though she was just a mere whisper of a tree at that point, my fingers were crossed that the warmth and the sun and the bright light, plus additional food and fertilizer, would be just the combination of care that she needed.
It took two full years and staying put in the same spot in the same pot, but Liz finally found her footing again thanks to the security of the greenhouse. Now measuring in at over 32″ inches in height, she’s made a substantial comeback.
She might not be back up to 2019 shrub-like status yet, but as you can see, she’s on her way to a full recovery. Over the course of last year, she flowered and formed baby lemons but none stayed on the vine long enough to grow weight and promise. Except two. A raccoon grabbed one of the lemons for a late-night snack but the other we watched grow bigger all summer as Liz herself grew bigger with larger leaves and longer branches. When the winter frost warnings came in late October, I brought Liz inside for the extra warmth and over the Christmas holidays, she rewarded us with clusters of citrus-scented flowers and the slowly ripening lemon.
After watching it turn from lime green to chartreuse to citron and then yellow, last Sunday, in a moment of long-anticipated celebration, I clipped this lovely little fruit from its branch and said a big thank you to Liz.
It takes a long time for a lemon to ripen on the vine. Liz in her entire seven-year life span so far has only brought five lemons to maturity. But the fruit isn’t really the joy of her, nor the point of this story. In the beginning, when she was a young sprout, I may have imagined future lemons by the boxful, but over the course of Liz’s life so far, the thing that I have come to love most about her is her resilience. Her continual attempt to reach towards the light. To keep going, keep growing despite difficulties and disasters. Emily Dickinson wrote the lines… hope is the thing with feathers… but in our case, here in the Vintage Kitchen hope is the tree with lemons.
2025 has started off on a global scale with dramatic, traumatic events – more than we can comprehend these days given the quick succession in which they’ve been happening. While we witness and recognize all these upsetting situations and process them right alongside you, here in the Vintage Kitchen in this new year, we are determined to look beyond the day-to-day news cycles and stresses, and focus our attention on cultivating and creating a space that brings joy, insight and interest to cooks around the globe via culinary storytelling. Following Liz’s lead, I hope the blog this year provides comfort, encouragement and positivity for anyone who needs an extra boost of cheer in the face of challenging times.
Throughout 2025, you’ll find more frequent posts surrounding topics our kitchen community likes most – cooking, collecting, history and gardening. We’ll share recipes and links, highlight favorites of all kinds, recommend good books and new techniques and dive into stories about people and artifacts from the past that have influenced how we approach life in the present. Here are some of the regular subjects we’ll be sharing more of on the blog this year…
The Greenhouse Diaries
The Greenhouse Diaries return with a new vintage gardening book serving as inspiration and instruction for the next 12 months. Poor Leonie and Helen didn’t get as much attention last year in the Fragrant Year series as Katharine Sergeant Angell White did in the first year. I ran into all sorts of troubles with the practicalities of building a scented garden month-by-month, mostly on the ordering and acquisition sides. In the festivity of the series, we were working out a collaboration with a national grower, which in the end didn’t wind up working out at all. As we learned, most growers won’t ship any plants to our neck of the woods before late spring or after early autumn in order to ensure a successful growing experience. That left a very slim window of attempting to add in a year’s worth of plantings in just a few months. This year, we’ve changed direction, revised the garden map, and are working with more achievable goals. I can’t wait to share the new plans and the vintage book that helped inspire it.
Vintage Recipes
It’s setting up to be a delicious year here on the blog with a big batch of vintage recipes that will be rolling out in more seasonable fashion. Throughout the year, we’ll also continue with new posts in the ongoing International Vintage Recipe Tour (year six!) and the Quick Cooking Chronicles.
To ease into 2025, after the hustle and bustle of holiday cooking, we are kicking off the first culinary adventure today with an easy uncomplicated classic – a vintage British recipe for a simple banana bread. The recipe comes from the 1987 edition of The Afternoon Tea Book by Michael Smith. In addition to being one of England’s most well-known food historians and an experienced cook himself, Michael was referred to as “the doyen of English cookery” by the New York Times.
The recipe, simply titled Banana Bread, is soft and sweet and manages to achieve that perfect balance between banana and spice. Ready within an hour, it comes out of the oven the color of chestnuts with a consistency that is smooth and springy in the cutting thanks to the addition of both cream and butter. Enjoyable any time of day, it makes a great breakfast treat or an afternoon snack. And of course, Michael recommends pairing it with a warm cup of tea.
Heirloom Kitchen Stories
Since the blog and the shop work in tandem, you’ll find heirloom kitchen stories in both spots. But the shop tells shorter stories on a more frequent basis (daily) and the blog tells more long-form stories on an intermittent basis (weekly or bi-weekly) so whichever appeals to you, you’ll have one or both to enjoy. Some of our most favorite, most memorable stories turn out to be the humble, relatable ones about everyday home cooks and the recipes, books, and heirlooms that have been a part of their personal culinary journey. Thanks to information shared by a few families around the US in 2024, we have several new personal cooking stories to highlight this winter. One is an exotic love story wrapped around this book…
Another surrounds this 1940s Hamilton Beach milkshake machine…
and another introduces us to this mid-20th-century cook whose culinary journey took her from Kansas to California with a collection of recipes in tow…
Other bits of fun culinary history floating around the shop this winter include stories about a beloved 1970s Greenwich Village restauranteur…
the ancestry of a 1950s West Indian cookbook…
and the life of a famous New York City celebrity hotspot that first opened in 1927…
That of course is just the start. There will literally be hundreds more stories to share in the shop and dozens more to share on the blog throughout the year all highlighting little-known or forgotten people, places, and foods from the past.
1750 House & Garden Updates
This year 1750 House turns 275 years old. We are doing our best to get all the renovations completed before the end of the year so that we can throw a big party to celebrate this big birthday. As projects get finalized over the year, I’ll share updates on the progress we’ve been making since we first arrived in 2022, including new information on the genealogy of the house dating all the way back to the 18th century.
It’s a big year with a lot on the agenda and most likely a few surprises tucked in between the topics listed above. We can’t predict how the world will change in 2025, but we can say that at least here in the Vintage Kitchen, these next twelve months will keep you well-fed and blissfully in touch with stories that focus on kindness, joy and positivity by way of the kitchen. Before, I sign off, I just wanted to note one more thing…
A Note on AI and Our Promise To You
In light of all the current discussion surrounding AI, while it might be influential and important in some areas of modern life, there is no room for it in our storytelling in the Vintage Kitchen shop or on the blog. Last year we had some personal experience with the darker sides of it. I hesitated sharing this information then simply because it was a disheartening situation and definitely did not do anything to improve our creative endeavors, but it ties into my promise to you now, so I’ll share a brief version of what happened for context and clarity going forward.
In April 2021, two big boxes arrived by mail from Europe carrying our first order of French market bags for the shop. I was so excited to include these bags in the shop, not only because I had personally used and adored the same exact bag for many years and could well attest for its competency, but also because I couldn’t wait for other people to experience the bag’s effortless ease and style. Once the bags were all unpacked, in preparation for the photoshoot, I shopped at the farmers market, selecting items that I typically purchased and carried in my own market bag during personal shopping trips in order to illustrate the capabilities of the tote.
Early spring herbs, vegetables, wine, and bread were all gathered from the market for the shoot. When it came to the flowers, initially, I had my heart set on grabbing a couple of bouquets from a vendor who sold locally grown ranunculus in this gorgeous color palette of pink, peach, and coral. But the ranunculus weren’t available at the market that day, so the next best choice was a bouquet of pale purple-pink peonies. With all the market foods and flowers set and styled in place, I photographed the bags from all angles, both empty and filled to the brim with the farmer’s market items so that shoppers could see it in all its various situations as market bag, beach tote, picnic basket and all around shoulder bag. Here’s a sampling from the shoot…
On May 2, 2021, the bags launched in the shop in an air of excitement and joie de vivre. I was so excited to see that our ITVK shoppers found the bags to be equally as useful and they became a lovely staple in the shop. Unfortunately, sometime in late 2023, I was alerted to the fact that my market bag photographs were showing up in other retail places online. The photos were copied from our website, without our permission, and used online to sell similar products by other retailers on other sites. Throughout 2024, my photos popped up on Etsy, Amazon, Faire, Pinterest and a slew of independent shops all selling the same style bag. These are some examples of where they are currently being used by other retailers as of January 2025…
We’ve tried our best to eradicate as many as possible, and many retailers did take them down from their sites at our request, but for all the ones that were removed more kept popping up. All this turned into a very time-consuming endeavor, which in and of itself is a whole other frustrating story for another day.
I wanted to share this information, not to highlight this disappointing act of copyright infringement but to highlight the Wild West atmosphere that AI generates in our current marketplace. This copying of our photographs was not the fault of AI, just lazy sellers and bad business practices, but someone recently mentioned to me that a food photograph I had taken just a few weeks ago was so nicely arranged that it looked fake. Like something AI would have generated.
In telling you all this I just wanted to let you know that we do not, nor will we ever in the future incorporate AI into the Vintage Kitchen when it comes to writing or photography. You can rest assured that everything from the photos we take, to the stories we tell, to the heirlooms we sell are all 100% authentic. They are real items, photographed and written about by real people, that reflect real history.
That’s our promise to you as a shop and my promise to you as a writer and a photographer. All of our heirloom origin stories and blog posts are highly researched – sometimes for days or weeks at a time, and we consult only trusted archives and institutions that have been collecting verified information for decades or even centuries. The kitchen is too full of unique stories, intimate details, and interesting perspectives to leave it up to bots to try to decipher personal human experiences in any meaningful way.
That means periodically you might see a typo, or a misused comma, or an impassioned thought that ran away with proper sentence structure. Even though those writing missteps might not be correct grammatically, we’ll sometimes leave them in the final edit. That’s how you’ll know these posts and our shop stories were written by humans for humans. Here in the Vintage Kitchen, we are not fearful of AI, we just love people and history too much to leave compelling real-life storytelling up to machines who have never fried an egg or baked a cake or curated a collection of favorite objects in the pursuit of personal passion and joy.
Now that that is out of the way, a whole new year of exciting discoveries await here in the Vintage Kitchen. I’m so glad you are here to join us in what I think is the best little community on the internet. Thank you so much for being a part of it.
Cheers to the new year, and to Liz Lemon for being the bright light that leads the way in 2025.
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 