I’m Italian and I love to eat. I was a foodie before the word “foodie” was a thing. My people might have helped create the concept. It wouldn’t surprise me if the person who coined the term “foodie” was Italian.
So maybe it’s no surprise that I also love diving into antique recipes of yore to find and renew dishes of bygone eras. They are fun and often quite colorful, and they give a little window into the past, into a simpler time when people weren’t petrified by back-to-back horrific news stories and had lots of free time to decorate mini Christmas trees with tiny shrimps for all the many holiday parties they were preparing to host.
More from LittleThings: 5 Festive And Tasty Non-Alcoholic Cocktails To Serve Around The Holidays
Some of my favorite places to look are in Amish cookbooks, in any old cookbook I might stumble upon at a thrift store, church collaboration cookbooks (where all the ladies get together and combine their recipes into a book held together with a spindle-y plastic spine), and websites where the authors talk about recipes that their grandmothers used to make.
Here are a few classics.
The aforementioned tiny Christmas tree shrimp cocktail ordeal uses sprigs of parsley woven together in a tree shape atop a foam cone to help hold its shape, which are then adorned with cute little shrimps as delicious decorations. Bon Appetit printed the recipe in a 1974 issue of its magazine, but I have a recipe from even before that in a Christmas cookbook from the 1950s. What is so fun and neat about these recipes is that they are passed down from generation to generation. More recent versions of the recipe utilize kale stalks as trees — and even popcorn shrimp instead of naked shrimp. The finer details are up to you, but this tree is a guaranteed party hit.
In addition to the shrimp tree, every holiday shindig reaching for olden-day recipes needs a big bowl of party punch.
My mother used to make this concoction using a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale, a big can of Hawaiian Punch, a bunch of ice, a few cans of fruit cocktail, and scoops of ice cream sherbet on top. In re-creating this recipe for our family’s Thanksgiving dinner, I used seltzer, cranberry juice, a bag of frozen fruit, and scoops of sorbet so as to offer less FD&C Red to my distinguished guests. But the punch wouldn’t have been complete without one of those old-timey punch bowls, which I was easily able to track down for less than $10 at our local Salvation Army. The set came with a large bowl, 2 ladles, and 11 cups (one was missing). It was a holiday recipe for the books and turned out so well, I plan to do it at every get-together we have for the rest of the season and for years to come.
During the pandemic, I was delighted to be turned on by a friend to a recipe for something called a depression cake or crazy cake.
Crazy cake was a recipe from the early and mid-1900s that became popular during the depression and war rationing when it was harder to find ingredients like eggs, milk, and butter (unless you happened to live on a farm), and/or people just didn’t have the money for those items. Thus some clever cook came up with a cake recipe using more readily available household ingredients, such as flour, vinegar, sugar, baking soda, water, and cocoa. Believe it or not, this simple cake is truly delicious and satisfying, and thanks to the vinegar and baking soda, it rises quite nicely.
I even learned accidentally after my sister had picked up a gallon of Amish-made roadside root beer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, that it is, in fact, an easy-to-make elixir stemming from a recipe perfected in the late 1800s that consisted of a few simple ingredients.
The beverage gained popularity quickly and enjoyed an especially hot minute during Prohibition in the 1920s. It’s really never lost its spunk, and here we are, nearly 150 years later, still loving the stuff. Root beer’s main ingredients consist of sugar, yeast, water, and sassafras (a bushy tree) — or more commonly in major brands, sassafras flavoring, once testing led to theories that sassafras causes cancer and has since been labeled as a carcinogenic substance.
These are just a few of the fantastic examples of midcentury meals and delights that you can find if you’re willing to turn your taste buds toward the past and see what lands on them.
