Similarly to now, people worried about their weight a hundred years ago. A 1923 cookbook, The Calorie Cook Book, contains lots of menus and recipes for people who wanted to lose weight. The book contained menus for a week for each season of the year. Here is the Sunday Spring Reducing Menu.
Author: Sheryl
1923 Kraft Cheese Advertisement (with Recipe for Spinach Timbales)
A full-page advertisement in a 1923 issue of Ladies Home Journal for Kraft Cheese piqued my interest. It contained a recipe for Spinach Timbales. From time to time I see timbale recipes in hundred-year-old magazines and cookbooks. Timbales back then were creamy vegetable or meat mixtures that were put into individual molds and baked.
The advertisement made the claim that Spinach Timbales were tasty and so nutritious they could be considered a prescription. With a claim like that – and, an attention-grabbing image of the timbales – I decided this was a must-try recipe.
My Spinach Timbales didn’t look like the ones in the old advertisement, though I tend to think that they were more visually appealing than the ones in the old drawing (but I could be prejudiced since I made them). The Timbales were tasty, and reminded me a little of Spinach Souffle.
I used custard cups as the mold when I made this recipe since I don’t have timbale molds. I’m actually not even sure what a timbale mold is — though based on the drawing in the advertisement, I think that it may be narrower and higher than a custard cup.
I finely chopped the cheddar cheese when I made this recipe to try to get a similar look to the drawing – though the cheese melted when I baked the timbales and didn’t stay as small chunks, so shredded or grated cheese would work just fine.
The old recipe didn’t include a recipe for the cheese sauce, so to make it, I just made a white sauce and added cheese to it.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Spinach Timbales
2 cups cooked spinach, chopped (I used 2 cups frozen spinach that I briefly cooked.)
2 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1/2 teaspoons salt
dash pepper
2 tablespoons cheddar cheese, shredded, grated, or cut fine
cheese sauce (see below)
1 hard-boiled egg, sliced
Preheat oven to 375° F. Put egg yolks, milk, butter, salt, and pepper into a mixing bowl; beat until combined. Stir in the cheddar cheese and spinach.
In the meantime, put the egg whites in another bowl and beat until soft peaks form.
Fold the beaten egg whites into the spinach and cheese mixture. Spoon into greased custard cups. Place the custard cups in a pan with hot water that comes to about an inch below the top of the cups. Bake for 30 – 40 minutes or until a knife inserted in center of the mixture comes out clean.
Remove Spinach Timbales from custard cups after baking.
To serve: Spoon some of the cheese sauce onto plate. Set timbales in the cheese sauce. Top each timbale with an slice of the hard-boiled egg.
Cheese Sauce
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
dash pepper
1 cup milk
1 cup cheddar cheese, grated
In a saucepan , melt butter using medium heat; then stir in the flour, salt, and pepper. Gradually, add the milk while stirring constantly. Add cheese, and continue stirring until the cheese melts and the sauce thickens.
“What will we have for dinner?”
A hundred-year-old home economics textbook had a short section on planning meals:
The Planning of Meals
“What will we have for dinner?” Nearly every day in the year the average home hears this question. Sometimes the query comes very close to the meal hour and means that time is too short to prepare certain foods. This haste frequently means a hurried telephone call or a trip to the nearest store and the purchase of such materials as can be made ready very quickly for the approaching meal. This method is costly in time, energy, money and disposition, and should give place to a better plan. In a very smoothly running household there is a more or less definite and regular time for giving thought to the food question, resulting in a written meal plan and the making of order lists. Meals should be planned at least one day in advance, and very frequently it is advantageous to plan for several days. This results in better food, in less confusion, worry and waste, in lessened work, in a smaller cost, and in greater satisfaction to all persons in the household.
Economics of the Family by C.W. Taber and Ruth A. Wardall (1923)
I’m intrigued by the concerns and suggestions. In some ways the advice seems on the mark and in other ways it feels very dated. We don’t call the store to order groceries. (I actually was surprised that the textbook authors apparently expected most families to have telephones in 1923.) But we do plan menus, shop for ingredients, and try to keep the cost of food down.
Old-fashioned Nut Pastry Rolls
When I make a pie, I often have left-over scraps of pastry dough, so I was intrigued by a hundred-year-old recipe for Nut Pastry Rolls. These rolls are made by rolling out pastry dough (and it works fine to re-roll left-over pastry dough scraps), cutting it into rectangles, then spreading with jelly and sprinkling with chopped pecans, and rolling like a jelly roll and baking.
The Nut Pastry Rolls turned out well, looked attractive, and were tasty.
Here’s the original recipe:
“Paste” is an archaic term for pastry dough that was commonly used in recipe books a hundred years ago.
When I updated the recipe, I listed ingredient amounts for making approximately 10 rolls – though this is an extremely flexible recipe and the amounts can be adjusted based on the number made.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Nut Pastry Rolls
pie pastry for a 1-shell pie (or use scraps of pastry dough left-over after making a pie crust)
1/4 cup jelly (I used currant jelly.)
1/3 cup pecans, chopped
Preheat oven to 425° F. Roll pie pastry into a rectangle 1/8-inch thick. Cut into 3 X 5 inch rectangles. Spread jelly on the rectangles, then sprinkle with the chopped pecans. Roll each piece as for a jelly roll, then place seam side down on a baking sheet. Bake for approximately 12-15 minutes (or until lightly browned).
1923 Hires Household Extract Advertisement
This hundred-year-old advertisement makes it sound very economical to make homemade root beer. I wonder how much a bottle of commercially manufactured root beer cost back then.
Old-fashioned Rye Griddle Cakes
Do you ever decide to make a recipe because you want to use up an ingredient that is in your cupboards? Well, this is one of those times for me. I wanted to use up a bag of rye flour that has been lingering in my kitchen for too long, so when I saw a recipe for Rye Griddle Cakes in a hundred-year-old cookbook I decided to give it a try.
When I selected the recipe, I didn’t have particularly high expectations, but I was very pleasantly surprised. The Rye Griddle Cakes (or pancakes to use more modern terminology) were absolutely wonderful. They were hearty and lovely with maple syrup. They don’t taste like rye bread, since rye bread often has additional flavorings like caraway or anise – but rather have a milder flavor. And, as an added bonus, the only flour this recipe calls for is rye flour, so it is a gluten free recipe. [2/18/23 update: My original post contained incorrect information. Readers who commented on this post noted that rye flour contains gluten – so this is not a gluten free recipe.]
Here’s the original recipe:
I am not sure why the egg is beaten until light, then combined with the milk before adding to the other ingredients. Maybe the recipe author was beating everything by hand. When I made this recipe, I just put all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl and then beat with an electric mixer.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Rye Griddle Cakes
1 1/2 cups rye flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 cups milk
Put all ingredients in a mixing bowl; beat until combined.
Heat a lightly greased griddle to a medium temperature, then pour or scoop batter onto the hot surface to make individual griddlecakes. Cook on one side, then flip and cook other side.
1923 Home Economics Texbook Discussion Questions
I’ve been reading a 1923 home economics textbook. It’s fascinating to see the questions for papers and discussion in the book. Some of the questions we still ponder today. (Should children be paid for doing work in the home?) Others are too gender-based for comfort. (Should a boy have some training along the lines of household electricity, plumbing, and carpentry? What should a girl know of these things?)
