Sometimes a recipe calls for just the egg whites, and I end up with a couple extra egg yolks that I’m never quite sure how to use. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but sometimes I just toss the extra yolks. However, eggs are now so expensive that I want to keep them and use them in a day or two when making scrambled eggs or some other dish. I was pleased to come across directions for keeping egg yolks in a hundred-year-old cookbook:

TO KEEP EGG YOLKS

Egg yolks, if they are unbroken, may be covered with water and kept for several days. The water should be changed daily.

Source – Home Economics and Cook Book: The Daily Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), Supplement – March 13, 1925

 

I have a wood recipe box that looks similar to the one in the picture. It was a gift at my wedding shower. Apparently, recipe boxes (or to use the term in in the old ad, “recipe cabinets”) have been considered good shower gifts for at least a hundred years. I wonder if brides today receive recipe boxes. I’m guessing not.

My recipe box and the cards in it are well worn. I’ve pulled recipes out of it on a regular basis for many years. It contains many special recipes that I got from my mother, mother-in-law, friends, and relatives. Each brings back lovely memories. My recipe box is not a Fannie Farmer one. It says on the bottom of my box that it is a Woodcroftery product.

When caring for a sick child it is important to keep them hydrated and well-nourished. Often a child will eat little while complaining that nothing tastes good. An article on serving food to sick children in the January, 1925 issue of American Cookery began:

The sick child that loved his “land of the counterpane” in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem by that name must have had a resourceful nurse or mother to prepare interesting food for him, or he would have been just as irritable as any other youngster, recovering from the measles or grippe.

My first reaction to the sentence was not about food for a sick child. Instead, I started digging deeply into my brain trying to remember what “counterpane” and “grippe” meant. They’re words I’m familiar with, but that I don’t think that I’ve heard since I was a child. “Counterpane” is another word for bedspread. I did an online search and found Stevenson’s lovely poem: The Land of the Counterpane. “Grippe” is an old-fashioned word for flu.

The article continues with suggestions for making food more appealing to sick children:

• The appearance of the tray has much to do with tempting the convalescent child. For instance, by folding a tent out of white wrapping paper, and standing it over the dishes, commonplace foods become delicacies of interest, particularly if a tin soldier stands near the tent to “guard your health.”
• A little girl would, likewise, eat her food with more gusto if her tray were covered with a box that could be used for a doll house after dinner.
• One little girl, who was too ill to go to a picnic she had planned attending, enjoyed her supper that night just because her mother thought to bring it to her in a picnic basket.
• Children who have eaten toasted sandwiches in the sandwich shops will be delighted with three-deckers stuck together with toothpicks, and will eat them, even when the sandwich filling is composed of oft-despised scrambled eggs or stewed prunes.
• Graham crackers are good,  as well as nutritious, when served with milk. Try putting a few drops of hot syrup on the graham crackers, and standing an animal cracker on each one. It will be lots of fun to eat the circus parade along with the milk.
• One child even learned to like grapefruit when his mother put the juice in a bottle, and let him pretend it was medicine.
• To encourage the finicky child to eat up all the food on his tray, a meal ticket may be issued and every time the food is all eaten the ticket is punched. When a certain number of “meals” have been punched the child may be given a small reward.

American Cookery (January, 1925)

It can be challenging to make an omelet. I often struggle to successfully fold them. Here are directions in a 1925 home economics textbook for folding an omelet:

To Fold an Omelet

Run a spatula underneath the omelet to loosen it. Make a slight incision with a knife through the middle of the omelet at right angles to the handle of the pan, and fold the omelet over upon itself away from the handle of the pan. Grasp the handle of the pan in the right hand, placing the back of the hand underneath with the thumb pointing away from you. then turn the omelet upon a platter (see Figure 40).

School and Home Cooking by Carlotta C. Greer (1925)

Often hundred-year-old cooking tips and advice still are relevant today, but sometimes the old advice is very different. Here are some tips for cooking poultry in a 1925 cookbook:

No poultry should be cooked before it has hung for at least eight hours. In many large cities there are live poultry markets and each bird is killed as it is bought. These birds should be hung overnight before they are drawn and prepared for cooking.

When any fowl or game is being prepared for cooking, it should be thoroughly washed inside and out, and if there is an unpleasant odor from the inside, rub it with a little cooking soda. If the odor disappears quickly the bird is good to eat. If the odor persists it is best to cut the bird open to see whether there are any bruises or recognizable bad places. A fowl that has a bad odor had better not be eaten.

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The young chicken lends itself to many kinds of savory cooking. The older chickens are better for soups, stew, and salads. If a fowl is very old it will hardly make even a good salad because the white meat is apt to be coarse and somewhat tasteless.

Leftover fowl and game is excellent for pies, stew, croquettes and any number of casserole dishes. They should be combined with a rich gravy to give the best results.

The Home Makers’ Cooking School Cook Book (1925)

Most churches I’ve attended had potluck dinners and picnics where people bring a dish to share, but some churches have dinners with menus. Sometimes these dinners might be fund-raisers. A hundred years ago churches also held dinners. Here’s some church supper menus in a 1925 magazine.

Oh dear, I’m never memorized most of these cooking facts that a hundred-year-old cookbook says I should commit to memory. I generally just look at a recipe rather than memorizing all sorts of relationships between various ingredients.