Recipe: Vintage Recipe Clippings: Alice's Recipe Collection

Hello all!

It's with great pleasure that I present Alice's Collection to you! In the next day or so I will begin scanning and posting recipes from this collection here in our Vintage Recipe Swap board. As always, I have mixed feelings of happiness for having these wonderful old clippings to explore and sadness because the recipes have been sold probably because the person who they belonged to is no longer with us. After all, who would willingly give up a collection of recipe clippings that they've compiled for years!


The seller gave me quite a bit of good information about this collection:
"These two cookbooks total over 200 pages of recipes clipped from newspapers, with multiple recipes pasted on each page. A South Dakota woman began clipping recipes from newspapers and pasted them over the printed pages of a 1959 Grain Elevator Directory. In 1970, she received a gift a more modem recipe book with blank pages, designed to add handwritten and newspaper recipes. The collected recipes pasted in the Grain Elevator directory appear 10 be mostly from 1959-1969. Many young women who had grown up during the depression were now married and cooking for a husband and children. They were especially frugal and instead of buying a special book for recipes, it was not uncommon to use a book, such as this, and simply cover the directory's information and advertisements in an otherwise discarded book. The second, and more modem, book of 50 pages, was used after the first book could hold no more recipes. Also, true to persons saving recipes, the books have some additional loose clipped recipes that never got pasted into either book.

Most of the recipes are for desserts, breads, cakes, cookies, bars, and pies, with occasional vegetable, meat, and pickle recipes. The titles of some of the recipes are peculiar, intriguing, delightful, and distinctive, such as: Haystacks, Cockoo Cookies, Dandy Buns, 1882 Doughnuts, Telephone Bars, Witches Hats, Peter Paul Mound Cake, Julia's Liver Loaf, Sweet Petals Coffee Cake, Matrimony Cake, Flora's Good Punch, Bishop's Bread, and Enchanted Dreams.

This collection, spanning about 13 years, tempts the cook to bake some of these surprising, amusing, and savory recipes. It also offers entertaining and interesting reading to see how recipes have changed, or survived, over the years."

Here is a 'words to live by' clipping Alice glued inside the front cover of her 1970's recipe book:

RECIPE FOR LIFE
"Be glad each morning when you awake.
You can get out of bed and a deep breath take.
Then think - who can I make happy today?
Cause happiness is free, so let's give it away.
Just give a helping hand or a friendly smile.
These are the things that make life worthwhile!"

Thank you Alice, wherever you are - you are still spreading happiness!

I hope you'll enjoy the recipes and please feel free to share any recipes from clippings that you've collected. Also, we'd love to hear about how you keep and organize your paper recipe clippings.

Recipes from Alice's Collection (click here)

Happy Cooking!
Betsy