Ancient American Housekeeping Wisdom
Jun 11th 2009 · by Catherine Osthaus
I am extremely excited to share with you a great link to a book I have just discovered (it is a scanned “ancient cookbook†published in 1869). Sometimes in life we may need some grandmotherly guidance and wisdom. It seems since the invention of televisions and just over scheduled lives, the art of housekeeping and cooking have been lost. We don`t spend time in the kitchens with our mothers or grandmothers anymore.
A lot of us just don’t have any kind of motherly resource and just end up lacking. We may learn the hard way with trial and error or never learn these necessary skills at all. I don’t know about you, but I was thrust into marriage and parenthood without knowing how to cook and sew and once my girls arrived I needed some major help!
If you have a close grandparent, I encourage you to find some of their old cookbooks. You will be shocked at how different the recipes are compared to today’s cookbooks. A lot of traditional ways have been lost in the modern age of convenience.
So here are some ancient recipes that you won’t find in a modern cookbook from Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers.
How to Brown a Calf’s head with the Skin On
How To Cook Rabbits and Squirrels
How To Make Brain Cakes
(We are of Polish Heritage and my mother said that eating Brain was a delicacy in her youth!)
How To Make Giblet Pies and Soups
There are 5 pages dedicated on how to eat oysters (just keep hitting the *next* button at the top of the page)
Blackberry Cordial
“This is valuable medicine for children in summerâ€
And how to pickle, preserve, make catsup (just keep hitting the *next* button at the top of the page)
How to make liver sausage and head cheese
The rest of the book deals with how to keep house, herbal and medicinal food remedies (butter oil was used for soothing the stomach for violent vomiting and dysentery)
Take note at all the simple and plain recipes there are in this book. Yet they are so extremely nutritious and loaded with fat, milk, eggs, gelatinous stocks, brains, liver and feet. I also saw tongue amongst the recipes but did not link. I remember having had cows tongue as a kid and it being extremely chewy but tasting good nevertheless.
There are recipes in there that are good for the “delicate personsâ€. These recipes are high in fats from “rich milk†and eggs, butter and highly gelatinous from boiled pig’s feet. Calf’s foot gelatin with cream is “nice for the sick personâ€. And note that this milk and cream would be raw and unpasteurized.
Spend some time exploring this book and hopefully try out some recipes and remedies.
Note what ingredients are not included in this book:
- Canola oils, corn oils, soy oil and other “new” industrial vegetable oils.
- Skinless, boneless chicken.
- 1% and 2% milks.
Animal fats, bones and organs where used for medicine and good health. This is how our great grandparents and grandparents ate before heart disease, cancer, and obesity became epidemic.
Share your thoughts!
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade.
To your health,
Comments RSS 
Very interesting!
I love collecting old cookbooks and perusing my grandma’s shelves . . . I remember one recipe in an old, old cookbook of hers, I think it was for roasting a whole pig or something, started with, “Have a man dig a hole” – fantastic!
Thank you for the links! I’m going to have to go reading . . .
Best,
Sarah
Wow, I can’t wait to go through all these links. Even the things I DO know how to do, I want to see how it compares to what’s here. (Can’t say I’ve ever boiled a calf’s head, though!) Thanks so much for posting this!
Kelly p.s. I stumbled this, hopefully it gets a lot of traffic!
What a great resource!
Thank you so much for sharing this in today’s Fight Back Fridays carnival.
Cheers,
KristenM
(AKA FoodRenegade)
Great post, I love vintage cookbooks, I wish I had the space to collect them! I wanted to share something you may want to add to your list, there is an online vintage ground meat cookbook at meatbook.com, complete with overly colored food photos and 50’s clipart. Hope you enjoy it!
Heidi
@Sarah – your comment made me chuckle. Thanks
@Kristen and Kelly – Thank you for stumbling and tweeting this post!
@Heidi – I checked out meatbook.com and it has some wonderful looking recipes. I was intrigued by the liver dumplings and the heart patties with gravy. I did notice that a lot of those recipes contain MSG in the spice mixture. MSG is a very powerful neurotoxin and can be found in the spice section of the grocery store.
I will have to try some of those recipes (without the MSG).
GREAT post! I stumbled it!
I love old cookbooks. I have a little cookbook I got from Scotland that has recipes for boiling sheep’s heads. I’m looking forward to learning how to make haggis.
Wow this is really interesting! Thanks for posting it Catherine!
I’m gonna tweet your post and a pdf of the book!
Regards,
Michelle.
Thanks for sharing this traditional wisdom! I look forward to reading it.
My Grandmother is 89 and I’m always asking her how they gardened and how they lived when she was a girl. It’s disturbing how quickly our diets have changed.
Thanks for the great links.
I would love to be able to sit with my Gramma and ask her things that I never even thought of when I had to opportunity to do so. I wish I could go back in time and live in the 1800’s. Despite the high def tv’s and high end everything of today’s world, I think the days of yesteryear past were saturated with the rich colors of being truly alive and one with nature and each other.
Thank you to all that have stumbled and tweeted this post!
@Laryssa- It is absolutely wonderful that you have a grandmother to turn to! We moved closer to my children’s grandmother and they they absolutely cherish this relationship. I often wonder how different their life will be to ours. It seems that each generation has its own transformation.
@Roxanne – Ever since my teenage years I have been fascinated with the local Mennonite community. Some communities live without electricity, telephones, cars, washing machines or any other “modern” gadget. Not all Mennonite communities are like this but there is a select few that hold off on adopting modern life. Not only that but they are close to and take care of their aging grandparents.
This is awesome! I was just thinking today about how much cultural knowledge we’ve lost in a relatively short amount of time and I am excited to read these links. Thank you for putting this together!
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