Vintage Recipes English
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Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Senior (55+)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
introduction cooking vintage recipes. It's been 25 years since I had to say goodbye to my grandmother, but I think of her every day. I know my mother does too and always with a smile. Times are changing. But those of us who are lucky will recall our grandmothers, our even our great grandmothers raised in the teens and twenties, married in the thirties and raising Children during and after the Second World War. This is a whole generation of women whose time was unique and shall never again come to pass raised by victorian mothers themselves. They saw the days of women's suffrage, the lean years of the great Depression and the outbreak of two world wars. They did not enjoy many of the freedoms women have today, but their homes were so often clean and comfortable. Their Children were fed home cooked meals and they often took an active hand in the church and community around them. My grandmother always had cookies usually stored in a tin in the cupboard. Visitors were always welcome and if they weren't quite expecting you for supper, well, they just put an extra potato in the pot. There was always enough to go around. Photo albums are one way we still connect with them, but there's another way we can do that. One way we can reach back through time and spend an hour together. Have you discovered it yet? It's the recipe box. Time travel by recipe card. Nostalgia is a powerful thing and many of us would love to explore the decades of the 19 hundreds in this book. We share with you some of the classics of each decade from the 19 twenties through to the 19 seventies. Some will be food you've heard of but might ever have tried while others might be familiar to you already. These foods would have been cooked on one of the old august stoves if you didn't have one as a child, they were large enameled iron ovens with a stove top and the heat came from a wood burning compartment inside. If you lived in rural area or by electricity or gas. For those in a town or a city. For the really old recipes, the temperature was usually measured by holding your hand out. So some will say only medium or hot oven. Also, people mentioned putting a pot on the back of the stove. There was usually less heat there and your pot wouldn't be in the way. So that's where the expression put it on the back burner came from. By the 1950s and 1960s, most Kitchens would have an electric range, a refrigerator and a freezer. These stoves, as you can imagine, served as a heat source as well. So you often found Granny's rocking chair nearby covered with a colorful homemade Afghan. Another big change this time period saw was the advent of convenience foods. Between the 1940s and 1950s, improvements in refrigeration meant that frozen foods were plentiful and they were cheap. More women were joining the workforce and so frozen vegetables saved a lot of time. Also the number of supermarkets in America doubled during this time. So the market for processed foods, both canned and frozen was exploding. These were prosperous times. People had money to spend. Companies took advantage of this by advertising their new processed foods as healthy and convenient and women were happy to buy them. Sadly. This also meant the end of an era. What used to take a number of people in the kitchen to accomplish was now managed by the mother alone. Now there was less need for a rush of canning and preserving foods in the autumn, recognizing that cooking and food preparation was becoming less satisfying for women. Advertisers started to talk a lot more about entertaining. This put company back in the kitchen at least to some extent. But it was never quite the same. The multigenerational households are gone. For the most part, Children don't stand on chairs to wash dishes in the sink and we don't have friends and sisters coming and going by the back door chatting over a big bowl of peas to shell peeling potatoes are making pickles. But if you look, you'll see a shift happening. We're realizing that the additives and extra salt and sugar and are processed foods aren't good for our families. We're noticing that we've become very dependent on factories and industry and we'd like to be able to do more of these things ourselves things like growing a garden, preserving our own foods and cooking organic foods from scratch and maybe like me, women today are missing that feeling of sisterhood and finding it lonely in our modern kitchens. I've been collecting the recipe boxes from the women in my own family, the handwritten cards and the magazine clippings. And once in a while I'll find a handwritten note or even a photograph. I love to handle these old cards and follow the instructions the way they are written because it makes me feel closer to the women I'm missing and even some I never met. I hope you enjoy them too.