My Grandma's Vintage Recipes: Old Standards for a New Age

Written by Tracy Falbe

Narrated by Tracy Falbe

A vintage recipe is obviously something from at least a few decades in the past, if not longer. But I feel a vintage recipe also needs to show the character of the time in which it was written. The recipes presented in this collection came from my Grandma’s school notebook that she began when she was 15 years old. She grew up in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, and her recipes reflect the food eaten at that time and place.

Regain the wisdom and creativity of our ancestors who were experts at whipping up something special with tight budgets and limited supplies. You may not be able to find the “10-cent bag of marshmallows” anymore, but modern cooks can still benefit from this collection of 1920s vintage recipes collected by my late Grandmother. In 2012 I discovered her handwritten recipe notebook from 1926 and developed this cookbook.

While updating the directions for modern cooks, I maintained the vintage charm of her original notes. Generations ago people did not have a bunch of fancy ingredients, but they still came up with a variety of yummy quick breads, cakes, desserts, pies, salads, main dishes, canning recipes, and fruitcakes. This cookbook has a special emphasis on fruitcakes. I share my mood-altering experiences with her fruitcake recipes. Bakers who love the holidays should definitely add a classic Christmas fruitcake to their list. All jokes aside, fruitcake deserves a place among elite holiday desserts.

And people into urban farming and homesteading can harvest delicious value from these vintage recipes meant to use up all the dried fruit and nuts you can pick. Plus find a variety of classic uses for all the tomatoes, cucumbers, and apples you can grow with marvelous canning recipes for sauces, pickles, and chutneys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Falbe Publishing
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664973367

Tracy Falbe

I have been hooked on fantasy and science fiction since preschool when I watched Star Trek the Original Series with my family on TV. Then came Star Wars at the theater when I was 5, and a few years later, I discovered the joys of reading fantasy with the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.The elements I like most about the genres are the high stakes (save the world, overthrow the empire, etc.), the diversity of characters, and how magic or extraordinary technology allows plots to expand in interesting ways. The ability of fantasy and sci fi to include analysis and criticisms of social conditions like religion and politics is especially fascinating as well. When this is done in conventional fiction, people and readers descend into arguments about whether an opinion is valid or the historical information is accurate instead of assessing the concepts themselves.Of course, fantasy and sci fi can just be fun as well. I love a good hero or heroine and villains can be the best of all. And there is something therapeutic about picking up a sword or blaster and solving the problems of the world.My taste in genre has inevitably married itself to my love of writing. For some reason I am a person capable of writing novels. The act of creating thousands of pages of fiction does not overwhelm me. Making it a good work of fiction is the hard part that requires countless hours of editing and rewriting and lots of daydreaming too.When I'm not writing, my other passions include cooking, growing food, reducing my plastic waste, raising rabbits, spinning wool, and reading.