vintage recipe – Lost Recipes Found

Italian Apple Cake (Torta di Mele)

September 25, 2025

“Eight Red Astrakan, two Wilton Twig, three Hubbardston Nonsuch, one Keswick Codlin…” The orchard plan from a page in Joseph Gundry’s 1869 daybook reads like a fantasy of heritage apples–and all with such whimsical names! But if you visit Gundry’s former estate in Mineral Point, WI, the apples no longer exist, gone along with three quarters of the 17,000 apple varieties that used to thrive in the United States. In ongoing efforts to turn this around, orchardists and plant geneticists have succeeded in bringing tasty heritage apple varieties back from the brink. That means you’re more likely to find them at farmers markets this season! This beautiful, easy-to-make vintage apple cake is the perfect way to showcase the best of them. Made with simple ingredients that allow the apple flavors to stand out, the cake is tall and tender.

Known as Torta di Mele in Italy, the cake goes back centuries, with all sorts of regional variations. Some mix in nuts or dried fruit. Others add cinnamon or a fancy spiral of sliced fruit on top. But all versions keep apples at the cake’s core.

Our delicious version requires just one mixing bowl and a handful of ingredients: butter, flour, sugar, eggs, milk, yeast, lemon zest and plenty of fresh chopped apples. (So, a vintage “dump cake!” ) To make sure the recipe worked with both heirloom and easily obtainable apples, we baked it both ways: The cake shown in the main photo was made with Honeycrisp. Another was made with heirloom Discovery apples from Nichols Farm in Marengo, IL (shown in the ingredient photo) which originated in Essex, England in 1949 and are a cross between Worcester Pearmain and Beauty of Bath apples. Both cakes were delicious!

If you want to make your cake look fancier, you can spiral slices of some of the apple on the top of the cake before baking, but we opted to simply chop the apples into bite-sized pieces and stir them all in. Not too sweet, this cake works well for coffee or tea, or—with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert. NOTE: My springform pans are old, so I usually wrap the base in aluminum foil and line the baking rack with a sheet of it to ensure no drips escape from the pan while baking. For more delicious apple recipes, try our Classic Apple Pie, our tall and tempting Melting Apple Cake, our Hubba Hubba Cake , our savory Choucroute with Pork Chops & Apples, or our Deep Dish Cranberry Apple Pie

Chilled Desserts

Classic Blancmange with Raspberry Sauce

June 10, 2025

The first comedic episode I ever saw from Monty Python’s Flying Circus involved giant blancmange puddings playing tennis at Wimbledon. The episode was zany enough to make me a Python fan, but it also stirred my culinary curiosity. Just what was a blancmange?

First included in an early 13^th century Danish cookbook, blancmange–from the Old-French blanc-mangier, or “white dish”, is simply white pudding made from fresh-pressed almond milk. Believed to have spread across Europe through Arab trade routes, it used to be a savory dish, but by the 17^th century, the pudding moved squarely into the dessert category with the addition of sugar, gelatin, and sometimes cream.

While French chefs preserved the pudding’s delicate texture and almond-rich essence by using a combination of sweet and bitter almonds, in England the pudding devolved. Corn flour replaced gelatin as the thickening agent, artificial flavoring substituted for extract of bitter almond, and food companies started selling blancmange in instant-mix packets that were notoriously bad, making it a food Britons loved to hate.

Hoping to emulate the elegant loveliness that once popularized blancmange, I turned to the first American edition of Larousse Gastronomique, which was a chef named Prosper Montagné’s encyclopedia of French cookery. There I found famed 19^th century chef Antonin Carême’s recipe for blancmanger, slightly adapted here to allow usage of a food processor, almond extract, and gelatin powder. I used gelatin powder rather than the fish bladder gelatin called isinglass, used in Carême’s time (!) And almond extract instead of the bitter almonds Carême specified because while bitter almonds are rendered non-toxic when cooked, it’s illegal to sell them for home-cook usage here.

You can make this classic blancmange two ways: with or without cream. Both are very good. To make the pudding, you’ll boil a pound of raw almonds with skins on. Shocked in cold water, the almond skins will easily slip off as you pinch them, leaving you with a pretty pile of blanched almonds. Discard the skins and grind the blanched almonds in a food processor, slowly adding water to make a slurry. Pour the slurry into a clean, fine-weave cloth and twist to extract the creamy, fresh almond milk. Boiling the milk with sugar, softened gelatin and cream (if using) you’ll then cool the mixture slightly, stir in almond extract and a little vanilla paste, pour into molds or small serving cups and chill until firm.

To release puddings from molds, dip the molds for a few scant seconds in hot water and invert each over serving plates. If a pudding needs a little encouragement to release, use your plastic-gloved fingers to gently coax it away from the inside edge of the mold as you invert it.

Because red berries go very well with blancmange, I’ve included a red raspberry sauce. Spoon it over the puddings, or, serve it alongside, with extra fresh berries over all. Continue Reading…

Savory Pies

Russian Vegetable Pie with Whole Wheat & Nut Flour Crust

October 6, 2024

Anna Thomas’s “The Vegetarian Epicure, Books I and II,” were the first cookbooks I ever owned. She published them in the early ‘70s and I bought them more than a decade later, out of college and eager to cook vegetables in a fresh and delicious way. Her Russian Vegetable Pie, filled with tender sauteed onions, cabbage and mushrooms over a slather of cream cheese, was one of my first baking triumphs. I’ve made it many times since. But I altered the recipe to cut out the butter in favor of olive oil, switched to Neufchatel instead of cream cheese, added a swirl of Dijon mustard at the base, and tucked the filling into a healthier whole wheat & nut flour crust.

I think my recipe update of Anna’s long-loved pie would meet her approval. Writing in her 1996, “The New Vegetarian Epicure,” Thomas says her ’70s cookbooks—which would go on to sell more than a million copies, were written at a time when vegetarianism was a popular idea, but vegetarian food was pretty awful. So, her first aim was to make vegetarian food taste better. And back then, using plenty of butter and cheese was then still a thing. “That first Vegetarian Epicure and its sequel captured the geist of a certain time—it was a guilt-free era when butter and cream were used without a care and cheese ruled,” said Thomas. “Today, of course, our attitudes are different, and I say thank goodness they are. We are all finding healthier ways to eat and enjoying lighter food.”

To make the pie, you’ll need a nice, small head of Savoy cabbage, some cremini mushrooms, a good-sized yellow onion, and some fresh snipped French tarragon, basil, and dill. I like the texture and sturdiness of a whole wheat pastry flour crust (with almond flour added for a little extra nuttiness,) but you can make it gluten free by substituting gluten free flour for the whole wheat flour and omitting the mustard. If you need the pie to be dairy free, substitute coconut oil (chilled until solid) for the butter in the crust and use vegan cream-cheese-style spread instead of Neufchatel in both the crust and spread in the bottom of the pie. Continue Reading…

Pie Revival

Summerberry Pie

June 6, 2024

Juneberry, Sugarplum, Shadblow, Saskatoon…there are many names around the U.S. and Canada for what we know in Illinois as the Serviceberry tree. We planted ours to beautify the landscape 24 years ago and were delighted to learn that the pretty red berries are edible, with a flavor profile similar to blueberries (but more redberry-ish) and even higher in protein, dietary fiber, calcium, magnesium & manganese. No wonder Native Americans used them to make pemmican!

This year, I used the berries in combination with raspberries, blackberries and blueberries to make this fabulous summer berry pie. You can alter the berry-to-berry ratio, just be sure to use fewer blueberries than the other types of berry, and you will still need about 7 cups of fruit which should mound up nicely in your 9-inch, deep-dish pie plate. While American farms don’t grow serviceberries for sale, they are available frozen from Canada. To make a pie with just serviceberries, here is that recipe.
Continue Reading…

Italian

Classic Bolognese Ragu

February 22, 2022

Known in Italy as “ragù alla Bolognese” this rich meat sauce actually has very little tomato in the sauce–a surprise to many American home cooks. The deeply satisfying flavors come from long, slow cooking of the vegetables and meats. First referenced in a cookbook by Pellegrino Artusi in 1891, the original recipe called for lean veal, pancetta, onion and carrot cooked in butter, plus mushrooms, broth and a ½ glass of cream which was added at the end. Evolved over the decades to include a few other ingredients—most notably tomato paste, the sauce has become a favorite world-wide.

We hewed pretty closely to the original with our Bolognese. To make it, you’ll begin with soffritto (from the Italian soffrigere, “to sauté”) a trio of very finely chopped carrot, onion and celery. Once the vegetables are cooked tender, you’ll add ground beef, finely minced (or ground) veal and pancetta, plus stock, red wine, soaked-mushroom liquid and tomato paste and let the whole mixture simmer over very low heat for a good two hours. Once the sauce has reduced down, you’ll scald the milk and stir in with the cream and simmer again for another hour.

Although traditionally served over tagliatelle, we like Bolognese spooned over our fresh-made gnocchi, with finely grated Parmesan cheese over all.

Melton Mowbray Style

British Pork Pie

February 18, 2022

Americans love their apple pie, but in Britain, pork pies rule the pastry roost. Brits spend more than £165 million on pork pies every year, according to statistics from the Kantar Worldpanel–more than they shell out for any other pie variety there. And among pork pies, the Melton Mowbray variety is king.

Melton Mowbray, a town in rural Leicestershire, England calls itself Britain’s “Rural Capital of Food” for the pork pies, and, Stilton cheese, both having been granted protected designation of origin (PDO) status by the European Commission. That distinction means anyone outside the 10-mile radius surrounding the town, and anyone using cured meat in the recipe, can’t officially call their pork pie a Melton Mowbray.

With that in mind, our Melton Mowbray-style pie uses hand-minced, uncured pork like the original, mixed with salt, pepper, sage, and a squirt of anchovy paste. Tucked into a traditional hot water crust with rich stock poured in through the vent hole to seal the meat, it’s a filling, portable feast. That portability made the pie a favorite bring-along on foxhunts as far back as the late 1700s. But the flavor of the pie took it nationwide. Continue Reading…

Pie Revival

Peaches + Cream Pie

August 2, 2021

If you’ve had the pleasure of plucking a sun-warmed, fully ripe peach from a tree and eating it right there and then, you know why peaches show up in my dreams. Velvety soft, juicy and with the most fragrant nectar, peaches are one of my favorite fruits. This old-fashioned pie is full of them. To make it, you’ll spiral peach slices over a butter crust and bake them in cream with just a hint of sugar and spice. A good dream in the making. Continue Reading…

Fourth of July

Red+White+Blue Berry Trifle

July 1, 2021

Fresh picked and washed under the water spigot at edge of the orchard is undeniably the best way to enjoy handfuls of summer berries. Short of that? A cool rinse and colander-jostle under the tap at home works fine. But if you want to fancy things up for Fourth of July festivities, layer the fruit with easy-to-make vanilla custard, fresh whipped cream and tender cubes of homemade pound cake in this in this red-white-and-blue berry trifle. You can stack everything in a tall, glass bowl, or, divide it up into single-serve parfait glasses. Continue Reading…

Celebrity Recipes

Frank Sinatra’s Favorite Spaghetti

February 17, 2021

In a 1973 interview with long-defunct Mainliner magazine, Frank Sinatra said, “Everything I know about cooking, I learned from my mother.” Mrs. “Dolly” Martin Anthony Sinatra lived in a home Frank built for her on the grounds of his Palm Springs estate. Her simple tomato, garlic and herb spaghetti sauce recipe was Frank’s favorite. We’ve tested it and see why he loved it—meatless, but full of flavor, it’s become our family favorite, too. Continue Reading…

Soup Kitchen

Cream of Celery Soup

June 20, 2019

According to the Farmer’s Almanac, celery needs three things to thrive: a long growing season, mostly cool weather, and a constant, unfailing water supply. So we’re like, “ding, ding, ding!” here in the Midwest–especially this year. Good thing I like celery as much as it likes the cool and damp : )

My suggestion? Buy plenty of that bumper celery crop and when you’ve had your fill of crudités and dip, and it’s raining yet again, make some of this comforting soup to take the chill off. Continue Reading…

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