Vintage – Lost Recipes Found

Tea Cakes

Lamingtons

November 7, 2025

“Poofy, woolly biscuits.” That’s what Baron Lamington, Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901, purportedly called the chocolate glazed, coconut-covered vanilla tea cakes that bear his name. First created and served to Lamington sometime during his tenure, the cakes would take Australia by storm, becoming as culinarily iconic there as Weet-Bix and Vegemite.

Affectionately called “lammos” by Australian natives, classic Lamingtons are made from either vanilla sponge or butter cake that’s been allowed to rest for a day before being cubed, dunked in chocolate sauce and rolled in finely grated unsweetened coconut. But fancy “glamington” renditions by bakers eager to gild the Lamington lily include everything from caramel tres leche versions to banana, chocolate raspberry and even pandan cakes.

Some bakers cut the cubes in half, adding a layer of jam or frosting in the middle. This hews to the earliest known printed version of the recipe, published in the December 17, 1900 edition of the Queensland Country Life, but the tiny cakes are very good, filling or not.

Our Lamingtons are made with Genoese sponge cake, baked in an 8-inch square pan, and finished as 1-inch cubes. To make them, you’ll bake and cool the sponge cake, storing it covered overnight, and then will prepare and cool the chocolate glaze until it has thickened a bit. To get perfect cubes, I cut off and discarded the dome of the baked cake and then flipped it over to expose the perfectly flat bottom side. Using a metal ruler I measured a grid and cut the cake into 1-inch squares. (Because 8-inch tins are tapered a bit, you’ll end up with a 7-inch grid and 35 finished cubes.) To glaze, I skewered each with a fork, fully dunked them into the chocolate, allowed excess to drip off and then rolled them in the coconut. Continue Reading…

American Classics

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

Meaty Mainstays

Choucroute with Pork Chops & Apples

September 19, 2025

Whether it’s ‘kraut on a Reuben sandwich, or an elaborate choucroute garnie, pork with fermented cabbage is an enduring pairing. This delicious one-dish meal: Thick pork chops in apple studded Bavarian sauerkraut with dumpling-like pillows of soaked bread and a sprinkling of caraway, is a play on the best of those traditions.

Appreciation for such dishes is long-lived in my family. When my Dad was a young boy in the 1930s, transforming a big barrel of slivered, salted cabbage into naturally fermented sauerkraut was an annual family endeavor. Grandma Lydia and Grandpa Al sliced big heads of the fresh, green chou into the barrel, and scattered salt in measured handfuls while Dad and his brother Emil mashed it all down with a huge wooden pestle. Weighted down, the mixture would mellow in its juices over time, to be paired with pork in one or another family meal preparations.

When I received a reader request from a woman trying to replicate a dish her great aunt Caroline used to make with bread, pork chops, sauerkraut, and apples, I set to work to create this dish. I use Bavarian sauerkraut because it’s more mild other varieties I’ve tried and doesn’t require rinsing. That, plus thick-cut pork chops with a nice fat cap on them, a fresh onion, good crusty bread (I like ciabatta or pugliese), and firm, tart-sweet apples (I used Michigan Evercrisp.) The sprinkling of caraway seeds is optional but adds a wonderful flavor accent. Continue Reading…

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…

Christmas

Classic Christmas Sugar Cookies

December 12, 2024

When I was little, we had two favorite babysitters. One had the patience of a saint and taught us to play fan tan and gin rummy. The other loved to bake. This simple recipe for buttery sugar cookies was her go to on the days before Christmas when she let us “help.”

We’d gleefully cut out the cookies and then cover them with nonpareils, dragees, and sparkling sugars, chasing any sugar pearls that rolled off the table and sneakily eating chocolate jimmies when the babysitter wasn’t looking.

Somehow, our messy doings would still yield plenty of lovely cookies to share. You can vary the result from more tender to crispy depending on the thickness of the dough you roll out, and how long you bake it. To get sparkling sugars to adhere, simply brush cookie tops with a little egg-white wash before sprinkling and baking. Or, pipe baked cookies with frosting and add a few dragees or sparkles then. Happy Holidays! 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…

Mile High Srawberry Pie

Fresh Strawberry Pie

July 25, 2022

This fresh strawberry pie, stacked high with just-picked farmers-market berries in a strawberry-juice glaze, comes with a great backstory. Liberace (pianist Vladziu Valentino Liberace)—once the world’s highest-paid entertainer, loved this pie, ordering it by the dozen from the place it was born: the now-defunct Hess Bros. Department store, of Allentown, PA. The man who sold it to him–Max Hess, Jr., was nearly as big a showman as Liberace himself. Continue Reading…

Deep Dark Rich

Stovetop Steak + Stout Stew

February 27, 2021

One of my boys loves deep dark flavors. If you want that in a good stew, steak and stout are the perfect ingredients. And when using a good grade of meat, you don’t really need the super long slow roast that you need with lesser cuts, so you can make this on the stove-top in a Dutch oven. With the pandemic still lingering, we may not be able to gather in crowded pubs right now, but this hearty stew is a pub-worthy comfort that will bring cheer to your home crew. Made with Guinness, sirloin steak, and carrot and onion to mellow the stout, it’s full of deep rich flavors. Continue Reading…

Warming Wonderful

North Carolina Cassoulet (Navy Beans & Meats in Ham Hock Stock)

January 31, 2021

This satisfying Southern dish full of richly flavored stock, smoky pork, vegetables, and creamy white navy beans, came to me by way of a North Carolina chef who had ready access to both locally grown-vegetables and humanely-raised meats. My home-cook version is a warming supper for chilly, stay-at-home days. I start the stock first thing in the morning in order to have the navy beans in the oven for their bake by midday, filling the house with rich, smoky, mouth-watering aromas. By suppertime, no one needs to be called to the table—they’re all ready and waiting. Add a nice side dish of cooked greens to go along with if you like, and some crusty fresh bread for dunking. Continue Reading…

On The Side

Boston Baked Beans & Brown Bread

November 12, 2019

Despite the unfortunate Phaseolus vulgaris moniker—the American Common Bean category includes bunches of beloved, native-to-the-Americas beans: navy, red kidney, pinto, great northern, marrow, & yellow eye, plus garden variety edible-pod beans (string, stringless and snap.) It’s not clear which of these the New England colonists first stewed in a pot, but we do know baked navy beans started with Native Americans. The Narragansett, Penobscot, and Iroiquois wrapped navy beans in deerskins—or put them in earthenware pots, along with venison, bear fat and maple syrup and then baked the lot in hot-stone-lined pits. Puritans eschewed the deerskins, but took to bean-pot cookery because the long, slow cook times meant housewives could prepare the beans a day ahead, and in so doing, stick to Puritanical no-cooking-on-Sabbath rules.

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