This recipe is from the 1950 Recipes on Toast cookbook.

• 3 tbsp. chopped onion
• 3 tbsp. chopped celery
• 1/2 cup diced bacon
• 6 eggs, slightly beaten
• 1/2 cup tomato juice
• 1/4 cup diced cheese
• 1/4 tsp. paprika
• 1/4 tsp. poultry seasoning
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 2 tbsp. chopped parsley

Cook onion, bacon and celery over low heat until bacon is crisp. Combine remaining ingredients, add bacon mixture, and cook in double boiler or over low direct heat until eggs are firm. Stir just enough to prevent sticking. Serve on hot buttered toast. (4 servings)

From the 1950, Recipes on Toast cookbook

Recipes On Toast, published in 1950 by the Marathon Corporation. This was a complimentary cookbook from Snowhite Baking Company, the bakers of Snowhite Bread.  ”Baked in Muskegon by Muskegon Bakers for Greater Muskegon People.” Nice!  Local food long before local food was trendy.

This may be the only toast cookbook in my collection, and I must say it is very cool! Fantastic illustrations, page layout, and even photos. And the best part is that it is all about toast!  Mmmm… toast!

“Everyone knows how good hot buttered toast tastes at breakfast, servers just plain or with preserves! However, there are many delicious ways to serve toast for family or party breakfasts. Get the day off to a golden start with these tempting breakfasts featuring toast!”

And yes indeed you will find some fantastic toasty goodness in this fine little cookbook. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, you’ll find recipes that tempt your tastebuds. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that all the recipes actually seem decent—nothing too kitschy weird in here. Well, maybe the Apple Sausage Surprise is about as weird as it gets—sausages, applesauce, and American cheese on toast. Then again, that sounds alright too.

I love this quote, “Men take to ‘Toast Cookery’… it’s the easy way to rate high as an amateur chef.” Then there is, “Entertain often! ‘Toast Cookery’ lets you make a big impression for just a little money!” I’ve never thought about making a toast meal for guests, I just may try it some day.

This is a classic, find a copy, if you can. (Sorry, mine is not for sale, but if I find another copy, I’ll add it to the shop.)

This recipe comes from Abalone to Zabaglione – Unusual and Exotic Recipes, published by Peter Pauper Press in 1957.

• 1 pound chopped lean beef
• 1/2 pound chopped lean pork
• 1/2 pound chopped lean veal
• 2 eggs, well beaten
• 2 cups milk
• 1 cup soft bread crumbs
• 2 teaspoons sale
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 cups meat stock or 2 bouillon cubes dissolved in hot water

Combine meat, egg, milk and bread crumbs. Mix well. Add salt and pepper. Sauté onion in butter until brown. Remove onion, add to meat and mix well.

Shape small meatballs with wet hands and fry in butter until brown. Add stock and dimming 20 minutes. Serves 8.

Abalone to Zabaglione – Unusual and Exotic Recipes, published  by Peter Pauper Press in 1957. Another fine example of the cool & wacky mini cookbooks published by Peter Pauper Press back in the late fifties!

Abalone to Zabaglione is the food recipe version of the wild drink recipe book called Aquavit to Zombie – Basic and Exotic Drinks. Ah, what a weird and wonderful party you could have if you used both of these cookbooks for your next soirée!

So what kind of unusual and exotic recipes await you? As with many of these cookbooks, the recipe are in alphabetical order, and not by category. So we begin with a basic recipe for Abalone. Abalone is a mollusk, a shelled creature of the sea, although the illustration next to it is of an octopus.

The book moves through some not so usual, but perhaps slightly exotic recipes, until we get to Bird’s Nest Chicken Soup. Yes, it actually uses a small bird’s nest in the recipe.  Sound odd? Just wait. Bird’s nest soup is actually a delicacy in China. It uses the nest from the cave swift, which are renowned for building saliva nests. Okay, now that is usual.

After that we find a few more normal recipes, then a recipe for Eel, en Matelot, (which actually looks good). There is Gogl-Mogl, which only has an unusual name, as the recipe is just egg yolks, sugar and Rum or Cognac. Things don’t really get weird again until we hit the “R’s”, and then we find a recipe for Roast Reindeer. Well, perhaps not really odd since many people hunt and eat regular deer.  Perhaps the whole indoctrination of Rudlolf the Red-nosed Reindeer makes this recipe feel a little more unusual than it really is.

Following the Roast Reindeer, we stumble upon Shark Fins, Trussed Squabs, Turtle Soup, and a bunch of more normal recipes in between. Does hearing “Trussed Squabs” make you feel like taking like a pirate? Or is that just me? The book closes with one more unusual sounding recipe, Zabaglione, which is another egg & booze recipe, this time with Marsala wine.

Abalone to Zabaglione – Unusual and Exotic Recipes is definitely a must have for anyone’s collection.  Aside from the unusual recipes, it has a good number of decent exotic recipes.  And of course it has very cool illustrations and fonts.

Festive Buffet Cookery, published by Peter Pauper Press in 1965.  Recipes compiled by Evelyn Loeb, with Decorations by Maggie Jarvis.

The cookbook series from Peter Pauper Press stands apart from many of the other vintage cook booklets out there. They are actual hardcover mini books with kitschy illustrations, and an easy to read type size. While the illustrations are as kitschy as many other cookbooks from the 50′s & 60′s, something about the style of these screams Peter Pauper Press.

Festive Buffet Cookery gets straight to the point with the recipes, and doesn’t have any tips or other banter like many cookbooks have. No table of contents, no index, just 56 pages of tasty recipes. With the easy-to-read type, this cookbook basically has one recipe per page, give or take.

On average, the recipes don’t look too bad, but there are a few where you might think “ewww!” Tongue with Sweet-and-Sour Sauce (okay, I’ve never tried beef tongue, but it seems like “ewww”). Cherry Noodle Casserole—noodles, 8 eggs, cottage cheese, and, um… cherry pie filling. Sliced Maraschino Lamb. Really? Ruin a good pieces of lamb with those nasty bright red cherries? I’d imagine their drink suggestion with this dish would be a Kiddie Cocktail. Their “Boeuf Bourgignon” recipe uses minute tapioca. Hmm… yeah, I’m not so sure about that one.

As I mentioned, this book has fun illustrations as you can see from the cover. No photography, just kitschy cool illustrations. The font used on the cover is kind of cool, and inside they use “Hobo” font as the headline font. (I personally think Hobo was overused, just like Papyrus is overused these days.)

All-in-all a fun little vintage cookbook, and perfect for anyone’s collection.

This Boston Brown Bread recipe comes from the 1953, Let’s Get Acquainted With Your Hotpoint Electric Range. This recipe has instructions for the Thrift Cooker on the Hotpoint Electric range, but I’ve added other cooking instructions for those of us without the cool vintage Hotpoint range.

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup corn meal
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup raisins
• 2 cups sour milk
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1 tablespoons melted butter or margarine

Mix first 7 ingredients together. Combine remaining ingredients; add to dry ingredients. Beat well. Pour into 3 greased (No. 2) cans. Cover with aluminum foil or two thicknesses of waxed paper. Place on trivet in Thrift Cooker over two cups of water. Switch to HIGH until steaming vigorously. Switch to LOW and steam 3 hours. Yield: 3 loaves.

And now, for folks without a Thrift Cooker:

Firstly, a No.2 can is apparently 1 lb. 2 oz.  Other recipes mention using a coffee can, or even just using a loaf pan.  And now, cooking without the Thrift Cooker….

Cover the cans tightly with foil. You can use the stovetop method, by setting a steamer rack inside a tall stockpot and setting the cans in the pot.  Then fill the pot with enough water to come 1/3 of the way up the sides of your cans. Bring water to a boil. Steam the bread for at least 2 hours and 15 minutes, checking water level occasionally. Check to see if the bread is done by inserting a toothpick into it. If the toothpick comes out clean, you’re ready. If not, recover the pan and cook for up to another 45 minutes.

Let’s get Acquainted With Your Hotpoint Electric Range, published in 1953,  a combination of an owners manual and recipe booklet for your retro cooking enjoyment. You’ll find a nice mix of info on using the electric range, reference charts for cooking and baking, and then a bunch of mouth watering recipes.

Before we get to the recipes, lets talk about the coolness factor. As you can see from the cover, this booklet has rather nice photography, cool fonts, and a there is a hint at what fun illustrations may be inside. While there isn’t a ton of food photography inside, what is there matches the retro goodness that you see on the cover. There are also quality B&W photos documenting the various parts of the oven. The illustrations are simple, yet have that fun hip feel which cookbook illustrations of the fifties often conveyed. The page layout is clean and simple, yet still has a bit of style as you see with this image. And the fonts… classic scripty fonts from the fifties. Whats not to love?

On to the recipes! The recipes look pretty average, and probably fairly good for the most part. There is a fair share of MSG being tossed in some recipes. Why fried chicken needs MSG, I don’t know. There aren’t too many odd sounding recipes, but here are a few:

Steak Cups – ground beef in a muffin tin, the meat pressed to the sides to make a cup, and then filled with catsup.

Feathered Rice – pretty much just rice, with boullion, so who knows where the “feathered” part came from

Asparagus Daffodil, and Daffodil Cake – hmm, no clue on the “daffodil” reference in these two recipes.

French Fries – Ah, they were already ahead of our modern & lazy society. “2 packages frozen French fried potatoes… bake at 375°.”  Sigh, no secret recipe for making great home-made fries.