In The Vintage Kitchen

Where History Comes to Eat! Exploring all the fun and facts of kitchens past.

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Found Underground: Artifacts Unearthed at 1750 House {Part One}

Found Underground: Artifacts Unearthed at 1750 House {Part One}

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To Tokyo with Truman & Millie, A 1950s Travel Scrapbook, and A Vintage Teriyaki Recipe

Truman packed his Dacron. Millie packed her day dresses. Together, they hauled over 60 pounds of luggage to the Portland International Airport, got on a plane, and flew to Hawaii. Destination number one of their 35-city tour around the world. The year was 1954. The month – February. Truman documented the entire trip in real-time, as it unfolded city by city, in a spiral-bound notebook clad in…

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Reading While Eating: 13 Recommended Books about Life, Love & Landscape

As we settle into cozy mid-winter weather with the hustle and bustle of the holiday season behind us, I’m excited to share the annual tradition of the recommended book list. Usually this lists gets published at the end of December during the last week between Christmas and New Year’s, but I’m a little late this year. Two books that I definitely wanted to include on the list I finished just as…

Reading While Eating: 13 Recommended Books about Life, Love & Landscape

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A Cranberry Cake at Christmas

When it comes to dessert at Christmastime, an infinite loop of baking options never fails to greet us at every source. From chocolate to candy canes, cookies to confections, the holiday peppers its sugar plums and santas with all the sweet-natured hallmarks of the baking season. Every year, we are spritzed and sprinkled, fluffed and frosted, whipped and whirled into a cacophony of holiday…

A Cranberry Cake at Christmas

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All That Was Learned in a Season of Herb Gardening

Adelma did not let us down. In her 1964 book, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, she assured readers that certain types of herbs would grow in sun-dappled shade gardens. And she was not wrong. Herbs did grow. Flowers did form. And I did clip and cook my way through the summer. Just not quite in the way that I had anticipated. If you are joining us for the first time, this post is part of a series…

All That Was Learned in a Season of Herb Gardening

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Mark Your Calendars: Our Annual 40% Off Sale is Sunday, November 2nd!

Autumn 2025 comes to 1750 House in a blanket of color. It’s hard to believe that our annual once-a-year shop sale is just two weeks away, especially since our last blog post left off with baking bread in the middle of a summer heatwave. And yet, now here are, firmly swaddled in a blanket of autumn leaves with the woodpeckers performing their yearly tap tap tapping on the shingles of 1750 House…

Mark Your Calendars: Our Annual 40% Off Sale is Sunday, November 2nd!

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The Kindest Bread Recipe: A Homemade Yeasted Sandwich Bread from the Tassajara Bread Book circa 1970

When it comes to describing great bread recipes, they tend to take on a variety of accolades based on specific attributes. Best flavor. Best texture. Best no-knead. Best whole wheat. Best no wheat. Best gluten-free. Easiest to make. Fastest to bake. Biggest loaf. Smallest effort. Best. Fastest. Easiest. Again and again, over and around, brilliant bakers everywhere boast. No one that I’ve…

The Kindest Bread Recipe: A Homemade Yeasted Sandwich Bread from the Tassajara Bread Book circa 1970

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Mid-June in the Vegetable Garden

Lily If I walk out of the back door very quietly on these early, almost-summer mornings, I can usually spot Lily eating grass at the edge of a way too overgrown decades-old daylily bed. Lily, as we came to call her due to her preference for this area of the yard, is a baby rabbit about the size of a teacup. She was born to Lefty, a wild cottontail that lives in our woods. Lefty Lefty came by…

Mid-June in the Vegetable Garden

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Celebrating Mom: Homemade Chocolate Sauce & The Power of Passed Down Recipes

There it is. In all the swoops and swirls, the dips, the flourishes, the misspellings, the slanted letters, the shaky hand. There’s the story and the memory. There’s the cook. There’s guy, the gal, the friend, the aunt, the spouse, the sister, the dad, the mom. There’s the he, the her, the who, the what, the when. There’s the life. Handwritten recipe cards and cooking scrapbooks are the…

Celebrating Mom: Homemade Chocolate Sauce & The Power of Passed Down Recipes

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Advice from Adelma: How to Create an Herb Garden in Partial Shade

In the words of New England herbalist Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997), “the most difficult garden to maintain is an unplanned one.” If you are joining us on this year’s Greenhouse Diaries adventures, you’ll recall that Adelma is our horticultural teacher, creative muse, and gardening inspiration for 2025 as we embrace her expertise in building and establishing an herb garden here at 1750…

Advice from Adelma: How to Create an Herb Garden in Partial Shade

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Jamaican Rice and Beans and a 1940s Trip to the Caribbean

Welcome back to the International Vintage Recipe Tour. When we last left off on our around-the-world culinary adventures, we were in Italy cooking up Chicken Canzanese and spotlighting the artistic and culinary career of Edward Giobbi and his talented family. Chicken Canzanese A painting by Edward Giobbi This time, our international itinerary takes us to Jamaica, where we are cooking a…

Jamaican Rice and Beans and a 1940s Trip to the Caribbean

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Celebrating International Women's Day: Ten Vintage Cooks & Their Books That Impacted Global Cuisine

Celebrating International Women's Day: Ten Vintage Cooks & Their Books That Impacted Global Cuisine

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The Greenhouse Diaries 2025 : Meet Herbalist Adelma Grenier Simmons - Our Inspiration for the Year

Snow is on the ground, freezing rain is in the forecast, and our first seedlings have just sprouted. It is officially time. The Greenhouse Diaries are back for a whole new year of growing adventures, experimental gardening, and wit and wisdom from some of the most interesting gardeners of the past three centuries. If you are new to the blog, this series started in December 2022 as a way to…

The Greenhouse Diaries 2025 : Meet Herbalist Adelma Grenier Simmons - Our Inspiration for the Year

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Malindy Walker's 1920s Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe

On August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech in Washington D.C. Four decades earlier in 1921, a southern domestic cook named Malindy Walker, locally known as Aunt Malindy, delivered her own inspiring words in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Unlike MLK Jr., Malindy’s words weren’t spoken on a national stage, nor did they reach thousands of admirers. Malindy’s platform was…

Malindy Walker's 1920s Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe

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Two Stories, One Recipe and What's on the Calendar in the Vintage Kitchen for 2025

Thousands of lives spend time in our kitchens. Every day, every week, every year. Even if your living situation is made up of just one or two people, dozens more move about your cooking space, unseen, whispering stories of history and heritage, of comfort and cooking secrets, of design and innovation, of hopes and dreams. I’m not talking about ghosts here, although maybe if you are an old home…

Two Stories, One Recipe and What's on the Calendar in the Vintage Kitchen for 2025

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Chicken Thighs with Cinnamon and Dates From Kim Sunee's Memoir A Trail of Crumbs

In 2008, Kim Sunee published a memoir called Trail of Crumbs. It’s the captivating true story about the first 28 years of her life as she moves in the world from being a three-year-old toddler abandoned by her mother in a Korean marketplace to being the adopted daughter of an American family living in New Orleans to becoming an independent, international traveler wandering the world in search of…

Chicken Thighs with Cinnamon and Dates From Kim Sunee's Memoir A Trail of Crumbs

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Reading While Eating in 2024: Five Recommended Books About Food, Friendship and Appreciation

When December comes around every year, I always love compiling the book list. This month marks the end of 2024, and also the start of the wintertime reading season with the release of the annual Vintage Kitchen recommended book list. Blog stories were a bit sparse this year due to many unanticipated factors, but I’m happy to say that they haven’t hindered this annual tradition of posting a…

Reading While Eating in 2024: Five Recommended Books About Food, Friendship and Appreciation