Old recipes inspire fond memories

West End

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/01/2024 (671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Newspaper clippings, faded recipe cards and those thin booklets of recipes published by the likes of Baker’s chocolate, Robin Hood flour and Bee Maid honey made up many of our recipe collections before the internet changed everything. They were often dog-eared, covered with notes and kept in a kitchen drawer.

You rarely even see the once-ubiquitous recipe boxes with their sets of index cards in thrift stores nowadays, as free online recipe sites have rendered them pretty much obsolete.

What a shame, as a passed-down recipe collection comes complete with countless memories and could include favourites such as the chicken divan recipe made ’70s style with cream of mushroom soup and mayo, or the hearty pea and ham soup that warmed up Canadian kids everywhere in wintertime.

I always assumed my sister had most of my mum’s recipes and was surprised to hear that they hadn’t made the move back to B.C. from Ontario. Luckily, she had copied a few of them into a notebook. A number of our favourites were misplaced years ago including the one for our mum’s amazing no-bake chocolate dessert that was always on the table every Christmas.

It might have been a bavarois or a charlotte, according to one of my brothers. Both of them have been trying to replicate the recipe these past two Christmases with some success. The latest one I tasted would lose just a few points if this was a baking competition, which it isn’t,-is it?

For my part, I have scoured internet recipe sites for it. I even emailed the Peek Frean biscuit museum in the U.K., as it is made in a springform pan lined with their Bourbon biscuits.

I did have a hunch that it could be a Hershey recipe, as that was the brand of chocolate chips and baking chocolate around the kitchen when I was a teen. Eureka! it turns out that it was in fact an old Hershey recipe from some 40 years ago, and had probably been printed on one of its Chipits bags.

I still have to serve it to one of my siblings so they can confirm that this is indeed our mum’s long -lost chocolate sweet recipe, but I am confident.

I started my own recipe collection recently with a cute box and some index cards found at the thrift store. I am adding family recipes to the ones I have amassed over the years. It is nice to have a hands-on activity, instead of saving everything on my phone.