Fascinating Recipes to Celebrate 6 Million CHNC Pages!

But where to start on our search for food and drink? We begin by following our curiosity: a simple search for the word “recipe,” yielding over 90,000 results. Then we sort by date, oldest first. Voila: some of the first recipes in Colorado’s recorded history. Let’s stick to pre-1890 results for now and get our gold pan out. We’ll see how recipes became regular features in newspapers (such as the ‘Farm and Fireside’ column in The Colorado Banner), before becoming a firm fixture in many papers throughout the 20^th century. Click the link to go to the article (look for and zoom in on the word “recipe” highlighted in yellow).

Food and drinks

Let’s start with some of the oldest true recipes in the collection (discounting the thousands of ads for unlikely panaceas). Finding a smattering of examples from this period was done through filtering by specific years. You could also combine your search with specific ingredients or food type. Below are 25+ recipes that would make for quite the banquet. Note, unlike today’s recipes, there is usually very little hand holding or preamble containing the author’s life story:

• Substitute for coffee (1862)
• Catsup (1870)
• Cranberry sauce (1873)
• Chocolate caramel (1873)
• Beef tea (1874)
• Chilly stew (1874)
• Miner’s soup (1874)
• Rice pie (1875)
• Fried potatoes, pickles, etc. (1875)
• Mince pies (1875)
• Composition cake, porridge, rice cake, etc. (1876)
• Honey (1876)
• Welsh rabbit [rarebit] (1876)
• Tapioca, suet, Florentine, and apple puddings and sauces (1876)
• Pumpkin pie (1877)
• Picnic lemonade (1879)
• Cookies, fruit cake, lemon pie, oysters and macaroni, etc. (1883)
• Cornbread (1883)
• Chocolate pudding, wheat muffins, griddle cakes, Graham gems, lemon pie, etc. (1884)
• Orange pudding (1885)
• Apple water, Yankee muffins, chocolate cake, coffee cake, Johnny cakes, etc. (1887)
• Doughnuts, etc. (1887)
• Gingerbread, hicorynut cake, sweet potato lunch, etc. (1887)
• Split Durkee and other cocktail recipes (1888)
• A good health drink (1890)

Non-Foody Recipes

Hungry for more “recipes”? The word was not always used in reference to food. In old newspapers, this gives rise to a lot of weird, unhinged usages. In today’s parlance, a recipe is often just a “hack” – like a handy tip, though not always to be recommended as you’ll learn below.

Can a single ingredient (whiskey) be considered a recipe? Apparently so in this 1865 recipe for destroying rats. How about a recipe worth one thousand dollars to every housekeeper? That’s over $24k today! On second thoughts, best avoid cleaning solutions with half pounds of “unslacked lime” [sic] (also known as quicklime)… Ever wondered the recipe to cure sick soldiers? (If you can make out the meaning of that one, give yourself a cookie.) How does one cure a rattlesnake bite? How about a telephone recipe or a simple recipe for keeping a disaffected people in subjection? How exactly does one go about creating a “live town”?

Also consider this recipe for health. They were indeed, if you believe the papers, a health-conscious bunch back then, and many recipes are really remedies for known diseases such as scarlet fever (“These remedies will not fail to give relief and stop the plague”), small pox, or even more serious problems such as an antidote for fleas (spoiler: it’s tar, as in…tar), cold feet (you’ll never believe this one hack of warming your feet by the fire) and “ensuring early rising” (think Michael Scott’s fragrant start to the day, but not).

This recipe is a joke

Did you know that humor is not a modern invention, and though you can argue that people never smiled in their old-timey photos, that was because the smartphone had not yet been invented? The papers of old, serious as they were, often contained what we might suppose were meant to be witticisms. Picture them laughing heartily with bedsheet-sized newspapers spread over the breakfast table! Admittedly, some humor from days gone by will leave today’s audiences blinking and straining to understand if a joke is present or whether it was translated from some obscure language. Others are timeless, hilarious, and often surreally strange. Judge for yourself in the following “recipes”:

• Recipe for creating the sensation of a sleigh ride (1865)
• Recipe for removing a bald spot (1875)
• Recipe for becoming rich (1875) and another one (1879)
• Recipe to prevent wells and cisterns from freezing (1875)
• Recipe for a modern novel (1875)
• Recipe for a recipe book (1876)
• Recipe for curing tobacco-chewing (1876)
• Recipe for shadow soup (1876)
• Recipe for low spirits (1879)
• Recipe for good writing (1883)

Further research

As always, we have barely scratched the surface of CHNC’s offerings. I am sure that refining your searches will yield some interesting rabbit holes for further exploration. In writing posts like these, I like to ask myself a question and let the collection guide me. For example, what clever/mad recipes were shared during the Great Depression? There’s a way to begin a search for that by limiting results by date. But unearthing those and other delights will have to be another post.

Did you try any of these recipes? Comment below with your thoughts!

See also:

• Time Machine Tuesday: The Sweeter Side of Colorado History – State Publications Library
• Delicious History – History Colorado
• A Curious Fruit Pie – History Colorado
• Tasting History – Youtube