Old Swedish cookbook
I love old books. This is a cookbook from 1930. The Princesses cookbook with old recipes, both everyday cooking and partyfood from that time.
Browsing through it, you can notice that cooking has changed a lot. Not any fast food in there. The cooking was taking more time then and the ingredients were different.
There is a lot of recipes that no one is cooking any more, but never the less very interesting to read. Then of course I’m a hungry monster, so I may have more interest than you in these kind of matters *lol*.
What do you say about these odd recipes:
- Deep fried tinned sprats cured in brine
- Tongue salad (lightly salted bullock tongue)
- Oven grilled calf brain
- Genuine turtle soup
- Bullock tail soup
- Oven cooked eel
- Cooked glazed calf shoulder
- Cooked smoked pig head
- Cooked pig feet
- Steam cooked hen
- Blood pudding
Getting any hungry yet….?
I guess it was a matter of eating what they could get over and mostly locally produced grocerys. A lot of the swedish folks were farmers, that was how they got their food. Not so much imported food and not so influenced of other countries cooking as we are today here in Sweden.
Of course there is a lot of other more tasty recipes, but that is some how not so fun to write about…. The dessert and cakes recipes are many, so I’m sure there is something to get there. Here is a picture of one of the three princesses cake which had the taste of sweet almond and nougat.
The really useful parts in this cookbook is:
a) All the sauce recipes. That is almost like a gold mine, because no one ever does any sauces any longer, so not many have the knowledge how to. I will definite explore that one further.
b) Other old swedish meals that was counted as true everyday fare, but is on the way to be outdated. They are actually really good. Many of them easy to make and not so expensive. So I’ll try to keep some of them up on the menu.
c) Described details of how to prepare certain food from the scratch. As an example how to lard and sew up a bird - or the different parts of a whole pig or bullock illustrated.
The difference in this old cookbook is that there is no ready ingredients to just mix together, everything is done from scratch with local fresh ingredients. Some of them demands a lot of preparing. The house wifes seemed to have more time over for that then - or didnt have any choice.
I love the extra advices in the end of the cookbook:
1. One huge list of tools needed in a kitchen, counted to a sum of approx. 450 swedish crowns ($59) in 1929. There is absolutely everything they could possible use in a kitchen - even for cleaning the kitchen and the kitchen staffs shoes!
2. Very detailed cleaning advices for iron stoves, silver, windows and washing of white curtains (!). The curtains washing procedure was quite advanced and involved whipping soft soap, turpentine and ammonia. They were supposed to lay in that mix over the night too. No wash machine lazyness. I wonder how dirty they were, demanding that washing procedure….
3. Information about the newest type of stove used at that time, AGA spisen, with coke as fuel.
4. A list of different foods chemical composition, splitted in percentage of albumin, fat, carbohydrate, water, salt and waste. That’s all. Quite different from todays cookbooks that lists the energy, protein, iron and vitamins in the food. People are more aware today and take an active part in their diet.
We’ll see if I manage to cook something from it some day, I promise to report if I do!
