Broonie is a traditional oatmeal gingerbread from the Orkney Islands in Scotland. This particular recipe comes from the folklorist F. Marian McNeill, who collected traditional recipes for her 1929 book The Scots Kitchen. Although she collected recipes from all over Scotland (I made another of her gingerbread recipes in this post), she was born and raised in Orkney, so broonie may have been familiar to her from her childhood.
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In my last post, I made Fannie Merritt Farmer’s molasses brownies, the earliest incarnation of brownies. Chocolate brownies came on the scene just a few years later in the early 1900s, although historians don’t agree on which exact recipe was the first. This 1904 recipe for Bangor Brownies is certainly one of the earliest brownie recipes to include chocolate.
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This gingerbread comes from Foods That Will Win the War, a pamphlet and recipe book instructing cooks how to save food during World War I. Although the United States never had official rationing during the first World War, the U.S. Food Administration ran an aggressive propaganda campaign urging Americans not to waste food, especially wheat, meat, fats, and sugar. Gingerbread was perfect for this, since the use of molasses as a sweetener means that it can be made without any added sugar at all.
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These simple Christmas cookies may look ordinary, but they contain an unusual ingredient…hard-boiled egg yolks!
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I rediscovered this recipe from my great-great-grandmother thanks to a bit of internet serendipity.
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This traditional gingerbread from the town of Fochabers, Scotland, is packed with all sorts of goodies, including fruit, spices, and almonds. The most unusual ingredient, however, is beer.
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Parkin is a type of oatmeal gingerbread traditionally made in northern England for Bonfire Night celebrations on November 5th.
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Will Rogers, the “cowboy philosopher,” was a man of many talents: actor, cowboy, newspaper columnist, and humorist. After settling his family on a ranch in California, he also became a beloved local figure in Beverly Hills; in 1926, he was briefly declared the honorary mayor. Naturally, when the Beverly Hills Woman’s Club produced a community cookbook, they asked him to contribute an introduction. He did – along with two recipes of his own.
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Lamington cakes, an Australian favorite, are named after either Lord Lamington, governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901, or his wife, Lady Lamington. Lamingtons are beloved enough that they are celebrated by an Australian Lamington Appreciation Society and have an official holiday, National Lamington Day, on July 21st.
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This punch recipe comes from Henrietta Nesbitt’s The Presidential Cookbook: Feeding the Roosevelts and Their Guests. Mrs. Nesbitt served as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s housekeeper in the White House for 13 years. She writes in her chapter on teas and punches that two hundred guests would be considered a small tea party for Eleanor Roosevelt – many White House teas would include over a thousand guests. “When the guest list reaches the thousand mark…the only solution is fruit punch, and plenty of it.”
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History in the Making 