Blog Archives
Test the Recipe: Blueberry Muffins
“Test the Recipe” is a recurring column on PCFG where we test vintage (anything published before 1990) recipes and see if they stand the test of time or need updating. In this post we test the recipe as exactly as possible for the most accurate outcomes. Those recipes that need updating will be featured later in a “We Can Do It Better” post.
It’s been a while since my last Test The Recipe post, but I decided I wanted the next edition to be a breakfast one. After a recent trip to the city, I’ve had blueberry muffins on my mind. So it was off to the old cookbooks to see if I could find an old blueberry muffin recipe to test. I found one in the McCall’s Cook Book from 1963. This book is huge and has pretty much everything in it. It’s actually kind of two recipes since they first offer a basic recipe and then offer variations, one of which, luckily for me, is blueberry. I’m a big fan of muffins because they’re easy to make and can then also provide a breakfast option for the rest of the week.
Test the Recipe: Grandma Lil’s Peanut Butter Cookies
“Test the Recipe” is a recurring column on PCFG where we test vintage (anything published before 1990) recipes and see if they stand the test of time or need updating. In this post we test the recipe as exactly as possible for the most accurate outcomes. Those recipes that need updating will be featured later in a “We Can Do It Better” post.
I’m mixing things up a little bit with this Test the Recipe post because I didn’t find it in a book; I found it in my grandma’s recipe box. As such, I don’t know the actual date on it, but considering the recipe is my great-grandmother’s I think it’s fairly safe to assume that the recipe falls within the time frame I established. I think a lot of the Christmas cookies my mom makes use my great-grandma’s recipes, but she doesn’t usually make peanut butter cookies, so I wanted to give these a try. I really enjoy peanut butter, and cookies are great, so I was excited to have some peanut butter cookies to eat. I’m sure my great-grandma didn’t come up with the recipe totally from scratch, but I don’t know where she may have gotten the original recipe from either.
Great-grandma Lillian
Test the Recipe: Peas with Sesame Butter
“Test the Recipe” is a recurring column on PCFG where we test vintage (anything published before 1990) recipes and see if they stand the test of time or need updating. In this post we test the recipe as exactly as possible for the most accurate outcomes. Those recipes that need updating will be featured later in a “We Can Do It Better” post.
I realized when looking through recent posts that the first two “Test the Recipe” posts were desserts. Not that there’s anything wrong with dessert, but we here at Poor Couple’s Food Guide believe in eating a balanced diet. So for this edition I turned to veggies. It was actually harder to find a good recipe to test than I thought it would be. There was a fair amount of vegetable recipes, but I had to narrow it down to ones that seemed quick, since this was going to be a side dish and not a main course, and also contain vegetables that everyone eating dinner would eat (which is easier said than done). There were a lot of recipes for vegetables I don’t like. Why so many asparagus and mushroom recipes guys? There weren’t even any I really wanted to use in the first book I looked through, but luckily I found one I felt like testing in Betty Crocker’s Working Woman’s Cookbook from 1982. I’ve always been a fan of sesame, so peas with sesame butter it was.
Test the Recipe: Glazed Pineapple Cookies
“Test the Recipe” is a recurring column on PCFG where we test vintage (anything published before 1990) recipes and see if they stand the test of time or need updating. In this post we test the recipe as exactly as possible for the most accurate outcomes. Those recipes that need updating will be featured later in a “We Can Do It Better” post.
I knew when I started the “Test the Recipe” column that I had to do at least one cookie recipe around Christmas-time. I didn’t want to take on any family favorite Christmas cookie recipes though, mainly because I already know that they’re good. To find a new old cookie recipe I turned to a book from Erik’s mom, McCall’s Cookie Collection from 1974.
There are a lot of interesting cookie recipes in here, but I wanted one that was definitely different from the cookies I knew me, Erik, and our moms would be making. I ultimately decided on this one because it was different from the usual Christmas cookies but also still had a bit of a Christmas call-back since it sounded like it could be a bit fruitcake-esque (without being a food no one wants to eat). So I set to work testing this glazed pineapple cookie recipe.
Test the Recipe: Hearty Whole Grain Coffee Cake
It can be a lot of fun looking through old cook books. Some recipes you look at wondering what people were thinking back then while others still sound really yummy. Though it’s usually pretty easy to tell the horrific vintage recipes at first glance, sometimes it can be harder to tell for sure which recipes have actually stood up to the test of time. That’s where our new recurring “Test the Recipe” posts will hopefully come to help. We plan to find recipes from vintage cookbooks/recipe cards/magazine cutouts, etc. and test them out. For the first run through we will follow the recipe exactly (barring any possible ingredients that are very hard to find/might not exist anymore in which case we will make the closest possible substitution) and see how it turns out. If it turns out good, then that’s it! Recipe is good to go and you can rest assured that you will end up with something yummy if you make it. If it doesn’t turn out good? Well then we’ll be revisiting the recipe and tweaking it and then posting our version of it as a “We Can Do It Better” post at a later date.
Our first recipe up for trial is from the Quaker Oats Wholegrain Cookbook from 1979.
There’s a bunch of interesting sounding recipes in there, so we’ll probably test some more from there, but first up is the “Hearty Whole Grain Coffee Cake.” I enjoy coffee cake but hadn’t had any for awhile, so it seemed like a good place to start.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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