Questions about making dishes from older cookbooks, or using antiquated cooking techniques or equipment. Primarily refers to dishes and techniques of the last 150 years, as opposed to the History and Food History tags which can explore much earlier periods.
Vintage recipes, that often come from vintage cookbooks, come with assumptions that no longer hold true both about the ingredients and about the cook’s background. They may also use language that can be both deceptively similar to modern language and maddeningly indecipherable to modern cooks.
Vintage usually means fifty or more years old, but there may be overlap as newer books are written using older assumptions, or in an older style.
Vintage-Cooking is distinguished from History and Food History in that the question is about how to follow an older recipe or food practice, rather than the questions about origin or evolution of foods that belong in History.
A good vintage cooking question should include the context of the recipe, phrase, or technique. The context may include the source of the recipe, the year or era that the recipe was written, and the country where the recipe, technique, or dish originated.
A good vintage cooking question can also include further examples of the use of this phrase or technique in other cookbooks or other contexts. The Internet Archive includes many vintage cookbooks and can be searched for words, recipes, and phrases to shed further light on the question and its potential answer(s).
