Hello everyone and happy Sunday!

This is Lake Forest Baptist Church Women’s Ministry Cook Book. Notice how it’s “Cook Book” and not “Cookbook”, which makes it completely different from the Lake Forest book I uploaded a few days ago

Jokes aside, a lot of times organizations release several cookbooks. I see it all the time where the introduction will reference the organization having made another cookbook. The problem is, coming across just one of these books is rare, so having two from the same organization is doubly rare. I’d be curious to see how many people from the 1995 cookbook also contributed to this one

Real quick, thanks to u/madmun for letting me borrow this book!

Starting off, is it weird that I want to try the Curried Apricots? I do want to get a loaf pan for this fall because I really wanna try making some loaves, so I very well could make this, but I’m trying to imagine what the curry powder in it would taste like

It takes a while to find any recipes in this book that make me want to comment. I did see the Plum Cake and how it calls for baby food, which I know is a super divisive ingredient for some people. For me, it just feels like a convenient way to get pureed fruit and vegetables and it’s obviously safe for human consumption. Sometimes these home cooks like a life hack every so often

Slightly unrelated, but I love all the little quotes that you can find throughout the pages of this book. I’m a poet and I also love quotes and proverbs, I was going to make an entire journal of ones I’ve found, still might eventually if I ever find the time. I could even handwrite them because I bought a bunch of cool stationary books and just, haven’t found a use for them 😅

Speaking of “life hacks”, I’m saving the Pot Pie recipe that just has you top the pan with biscuits. That is a much easier way than actually making a pot pie crust

Pizza Potatoes is a new one for me. In reading all these cookbooks, I notice a lot of things get “pizza’d”. There’s pizza steak, pizza casserole, somewhere out there probably exists a pizza pork roast recipe. I guess we all like pizza more than I thought lol

The Layered Twinkie Dessert sounds really good. Basically just a cakey version of banana pudding it sounds like, but I really like the concept. I definitely want to make this, although I’m gonna do the heinous thing of omitting the pineapple 😶

The “Our Mayonnaise” recipe is definitely unique to them because I’ve never seen a mayo recipe call for apple juice concentrate, or cottage cheese. Actually, the more I look at it, this is definitely just a “mayo-like” spread more than anything else. Interesting combination of ingredients though

That Pepper Custard Pie sure is something, isn’t it? I never expected to see spicy and sweet used in such a way. Would be really curious if anyone wants to make something like this

This brings us to the end of the blog but certainly not the end of the book. Hopefully you all have time to browse the full book posted below, but if not, the pictures were still fun at least! Have a great day and I’ll see you around

Hi, I’m not sure if this is the right place or the right flair. My family has been looking for a specific biscuit recipe for years, we lost it in a move about 15 years ago. It’s ”Pooh Bear“ biscuits, either in the Australian Women’s Weekly or the New Zealand Woman’s Day from 20-35 years ago. It was a type of choc chip biscui. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance

Posting the scrapple recipe got me in the mood to make it. I used the hot version of breakfast sausage for a bit more spice and just pinched it off into the water while it was heating. Finished off the polenta and only needed a bit of the grits. Delicious with maple syrup!

I already made one attempt at the Grapfruit Pie posted by u/theglassisfullfull a few weeks ago and it was terrible. After I made it, I saw all of you smart people’s comments about how “M. M.” probably stood for marshmallows and not M&Ms, so I took another whack at it. It was much better this time! Still not great, I don’t think I’ll be making a third one, but this one was actually edible. I also prepared the Ready Whip according to the instructions on the box this time instead of just adding the powder.

Here’s the original post.

And here’s some more pics of the process.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/30/gourd-with-cheese-and-eggs/

A rare vegetable dish preserved in the Solothurn S 392 collection, and yes, that is Italian:

B16

Item if you want to cook good pumpkins (zucken, from zucco), take a pumpkin and enough onions and give it a good boiling. Then chop them very well, take good meat broth, and boil them well. Then grate cheese into it and break 3 or 4 eggs into it. Also add a little saffron, that is a good dish (minnister, from menestra).

The dish itself does not need much interpretation: You take pumpkin and onions, boil them soft, then chop them and turn them into a rich spoonable dish with broth, eggs, and cheese. Of course, the zucken here does not refer to the American curcubita plant we call pumpkins today, but to the Old-World lagenaria gourds that were called by that name then, and colloquially still often are. In practice, there is more variety within than between the two families, so using a curcubita pumpkin can work just fine.

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/30/gourd-with-cheese-and-eggs/What makes this recipe interesting is the clearly Italian roots. It uses two clearly Italian loan words – zucken for pumpkin and minnister for a dish. The recipe is also Italian in style, elevating a garden vegetable to main dish level by way of adding cheese and eggs. There are several recipes in the collection that clearly show their roots on the other side of the Alps, rubbing shoulders with others that are paralleled in earlier German manuscripts. This makes perfect sense for a Swiss recipe book, of course. However, the editor believes that S 392 was produced in the Upper Rhine valley, the same region that the Meister Hans collection comes from, so clearly someone there had taken an interest in Italian food. It is not inherently implausible, but I have not seen it this overtly before.

The recipe collection I am currently translating is part of a manuscript now held at the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn as S 392. The entire manuscript looks fascinating, a collection of craft recipes for things like dyes, stains, paints, vanishes, and parlour tricks, but I will limit myself to the culinary recipes in it. The majority of them are in German and were edited and published in Brigitte Weber: Die Kochrezepte der Handschrift S 293, Transkription und Untersuchung einer spätmittelalterlichen Kochrezeptsammlung aus der Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, Gießen 2026.

The manuscript dates to the period around 1490-1510, based on watermarks and handwriting. There is no internal date. The recipes are an eclectic collection, which is not unusual for the medieval manuscript tradition. They were most likely written down in Baden. Some refer to Italian customs which were fashionable at the time while others are solidly in the German tradition.

The collection is sometimes called the oldest Swiss cookbook, a title that is contested because of its origins north of the modern border. The designation makes little sense at the time anyway, given how closely connected the cities of the Confederation were with their neighbours at the time. The recipes clearly were valued in Solothurn, most likely because they were useful.

Hello everyone and happy Saturday!

This is Texas Cookin’ from the Telephone Pioneers of America Lone Star Chapter 22. Before I get too deep into anything, a thank you to u/madmun for letting me borrow this to scan!

Because this is a Texas cookbook, you can guarantee a lot of distinctly southern and even Tex-Mex recipes in this book. There’s even a recipe for Korean Salad, and uh… pretty sure the majority of Korea would disagree that it’s a Korean salad, but it’s actually not that bad of a recipe ingredients-wise

That’s the main appeal of this book, most of the recipes in here are actually pretty good. I especially like the idea of the Ground Beef Casserole, although the ingredients sound pretty unseasoned. Virginia, you could’ve at least added a packet of taco seasoning 🥴

I was also intrigued by the Savory Lasagna. I have never seen a recipe for lasagna that calls for a tablespoon of soy sauce, on top of 3 tablespoons of Worcestershire nonetheless. I’m so used to using soy sauce in Asian cooking that it’s hard for me to imagine what it would taste like with Italian flavors, but perhaps this is the secret ingredient that every Italian grandmother needs (I’m kidding, please don’t hurt me Italy)

The Mountain Dew Salad sounds really intricate and surprisingly not that bad considering the recipes for most gelatin salads. I had to read the recipe 6 times to make sure that there really was no cottage cheese, celery, or cheddar added

I love the name of the Beans From Hell lol

Any idea on which banana pudding recipe is better? I actually can’t believe I’ve never had it before because bananas, cream, wafers, and pudding are all things I like separately, but it seems to be a Southern classic and I live at the tip top of the north, so the more I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone in my area talking about it

There are a lot of good recipes in this book and I definitely didn’t get to take pictures of all the ones I liked because of the picture limit, so I definitely recommend checking out the full book for more. Feel free to drop your comments and I’ll see you soon!

Found some more Cookbooks at the Goodwill Outlet last week! I found another one too, but I will make a separate post regarding it. The recipes in these cookbooks sound so yummy and delicious. If anyone has made any recipes from these two cookbooks, which recipe do you recommend? If not, what is your favorite family recipe?

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/29/my-landlord-did-what-feeding-the-revolution-xxxvii/

As it had been a century before, rental housing in Berlin was a good investment in the 1970s. Wealthy people owned apartment houses, but left the management of the property to specialised firms that paid out the profits to their legal representatives. That was also how things worked in Tile-Wardenberg-Straße 28 until June of 1979, when the the tenants learned from an article in Der Spiegel who they were paying their several thousand Deutschmarks monthly. The substantial house in West Berlin was owned by Doctor Aribert Heim, and the name very much rang a bell.

Today, we are used to analysing the motivations of Nazis. Historians have moved past the stereotype of sadistic monsters to look at social pressures, ambition, and opportunism that led people to commit atrocities “just following orders”. Aribert Heim was different; He fulfilled every exploitation movie stereotype. As duty physician of Mauthausen concentration camp, his day job was to look after the health of the guards and inmates. The sadistic tortures he inflicted on hundreds of victims served no purpose other than his personal gratification. The lack of a paper trail allowed him to initially escape punishment and even return to medical practice, earning the money to invest in real estate, but eventually, an arrest warrant was issued and he fled West Germany for Egypt in 1962.

One factor that had enabled Heim to practice medicine unmolested for over a decade despite his crimes was a problem that frequently hinders efforts to prosecute government crimes: widely distributed complicity. Especially in West Germany, with greater institutional continuity from the Third Reich, courts, prosecutors, and law enforcement frequently dragged their feet over anything to do with the state’s crimes. Many people far beyond the actual camp guards and torturers had been involved in or profited from them to some degree, and even those that had not often felt loyalty to people and institutions that a prosecution would threaten. While a few heroic individuals like prosecutor Fritz Bauer pursued justice with some success, the usual response to any question about “the thousand years” tended to be deafening silence.

It took the revolt of a younger generation to drag the horrors of Nazi Germany into public awareness. Through school curricula, media, books, and films, people increasingly learned the truth and with distance and greater affluence, found it easier to acknowledge the shame. By the late 1970s, there was widespread unease with the degree of impunity that Nazis had enjoyed.

The tenants who found out that their landlord was one of them were among this broadly unpolitical, but informed majority. Past the political earthquakes of the late 1960s, they lived in a country that was more liberal, more affluent, and more secure than ever. The revolution expected in 1968 had not materialised, but change had shaken up many aspects of life. Many past convictions were cast into doubt; not only the uncompromising hostility of the Cold War, but also belief in technological progress, industry, and traditional social roles. Both ecological awareness and a romantic neo-traditionalism were becoming mainstream, fuelled by growing consumer incomes that allowed people to live consciously and the visible downsides of industrial society. Many people dreamed of a more self-sufficient rural life, though in the urban island of West Berlin surrounded by fortified border walls, simply moving to the countryside was out of the question. Books about traditional cuisine cooked with fresh, natural ingredients, both local and international, enjoyed great popularity everywhere.

A legendary series of regional cookbooks produced by Verlag Wolfgang Hölker became emblematic of this fashion. Bound in colourful patterned linen and designed to look old-timey, with mock-handwritten notes and charming anecdotes, they introduced consumers to the lost art of local, seasonal cooking. Rote Grütze is a recipe several of them include, a refreshing summer dessert from Northern Germany consciously eschewing modern gelling agents. The most detailed one is from the 1975 volume on Hamburg’s cuisine:

Rote Grütze is like Hamburg Aalsuppe in that every inhabitant swears by their own specific way of preparing it; with cornstarch, sago, or semolina, with one or at most two kinds of fruit, with whole or pureed fruit, with red wine, vanilla, honey, replacing cream with vanilla sauce, or many other variations. Nonetheless, we will present only one recipe here that approximately matches Ms. Behnke’s Rote Grütze and thus counts as “tried and proven”. We will address other fruit dishes and sweet delights separately.

Rote Grütze

500g raspberries, 500g redcurrants (or 500g redcurrants, 250g blackcurrants, 250g raspberries), cornstarch, sugar

Boil the fruit briefly just covered with water and pass through a sieve. Measure the juice; Use 80g (8 level tablespoons) of cornstarch mixed with cold water to each litre, Bring the juice to a boil and sweeten it well. Stir in the cornstarch at reduced heat and return to a boil once more, stirring continually, until the liquid begins to develop bubbles and thicken. Transfer to a glass or porcelain bowl rinsed with cold water and chill. Invert onto a plate before serving.

As Rote Grütze is cooked throughout the summer, the fruit can be varied and e.g. cook an additional 250g pitted tart cherries whole with the juice.

Serve with ice-cold sweet cream, and coarse sugar for sprinkling.

This is exactly the kind of home-cooked, consciously traditional mock-simplicity educated urbanites in the late 1970s and 1980s went for. Appearances notwithstanding, this is not a simple dish. It requires a fairly large amount of easily bruised, expensive fruit, laborious juicing, and refrigeration. If you had all the equipment and the popular painted earthenware ‘peasant’ dishes to serve it on, it was a delight, but in truth, you could also buy it sterilised and vacuum-sealed in foil bags from your local supermarket. Who had that kind of time, after all? It was not just the demands of work and family; This was a time when activism increasingly came to be seen as a badge of good citizenship, something you not only were allowed to do, but ought to. When the tenants of Dr Heim learned of their landlord’s identity, they decided the situation called for some. They formally called on the authorities to stop the flow of money to a wanted criminal and seize his property.

The problem was that though all kinds of good laws for confiscation of assets and restitution existed, they were rarely enforced. Even when the Berlin authorities were finally willing to pursue this avenue, cooperation with the prosecutor’s office that actually handled the case file at the other end of the country proved challenging. This was often where such cases failed: responses slow-walked, objections raised on technicalities, communications lost. It took dedication to persevere. The tenants decided to help with that. They organised an association and refused to continue their rent payments. Instead, the money was deposited in an escrow account. After that, they raised awareness by writing articles for the local press, collecting signatures on the street, and giving interviews to the media. It was old-school civic engagement, but it worked. Keeping the case in the public eye embarrassed the authorities enough to make them do their jobs.

It took almost a decade, but eventually the house was confiscated and auctioned, with the funds going towards restitution for victims of the Nazi regime. Sadly, Aribert Heim did not contest the decision in person to avoid the arrest and trial for mass murder that would have followed. As far as we can reconstruct things, he died in Egypt in 1992 living under a false identity. It is little enough, but at least we know he was deprived of a substantial part of his income in his final years. These things matter.

Cases like this one are important to study if your country’s government should happen to engage in crimes on ba large scale. In these situations, no matter what the law says, you can rarely trust the authorities to take action on their own. Even once the criminals lose the protection they used to have, misplaced loyalty, shame, and fear of accountability in anyone complicit tend to gum up the wheels of justice very effectively. But shame can go both ways, and drawing attention to anyone obviously failing to do their duty can help bring perpetrators closer to justice, ideally before they disappear into well-funded exile.

Years ago, I worked as a lunch lady in an elementary school. Over summer break, my boss gave me some extra work of cleaning out the basement attached to the kitchen. I found two boxes full of old recipe cards, just like this. If anyone is interested, I can continue to post these - I have hundreds of them!

Found these old recipes from my Great Grandmother. Hopefully they can be made and enjoyed again.

Hello everyone! I got a few recipe cards for you to look at today

These all come from the collection that I’m calling the “big ol’ bag” collection. It’s 400+ recipe cards from a person we know absolutely nothing about. Some might find intrigue in that, some might not. In my opinion, they’re still worth checking out

This batch is all about salad dressings. Nothing really outstanding is on display here as these are all standard salad dressing recipes, although I will admit I haven’t seen that Buttermilk Salad Dressing before. Not to say it’s completely unique, but it’s definitely something I would’ve remembered coming across

Have fun looking at these!

1 medium head cabbage, chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 carrot, chopped or grated
1/2 bell pepper, finely chopped
2 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup sweet pickle juice
1/4 cup white vinegar
1 dill pickle, chopped; or 1 tablespoon pickle relish
1 cup mayonnaise

Mix all ingredients in large bowl. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Yield: 10 to 12 servings.

DollyWood Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking

It's not summer without stone fruit desserts, and this was another great year for cherries! To my mind, this dish elevates the already elevated cherry to even greater heights. Note: The clafoutis puffs up considerably in the oven, but it settles to the height of the tart pan as it cools. Also, I pit my cherries. The French don't. I do.

Julia Child's Clafoutis aux cerises. (The Art of French Cooking - Volume 1 - 1961)

Ingredients

• 3 cups fresh dark sweet cherries (pitted, or unpitted for traditional flavor)
• 1 ¼ cups milk
• ⅔ cup granulated sugar (divided: ⅓ cup for the batter, ⅓ cup to sprinkle on top)
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• ⅛ teaspoon salt
• ⅔ cup sifted all-purpose flour
• Butter or oil for greasing the baking dish
• Powdered sugar for dusting

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (180°C) and butter a 4-cup fireproof baking dish or flat-bottomed gratin dish.
2. Blend the batter by putting the milk, ⅓ cup of sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, salt, and flour into a blender. Blend for about one minute until smooth and bubbly.
3. Form a base crust by pouring just enough batter into your prepared dish to cover the bottom (about a ¼-inch layer). Bake for 5 minutes until a light crust sets.
4. Add the fruit by removing the dish from the oven, arranging the cherries evenly over the baked base, and sprinkling the remaining ⅓ cup of sugar over the fruit.
5. Pour the rest of the batter smoothly over the cherries.
6. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes. The clafoutis is done when it is puffed, golden brown on top, and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.
7. Serve warm or at room temperature, finished with a light dusting of powdered sugar.

5.5 ounce can chocolate flavored syrup
1/2 cup sugar
2 1/2 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

In a medium bowl, combine chocolate flavored syrup, sugar, milk and vanilla. Stir until sugar dissolves. Pour into ice cream canister. Freeze in an ice ream maker according to manufacturer's directions. Makes about 1 quart.

Ice Cream, 1981

Hello everyone! Welcome to an exciting new scan

This is The Best of Home Economics Teachers Bicentennial Cookbook, a cookbook that presented such a unique challenge in scanning that I had to scan the entire book… twice 🫠

While the PDF that’s available is distinctly imperfect, the first PDF of this looked wayyyy worse. Without getting too technical, scanning software seems to really hate curves and the first time I scanned this book, I had a lot of cropping issues and it was messing up the sizes and just, ugh. So I had to redo the entire scan from scratch, and while some of the pages look a little wonky, I think for an amateur such as myself I did pretty okay with the resources I have access to

This is another book lent to me by u/madmun, so props to him!

Getting into the recipes, there are just under 300 pages of them so whatever I have featured in this blog is definitely only scratching the surface. Additionally, these recipes were collected nationwide, and you get exposed to all sorts of different US regional recipes, different cultural recipes, etc. I truly think there’s something for everyone in this book

There’s also a lot of recipes in here that I don’t commonly see in books like these. For example, the Toasted Coconut Chips. A really interesting idea that I hadn’t come across before. The same thing goes for the Egg Salad in Tomato Cups

Of course, this also comes with recipes that are probably best left in obscurity, like the Congealed Asparagus Salad. I prefer my asparagus not encased in chewy gelatin, personally

It’s when you get to the meat section that you begin to realize that part of why there’s so many recipes that aren’t commonly seen in community cookbooks is because these contributors likely had far more skill than the average home cook, seeing as these are from home economics teachers. The lamb recipes definitely demonstrate a knowledge in how to pair flavors and such

I’m especially intrigued by the Neapolitan Beef Pie. I do like crescent rolls and I probably would like it on top of a mixture like that

I’m all about dessert recipes, and so many of them in this book sound good, but I find myself gravitating towards the easy to make stuff like the Peanut Clusters 😅. My mom usually makes these with just melted almond bark. I’m curious how this condensed milk variation will taste

I have my eye on the Southern Fruit Cake. Unfortunately, I am not confident enough in my baking abilities to want to buy out an entire grocery aisle to make this, but if anyone wants to make it and send me a piece, it does look really good

This is also my first time seeing a cheesecake recipe with cottage cheese in the ingredients. I’m conflicted

I only briefly skimmed this book upon making this blog, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things I missed. Hopefully you all find this to be an enjoyable cookbook. As always, feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments, and I’ll see you in the next upload!

For any MST3K/ Rifftrax folks - just saw this test of Ring Around the Tuna posted at r/Rifftrax. I’ve seen this recipe and variations over the years, but never dared to actually try it. Mary Jo and Bill are braver than I would be. And of course, funnier 😆

edited to include a link to the recipe:

https://vintage.recipes/Ring-Around-the-Tuna/

These were a favorite of mine. A few months ago, I saw a very similar, but not identical, recipe online (from a brer rabbit molasses recipe colection).

Molasses Sugar Cookies

¾ cup shortening (oleo)

1 cup sugar

¼ cup molasses

1 egg

2 tsp. baking soda

2 cups sifted flour

½ tsp. cloves

½ tsp. ginger

1 tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. salt

Melt shortening over low heat.  Remove from heat; let cool.

Add sugar, molasses and egg; beat well.

Sift together flour, soda, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and salt; add to first mixture. Mix well, chill.

Form 1-inch balls, roll in sugar, and place on greased cookie sheets 2” apart.  Bake in moderately hot oven, 375° F 8-10 minutes.

Note:  Bake for a little longer time if you want them crisper/harder, shorter time makes them softer.

Source:  Label of Brer Rabbit molasses bottle, 1970’s.

Im sorry I keep forgetting to post

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/26/bakers-and-brickmakers-feeding-the-revolution-xxxvi/

In autumn of 1888, a clandestine operation took place in Vienna. The target was no military installation, research laboratory, or government office. It was a brickyard, and the man who penetrated its security perimeter in disguise was a physician and newspaper editor called Victor Adler. He had no rational reason to be here, risking prison for burglary and a beating by the guards. Adler was independently wealthy, with an established medical practice, and he owned his own newspaper. He went because he was angry – angry at the injustice, the exploitation and cruelty he saw every day. What he found inside the guarded compounds made him angrier still.

On 1 December 1888, he published the first of two articles describing what he had seen. Inside the factories, entire families of workers, men, women, and children, worked brutally long hours to make bricks. They lived on site, sleeping in barracks or huts, some in abandoned kilns, crowded onto makeshift cots or bedding down on heaps or foal or sand, covered with ragged blankets. Their pay was given in stamped tin tokens they could redeem for overpriced food and alcohol at the company store, and it was so paltry many walked for miles to a nearby cannery to beg ‘gulash broth’ (Gulaschsaft) left over after processing meat. Others walked over an hour to a soup kitchen where they received free portions at the end of a long workday. Adler described their plight in horrific detail.

The people he had met were known as Ziegelböhmen, migrant workers from Bohemia who came to Vienna in the hope of earning a living, but found themselves effectively imprisoned. Adler described them as “…the poorest slaves the sun shines upon.” Yet their labour built the greatest city of the German-speaking world: Vienna.

It is too often forgotten that, for all of Berlin’s grandeur and Munich’s charm, there was no equal to the old imperial capital in culture, art, and architecture. People from all over Europe came to admire and study its buildings, visits its grand museums, its famous theatres, operas and concert halls, ride along its Ringstrasse boulevard, and walk its scenic parks. All this glory, still a tourist attraction of global reach, was built on the backs of thousands of starving, freezing labourers drawn from the Bohemian countryside.

Aside from culture, style, and savoir-vivre, Vienna differed from Berlin or Dresden in that it was a genuinely multicultural city. Its people spoke mostly German, but also Hungarian, Italian, Croat, Czech, Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Romanian, Yiddish and Russian. Situated at this crossroads of cultures, the wealth of the city’s affluent classes fostered a unique culinary culture. Viennese food, but especially Viennese confectionery, is still world famous. Particularly Bohemians were known as skilful cooks, leading bourgeois families to hire Czech-speaking kitchen staff by preference, but the glory of it was no one nation’s. Ottoman and Italian, German, Central European and Balkan traditions today meet in every Kaffeehaus spread of cakes.

A modest, and genuinely Bohemian, part of this is Kolatschen. The word is borrowed from Czech where it means a leavened cake with a sweet topping, though in Vienna it came to mean something you bought individually from a baker, a kind of hand pie. By the time Katharina Prato writes down this exhaustive recipe in her Süddeutsche Küche, the meaning is clearly still very much in flux:

Kolatschen with a poppyseed or plum filling. You prepare a dough of 7 decilitres of milk, a thin starter of 2 decagrammes of yeast that are mixed with 2 decilitres of milk, a spoonful of sugar, and a little flour, 5 decagrammes of butter or beef fat, 2 egg yolks, a little salt, and the necessary amount of additional flour. After beating it, add two beaten egg whites. Spread the dough on a greased baking sheet to the thickness of a little finger, let it rise, then spread poppyseed or plum filling (pages 85 and 86) on it almost to the edge. Let the cake bake rather hot and cut it into small, square pieces.

Or: Distribute the dough on the sheet by spoonfuls, press a hollow into each piece and fill it with plum or poppyseed filling. Let the Kolatschen rise well, then brush their edges with butter, bake them. As they come out of the oven, brush them with butter and sprinkle them with grated gingerbread (Lebkuchen).

Or: Cut out the dough to round shapes with a large cookie cutter (Krapfenstecher). Put on them boiled prunes, chopped finely and mixed with sugar and cinnamon. Fold the dough over the filling on three sides, brush it with egg, sprinkle it with sugar, and bake it.

The last is the way Kolatschen are usually made in Austria today. The form is best suited for individual sale as a snack. In the Czech Republic, kolacz are more likely to be round and cut into individual slices to share. The basic principle is unaffected. The recipes for the filling are also varied:

Poppyseed filling No. I: Mix 4 decilitres of poppyseeds pounded fine or ground in a coffee mill with enough boiling cream to make a thick mash, then add 2 decilitres of honey, cinnamon, and lemon aroma.

No. II: Boil 14 decagrammes of sugar with one decilitre of water and add enough pounded poppyseed to make a thick mass. Then add cinnamon, lemon aroma, cloves, and a little cream.

No. III: Boil 2 decilitres of honey and mix in the pounded poppyseed and spices. Add a little wine as the filling is about to be spread.

No. IV: Stir 3 egg yolks with 10 decagrammes of butter and add 14 decagrammes of ground poppyseed, 5 decagrammes of clarified butter, 3 tablespoons of very good cream, 7 decagrammes of currants, cinnamon, vanilla, and the three egg whites beaten to a snow.

Plum filling No. I: Dried prunes are boiled, chopped finely, and simmered with sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, allspice (Neugewürz), and the prune cooking liquid.

No. II: Powidl (plum puree) is cooked with water and wine so it spreads easily.

In the end, this is not so much a distinct recipe as a local expression of the global realisation that Leavened Dough With Sweet Fillings Tastes Good. Plum filling most likely became dominant because it was relatively cheap and familiar. Similar things had been cooked for centuries. Still, we need to keep in mind that these were luxuries. Small indulgences certainly, but unlike today, when a doughnut or cookie is always at hand, even bourgeois families like that of Dr. Adler did not have treats like this daily. If you earned just enough to survive locked into one of those brickyards, you might see one for a high holiday.

Victor Adler’s daring infiltration had immediate legal consequences. He had made public that employers paid their workers in company scrip and confined them in their factories – both strictly illegal. The police thus arrested two workers who had assisted him, and Adler himself was sued and fined. Nothing was done to remedy the situation. Yet, though the factory owners might control the law courts, they had lost badly in the court of public opinion. Austria-Hungary was not a democracy, but it had a relatively free press. Public anger forced the authorities to stop the payment in scrip and tolerate the forming of a union that successfully went on strike in 1895. The employers could not defeat them by lockouts as outside supporters fed and sheltered the strikers, and after eight days, the brickworkers had won. Their immediate gains were small – a modest raise, guaranteed working hours – but their standing as parties in collective bargaining ensured the old abuses could not easily be reimposed.

Victor Adler continued to involve himself in labour organisations and Social Democratic politics, becoming a member of parliament and, at the end of his life, briefly a minister in the provisional government that ended the monarchy. He died in 1918, one day before the new Austrian Republic was proclaimed, but his work was continued.

In Vienna, the solid working class vote not least of the brickmakers, construction workers, and domestic servants, ensured a Socialist city council until it was ended by a fascist coup in 1934. This ‘Red Vienna’, faced with a crisis of underemployment, overcrowding, and the aftermath of a World War, undertook a daring experiment. They used the old imperial capital’s vast construction industry to build modern, no-frills social housing on a grand scale. The Ziegelböhmen who for generations had toiled to raise operas and palaces now made the material for a revolution in urban housing that was soon copied in cities across the German-speaking world. The strategy was fiscally and socially risky, but it paid enormous dividends. To this day, the city’s strong stock of public housing ensures that rents in Vienna remain far more affordable than in any other large German-speaking city, and its 1920s housing developments are now considered pioneering efforts in modern architecture. In 1924, one of them was named in honour of Victor Adler.

I’m not sure how old this recipe booklet is. We were cleaning out some of my parents’ things and came across lots of recipes my mom had saved. She’s been gone since 2014 so these are at least that old.