From Youth's Companion, 1874.

A shoe polish recipe.  From Chatterbox, 1913.

Check your pantry's stock of styrofoam eggs for this cauliflower lamb recipe.  From Very Innovative Parties Cookbook by the Auxillary to the Alumni Association of Loma Linda University, 1987.

From The Cook Book of Left-overs by Helen Carroll Clarke, 1911.

Today's recipe for "cold slams" is from the University of Southern California's 1910 yearbook.

From Wee Wisdom, 1926.

This is the recipe for making cats.  From Wee Wisdom, 1919.

Today's recipe for raised eyebrows is from the University of Southern California's 1910 yearbook.

Reblog if, upon seeing an interesting recipe, you, too, exclaim, "I've got to make some this very minute."  From St. Nicholas, 1914.

Just as you may have guessed, fairy tea contains heartsease, Johnny-jump-up, May-bloom, joy-weed, and waterfall water.  Note that both "heartsease" and "Johnny-jump-up" are names for wild pansies.  How to tell one from the other?  We suggest that one is mostly purple and one is mostly yellow.  From St. Nicholas, 1914.

From Messages from My Father, by Calvin Trillin:

["Metaphor or Recipe?" could be one of those internet quiz games.]

When I gave a speech at a Jewish community center in the Chicago suburbs, I called it 'Midwestern Jews: Making Chopped Liver with Miracle Whip.' After the speech, someone came up and said that the title was an interesting metaphor. 'It's not a metaphor,' I said. 'It's a recipe.' That was how my mother made chopped liver.

***

["Pruning One's Family Tree"]:

***
When my mother was elderly, she jettisoned any number of relatives from my father’s side of the family, the way some older people who have moved into more compact quarters shed excess furniture. I don’t mean she stopped seeing them; she withdrew recognition of them as cousins. “How’s Cousin So-and-so?” I might ask on a trip home, only to be told, “Those people were never related to us.”

Here's a recipe book written by someone whose name appropriately sounds like fireplace grates for heating pans.  One Hundred and Sixty Culinary Dainties for the Epicure, the Invalid and the Dyspeptic by Samuel Hobbs, 1885.  See Nostradamus Predicted Your Next Diet.

In 1879, Fun magazine revealed its recipe for XXX:

Wit and Wisdom, Genial Fun,

   Humour and Satire keen,

Praise and bays for Honesty's son,

   Scorn for the False and Mean,

Pitying "chaff" for Malcontents,

   Laughter that folly wrecks—

These are the chief ingredients

   Forming our "treble X."

Here's a precursor to the cult film Eating Raul -- "Cooking a Husband," from 1884.

Our suggested tag line to introduce this recipe: "What would you give for ..."

1 cup Tabasco pepper jelly or jalapeño jelly (mild to hot as you prefer.  For very hot, consider habanero or ghost pepper jelly)

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. ground cloves

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Optional: 1 cup finely chopped spiced nuts