When it comes to cooking advice, Grandma knows best. Whenever I have a question about a dish I’m making, I know all I have to do is pick up the phone and call my Grandma and my cooking conundrum will be solved within a matter of minutes. Plus, I’m sure we can all agree that some of the best dinners and desserts we’ve ever been served have come from Grandma’s kitchen.
There’s a reason for that. Grandmas know best because they’ve had years of practice and have accumulated years of cooking advice from friends and even their own grandmothers. Recognizing the power that grandmothers can wield in the kitchen, we’ve decided to round up some vintage cooking tips to help you out in your own cooking adventures.
10 of Grandma’s Best Vintage Cooking Tips:
- If you want to poach eggs but don’t have an egg poacher, just make a ring of aluminum foil and butter it. Put the ring in boiling water and drop the egg in the ring. Poach until done.
- Make a fail-proof meringue by adding sugar (1 tablespoon to an egg) before beating egg whites.
- To get more juice from a lemon, pour hot water over it before squeezing.
- Instead of buying baking powder, make your own! It’s easy: just use 1 part baking soda, 2 parts cream of tartar and 1 part cornstarch. Mix well, sift three times and store in tightly covered tins.
- If a cake becomes dry, wrap it in a damp cloth and set it in a moderately warm oven until the cloth is dry. Your cake will be as good as new!
- To keep cookies fresh and crisp, place crumbled tissue paper in the bottom of the cookie jar or canister.
- Achieve the perfect, easy-to-peel hard-boiled eggs by placing the eggs in a pan and covering them with cold water. Then sprinkle about two tablespoons of salt in the water and cook. When the water begins to boil rapidly, cover with lid and remove from heat. Let stand in water until cool again. Your eggs will be perfectly peel-able!
- Dip tomatoes in boiling water for a few seconds for easy peeling.
- Before scraping new potatoes, soak them for half an hour in cold, salted water. This will help the skins peel off more easily and will keep your hands from staining too!
- To grate cheese, chill the cheese beforehand. To slice cheese, warm the knife so it cuts easily.
Now that we’ve learned a thing or two from Grandma, let’s talk giveaways! This week we have an awesome one for you. We’re giving away five copies of the Little Old Lady Recipes cookbook which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s filled with timeless, comforting dishes like meatloaf, buttermilk biscuits, pies, cakes and so much more. Plus you get to hear from the little old ladies themselves, real women who submitted these recipes. They give advice ranging from “Club soda is a wonderful thing. You can use it to remove any stain, or mix it with gin and drink until you don’t care about the stain anymore” to “There isn’t much a good cake won’t fix.” Read more about the cookbook here.
Enter to win a copy of Little Old Lady Recipes today!
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