A central Pennsylvania way to store your recipes
Longtime reader and source of neat York County information Jo Ott shared something with me several years ago that I just found in my files today and wanted to publish. It’s about the cabinets above, which were seen and photographed by Jo in a home outside Gettysburg.
When she originally shared her photos with me, Jo mentioned this 2012 York Town Square post by Jim McClure, which talked about members of the West Manchester Township and Greater Dover Area historical societies visiting the 1860 Yingling farmhouse near Gettysburg, which was under restoration. Workers during the restoration found several interesting items; some are seen in Jim’s blog post, and others can be found in this June 2012 article.
“There is, however, one other item not mentioned in either story,” Jo wrote.
She continued, “It is a sure-fire method of never losing your recipes and to always have them at the ready! Take a look at the four photos. You are looking at the inside of some of the farmhouse kitchen cabinet wooden doors.”
Jo continues, “Note on the pie dough recipe the name Dexo is written off to the left in parenthesis. I had to Google that to see what it is. This must have been a pretty savvy cook to know of its existence and to want to substitute it for supermarket shortening.” She added that the KitchenKrafts website describes Dexo as “Hi-Ratio Shortening designed specifically for bakers. Its ingredients are partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (soybean & Pam), mono and di-glycerides, polysorbate 60 and it is more temperature stable and holds air better upon whipping.”
What’s funny is that my mother has many recipes that call for Spry, a similar shortening for bakers, and while our recipes are in boxes and not our cabinets, it was neat to see the similarity!
Does anyone else’s family have kitchen-cabinet recipes in or around York County? I’d be fascinated to know.
