The Vintage Kitchen

Iced or Hot Peruvian Chocolate

Three cups on saucers. Each cup is filled with dark hot cocoa and is topped with whipped cream.
Hot Peruvian chocolate from a 1920s recipe.

This chocolate drink recipe says it comes from the land where chocolate is taken seriously. Much more seriously than it is in the United States. Is this really a Peruvian 1920s recipe? I have no idea, but it tastes different from any other chocolate I’ve ever had. The 1920s article said this Peruvian chocolate is good iced or hot. And it is.

Two glasses of chocolate milk on an embroidered cloth. From recipe for Peruvian chocolate.
Not as sweet when cold, but definitely just as rich: Iced Peruvian Chocolate.

This Peruvian chocolate tastes like something between a normal hot cocoa recipe like you’ll find here, and the thick drinking chocolate that you find in cafés. This is a drink to savor. It’s not too sweet. Enjoy this one with a friend or friends and some good conversation.

A half-full canning jar sits on a counter, holding coffee. Leaning against it is a box of Baker's baking chocolate. For Peruvian chocolate recipe.
Chocolate and coffee combine to make a rich drink.

Thick drinking chocolate can be difficult to make. This recipe is relatively easy, and it makes four 1-cup servings. You can easily cut the serving size to 3/4 cup and serve five. The servings look small until you taste it.

You might want to serve a glass of water along with this cocoa, especially if you are serving anything with it, such as dessert. Too rich to drink quickly, guests might appreciate another drink option on the table besides this chocolate.

Pan of melted chocolate with sugar sprinkled over the top, part of a recipe for Peruvian chocolate.
Step 1. Melt the chocolate over hot water and stir in sugar and vanilla.

This drink requires a lot of chocolate, four ounces to be exact. It needs an entire box of Baker’s choclate from the grocery store baking aisle. You can substitute four ounces of any chcolate that you wish. The better quality of chocolate you use, the better the drink will be.

Smooth liquid chocolate mixed with coffee. Making Peruvian chocolate.
Step 2: Chocolate and sugar mixed with the coffee. Ready for the milk.

You will need:

  • 4 ounces chocolate, unsweetened or semi-sweet
  • 3 cups milk
  • 1 cup strong coffee
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • sweetened whipped cream, optional

If you have all this in stock, the recipe is straighforward and easy. Using a double boiler makes the recipe almost fool-proof, since you can’t easily burn the chocolate when it heats over water.

Using coffee makes this an “adult drink.” If you make this for children, substitute 1/2 cup water for the coffee and increase the milk to four cups. (Don’t worry; this variation is included in the printable recipe below.) Iced or hot, this Peruvian Hot Chocolate is a keeper.

Iced or Hot Peruvian Chocolate

This rich, not-too-sweet 1920s chocolate recipe falls somewhere between hot cocoa and French drinking chocolate.
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time20 minutes
Total Time30 minutes
Course: Drinks
Cuisine: American

Equipment

  • Double boiler
  • Whisk or egg beater
  • Additional large saucepan

Ingredients

  • 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate I used Baker's unsweetened
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 cup strong coffee
  • 3 cups milk
  • 1/2 cup sweetened whipped cream

For Iced Peruvian Chocolate

  • 1 ice cube per serving

Instructions

  • Scald the milk in a large saucepan and set aside.
  • Melt the chocolate in a double boiler (or in a heatproof pan over hot water). If unsweetened chocolate is used, add the sugar and vanilla.
  • Add the coffee and continue to cook over hot water until thick and smooth. Cook until steam rises from the mixture. If you use hot coffee, and the mixture comes to a boil, boil for one minute. Stir constantly.
  • Add the scalded milk to the chocolate mixture and whip to a froth with an egg beater.
  • Cook in double boiler over hot water for ten minutes. Whip again with the beater.
  • Serve with sweetened whipped cream.

For Iced Peruvian Chocolate

  • Chill. Then shake each serving with a piece of ice before serving.

For Children's Peruvian Chocolate

  • Substitute 1/2 cup water for the coffee, and increase milk to 4 cups. Serve warm or iced.

Notes

This recipe makes four cups, to serve four. It is so rich, however, that serving 3/4 cup to five people works well too.
Gluten Free Adaptations · The Vintage Kitchen

Many Layered Jam Cake

Multi-layered oval cake on a blue plate. The top is covered in powdered sugar.
A 1929 recipe for Many Layered Jam Cake. This will become your new favorite!

The Many Layered Jam Cake is one rich cake. After trying it once, this recipe goes into my permanent rotation for entertaining. A bit more involved than an everyday cake, Many Layered Jam Cake definitely tastes like more than a sum of its parts. This is a delicious, decadent cake for your next vintage gathering.

The original 1920s recipe called for two different types of marmalade. It didn’t mean sweet orange marmalade and another sweet orange marmalade. This recipe calls for orange marmalade and lemon marmalade. Or maybe orange and lime. Even a sweet orange and a tart orange would be good.

Cake on plate with two small pieces cut off the end. The small pieces sit on a smaller plate next to the cake.
Look at that rich deliciousness!

In search of marmalade…

I couldn’t find any of that locally. My area sells sweet orange marmalade. Period. While I don’t live in the middle of nowhere, I also don’t reside in a large metropolis. But the three groceries I checked all offered sweet orange marmalade and nothing else.

If you want to try this with other flavors, you may be reduced to making your own marmalade. Any citrus fruit can be turned into marmalade. Oranges, lemons, limes, even grapefruit marmalade can be successful. Here’s a recipe for Meyer Lemon Marmalade by the Ball Company. The Ball Company that makes canning jars. They know a thing or two about canning recipes, and their Blue Book is legendary. I own two copies. But I digress.

Two oval cake pans sit on a cake cooking rack. Each pan holds a very small amount of unbaked batter.
Cake pans ready to go into the oven. Each one held 1/2 cup of batter.

Without any other options, I made the cake with just sweet orange marmalade. And Oh. My. I won’t say that I saw taste testers fighting over the cake when we did the original tasting. But I can say that every time I looked in the refrigerator a little more of it was missing. Even the Resident Fruit Hater at my house loved it. 

Ingredient substitutions

I made the Many Layered Jam Cake with gluten free flour because that’s what I have to use. The original recipe was written for ordinary cake flour. (To substitute regular flour for cake flour you simply measure a cup and then remove 2 tablespoons of flour from the measuring cup. Then, if you like, stir in 2 Tablespoons cornstarch to make up your full cup of flour.)

This cake is baked in layers. I used a 1/2 cup measure and ended up with seven very thin layers that baked in 12 – 14 minutes apiece. Once baked, I flipped them out of the pan and let them cool. And you know what? Cake layers that are only 1/4-inch thick cool really quickly. In less than half an hour after baking all the layers I was ready to assemble the cake.

Loose and fluffy

I used wax paper in the bottom of the pans to make removal easy. Changing the paper lining with each layer works best. Or simply grease and flour your pans really well so the layers don’t stick.

One thin oval of white cake covered with orange marmalade. This is a Many Layered Jam Cake in process.
Bottom cake layer with a thin coating of marmalade. Ready for the next layer.

Confession: the recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of baking powder. I swear I don’t remember putting that in. If you use the baking powder, your layers will probably rise a bit more than mine did, and taste less dense. Either way, this Many Layered Jam Cake is amazing.

Using only one type of marmalade, it took most of a jar to assemble the seven layers. A thin spread of marmalade goes between each layer. Then top the assembled cake with a nice sprinkle of powdered sugar. It’s so rich that it doesn’t need more than that. Icing would not only be overkill, but it would dull the citrus flavors of the rest of the cake.

If the weather’s warm, enjoy your cake with a nice glass of iced coffee. I wrote about iced coffee in the 1920s in this blog post.

Many Layered Jam Cake

Prep Time20 minutes
Cook Time1 hour
Cooling and assembly30 minutes
Total Time1 hour 50 minutes
Course: Dessert, Tea time
Servings: 6 people

Equipment

  • Electric mixer
  • 8-inch cake pans
  • cooling rack

Ingredients

  • 2 sticks butter, softened
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • cups cake flour works fine with Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free 1 to 1 baking flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 2 tsp lemon peel, grated
  • 1 jar marmalade or two kinds if you can find them
  • 1/4 cup powdered sugar you won't use it all; this is to spinkle on the cake top. I used about a tablespoon in a tea strainer.

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 350°F.
  • Prepare two round or oval cake pans. (The small oval cake pans in the photo are made by Wilton and available to go with their Level 2 or Level 3 cake decorating class materials.) Either grease and flour the pans liberally, or cut a piece of wax paper to fit the bottom of the pan, grease the bottom of the pan lightly, stick the paper to the pan, and then grease the paper.
  • Stir the flour and the baking powder together in a small bowl.
  • In the large bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and add the sugar, unbeaten eggs, flour/baking powder mixture, and the lemon peel. Mix together slowly for one minute, and then beat on medium speed for two minutes. The mixture should turn a light yellow.
  • Place 1/2 cup of the cake mixture into each pan, and smooth it down until it forms an even layer. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until done.
  • After you remove the cake layers from the oven, let them rest a minute and then loosen them with a metal spatula or something similar (don't use a rubber spatula that will melt from the heat). Turn each layer carefully onto a cooling surface like a cake cooling rack. Let them cool for 20 minutes or so.
  • Repeat the baking and cooling until you are out of batter. You should get 6 – 8 layers. I got seven, with the last layer a bit thicker than the others. I used it as the bottom layer to provide stability.
  • Once your layers are cool, assemble them. Between each layer, spread a thin layer of marmalade. If you have two types of marmalade, alternate flavors with each layer. Top your cake with a healthy sprinkle of powdered sugar. Refrigerate until needed, and then let it come back to room temperature before cutting.
The Vintage Kitchen

Fruited Cream 1920s Dessert or Salad

Bowl of whipped cream and fruit dessert alongside a small plate with five leaf-shaped dinner mints.
Fruited Cream served up.

Or maybe it’s a Fruited Cream Dessert Salad. If you’re looking for a light and cool dessert for warm weather, look no further. This Fruited Cream recipe from the 1920s fills the requirement. It’s smooth, fruity, sweet, and cold. And Fruited Cream gives us an example of some of the best from the Twenties kitchen.

An early forerunner of the famous ambrosia salad (or infamous, depending on your view), this cream goes together with very few ingredients and not much time. The largest time chunk of the entire recipe is the time that it needs to chill. To blend the flavors well, this recipe needs to cool in the refrigerator for at least four hours after you make it. Good thing it’s easy and quick!

The Twenties kitchen was known for simple ingredients. These were combined in innovative ways. Sometimes, as in this recipe, those combinations shine. Other times… well, let’s just say there’s a reason nobody makes Sardines and Boiled Egg on Toast anymore. 

A recipe like Fruited Cream was made when the cook wanted to throw a small party. It surfaced as a special salad for a special occasion. This recipe would not appear on the table for a festival like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or another major holiday. Repetition over time scripted those menus. It would, however, be a delightful addition to a birthday lunch.

You need fruit, and cream, and sugar

Four bowls showing ingredients for Fruited Cream. Bowls contain minced strawberries, crushed pineapple, sugar, and cream.
Ingredients for fruited cream dessert.

To make Fruited Cream you’ll need two cups of any fruit. I used 1 cup strawberries and 1 cup crushed pineapple, but you could also use canned apricots or peaches. Or you can even mix the fruit with pineapple, like I did. Peaches with pineapple sounds divine, actually. Especially if you like both fruits equally well.

You’ll also need a cup of heavy whipping cream, vanilla flavoring, and powdered sugar. You’ll mince your fruit (a very fine diced cut). Then whip the cream until very stiff, and stir in the vanilla flavoring and powdered sugar. After that you chill, chill, chill. This needs to chill in the refrigerator for four hours or more to blend the flavors so it tastes like a salad and not like fruit stirred into whipped cream.

Scale it up if you want, but mince it fine

As written, this recipe serves 5. It would taste great served with an iced coffee like the one I wrote about here. However, you can multiply it as many times as you need to feed a small crowd. Fruited Cream should scale well. If you need less than five servings, well… it makes fine leftovers for a couple days. After two days the cream starts to break down. Before then, it tastes great for breakfast with a cup of hot tea or coffee.

When you put this recipe together, you want to make sure that your fruit is minced very fine. A 1/8 inch mince isn’t too small. Most of my strawberries evened out at about 3/16” in size, halfway between 1/8” and 1/4”. I tried to make none of the pieces as large as 1/4”. 

Silver bowl containing mixture of diced strawberries and crushed pineapple.
Mince that fruit! It makes a difference!

The crushed pineapple you can smash with a fork when you drain it, and very little should need to be cut. I found a few pieces larger than 1/4” so I cut them down to the correct size.

All this mincing and measuring-by-eye may seem like a lot of effort for nothing, but it definitely tastes in the finished product. Instead of chunks of fruit in whipped cream, you taste a sweet creamy smoothness from the combination –– but only if your fruit is cut small enough. Remember, this isn’t your grandmother’s 1970s salad where the pineapple chunks compete with the mini marshmallows in a swirl of pistachio-flavored pudding. This is smooth, and creamy, and delightful –– a hallmark of the Twenties kitchen. This Fruited Cream will shine on your table as a dessert or a salad.

Fruited Cream Dessert or Salad

This recipe combines fruit and cream into a sweet concoction much larger than the sum of its parts.
Prep Time30 minutes
Chilling time4 hours
Total Time4 hours 30 minutes
Course: Dessert, Salad
Cuisine: American
Servings: 5 people

Equipment

  • Stand mixer or hand egg beater for making whipped cream

Ingredients

  • 1 cup strawberries, minced
  • 1 cup pineapple, crushed
  • ½ tbsp sugar, optional
  • 1 cup whipping cream
  • ½ tsp vanilla
  • 1 tbsp powdered sugar

Instructions

  • Drain the crushed pineapple and measure 1 cup.
  • Mix the minced strawberries and crushed pineapple in a medium bowl. Add sugar if the mixture isn't sweet enough.
  • Using an electric mixer or a hand-operated egg beater, whip the cream until stiff. Stir in the vanilla and the powdered sugar.
  • Stir the flavored whipped cream into the fruit. Mix well, and chill for at least four hours.
  • Makes 5 3/4-cup servings.
The Vintage Kitchen

Sweet and Savory Tea Sandwiches

Plate of sandwiches. Each sandwich is cut 1 inch by 4 inches, and they radiate out from the center of the plate.
Sweet sandwiches filled with flavored cream cheese or marmalade.

Sometimes you want to serve something unusual that doesn’t take three days to make. These Sweet and Savory Tea Sandwiches offer four options for quickly made, tasty sandwiches. Serve them at your next vintage-style small gathering or formal tea. And if you’ve never hosted a formal tea but always wanted to, these sandwiches will start you off.

Paging through a Twenties magazine one day, I came across the recipe for these sandwiches. It was only a paragraph, tucked into a longer article, but they intrigued me. I liked the idea of sandwiches that didn’t include watercress and cucumber! Plus, sweet sandwiches proved very popular in the Twenties. It was time I tried them myself.

Small chicken salad sandwiches arranged on a round plate.
Savory chicken salad sandwiches on home made dinner rolls. Yummy!

Warm Weather Sandwiches

Designed for warmer weather, these light tidbits are cool and easy to eat. You could certainly serve them in the dead of winter as well, but you might want to pair them with something heavy like chocolate brownies or a fluffy cake for dessert.

One of the things I liked best about these sandwiches was that they sounded easy. I don’t mind spending hours in the kitchen, but it’s nice to find those recipes that taste special but go together fast.

These Sweet and Savory Tea Sandwiches use cream cheese, a spicy pepper jelly, honey, and pecans –– not all together! Other sandwiches use marmalade as a filling. Then to balance out all that cream cheese you make simple chicken salad sandwiches served on dinner rolls as a savory option.

A stack of square sandwich bread slices nestled next to three small bowls of sandwich fillings. One bowl is white with brown specks, one is a light orange, and the third is a deep orange marmalade.
Three fillings ready to be made into tasty tea sandwiches.

Twenties Fast Food

Really, for as much time as the Twenties cook spent in the kitchen, these quick sandwiches are equivalent to fast food. I used a mix and made my own dinner rolls, since I need to eat gluten free. However, if I bought the rolls and the sandwich bread, I could throw these together for any party almost at a moment’s notice. 

My sandwich bread was pretty small, as gluten free bread tends to be, and I used about 1 ounce of cream cheese plus added flavors per sandwich. So from eight ounces of cream cheese and its mix-ins, plus 1/2 cup of marmalade, I could easily get a total of 9 sandwiches that I then cut into one-inch wide strips. Actually, since I was feeding only three of us, I made one of each type plus several chicken salad rolls. And I had plenty of the fillings left for another round.

If you use Parker-House size dinner rolls, you should be able to get six chicken sandwiches from the amounts I list in the recipe. If your dinner rolls are larger, you may want to double the recipe if you need half a dozen sandwiches.

A small bowl of chicken salad next to a plate of three dinner rolls.
Twenties chicken salad is very simple. Mixed and ready to fill those little rolls.

Assuming you plan to feed 3-6 people, I give you recipes that start with 1/2 cup of cream cheese or marmalade. After all, a party of two can be fun, but it’s a pretty small party. If you find that you have leftovers, they’re still tasty the next day. Store them in the refrigerator.

And if you want to add some 1952 munchies to your party, try the original Chex Mix Recipe. You can find it here.

Sweet and Savory Tea Sandwiches

Brighten your next gathering with these sweet and a little bit spicy tea sandwiches in three flavors.
Prep Time20 minutes
Total Time20 minutes
Course: Luncheon, Tea time
Cuisine: American
Servings: 6 people
Author: VintageJenny

Equipment

  • small bowl for mixing ingredients

Ingredients

  • 18 slices white bread
  • 6 small dinner rolls

Sweet and Spicy Pepper Filling

  • 4 oz cream cheese
  • 2 tbsp hot pepper jelly or spread I used Meijer brand

Sweet Pecan and Honey Filling

  • 4 oz cream cheese
  • 4 tbsp chopped pecans
  • 2 tbsp honey

Marmalade Filling

  • ½ cup orange marmalade

Savory Chicken Salad Filling

  • 1 chicken breast, cooked
  • 1 stalk celery
  • ¼ cup mayonnaise or more as you prefer
  • tsp salt
  • tsp pepper

Instructions

  • Remove the crusts from the bread slices. It's easier to trim the crusts before you make the sandwiches. Then stack the slices in pairs so they match. (If you like, transfer the crusts to your favorite freezer container and freeze them. You can use them for croutons, bread pudding, or something else later.)
  • Slice the dinner rolls horizontally to make small sandwich buns. Set them aside.
  • To make the Sweet and Spicy Pepper Filling: Mix the cream cheese and the pepper spread/jelly in the bowl with a cooking spoon until completely combined. Spread the filling on three slices of bread, top with three slices, and set them aside. If you have any filling left, transfer it to a small container for the refrigerator. Wash your small mixing bowl.
  • To make the Sweet Pecan and Honey Filling: Mix the chopped pecans and honey with the cream cheese in the mixing bowl until completely combined. Spread the filling on three slices of bread, top with three slices, and set them aside. If you have any filling left, transfer it to a small container for the refrigerator. Wash your small mixing bowl.
  • To make the Marmalade Filling: Spread the marmalade on three slices of bread, top with three slices, and set them aside.
  • Refrigerate until you are ready to serve. Then cut each sandwich into 1-inch slices and arrange on a serving plate.

To Make the Chicken Salad Filling

  • Mince the cooked chicken breast. You should have about one to one and a half cups of minced chicken. Place the minced chicken in the mixing bowl.
  • Trim the celery and mince it. Add it to the chicken.
  • Stir in the mayonnaise.
  • Add the salt and pepper. You can add more or less than the amount listed, to taste.
  • Spread the chicken salad onto the lower half of the dinner roll, and top with its top half.
  • Refrigerate until you are ready to serve. These sandwiches are best assembled right before serving.
Gluten Free Adaptations · Recipe Collections · The Vintage Kitchen

Oatmeal Gem Muffins

If you love oatmeal in a bowl but don’t have the time or inclination to make it every morning, these oatmeal gem muffins might be the perfect solution. Only slightly sweet, these muffins taste like you’re eating prepared oatmeal from the palm of your hand. Best of all, you start them overnight. Then you only need to stir in a few ingredients in the morning and bake them.

Three golden oatmeal gem muffins on a white plate. The photo shows only part of each muffin.
Oatmeal gem muffins, ready to eat!

Published in 1919, this recipe was called Oatmeal Gems. Gems are muffins baked in cast-iron gem pans. A gem pan could look like a muffin pan, or it could turn out half rounds of bread. Usually, a gem pan contained some kind of open area to allow air and heat flow around the individual muffin cups. If this concept fascinates you, The Cast Iron Collector web site gives more information on gem pans than you will ever need for a vintage home kitchen. After all, the well-equipped home kitchen contained one gem pan. Just one. The vintage kitchen provided no room for storing extra, unneeded utensils and pans. (Thankfully, I have a garage that I use to do just that.)

Muffins in the vintage kitchen

In the vintage home, muffins accompanied a meal, or they provided part of a teatime heavy snack. Today we eat muffins as a standalone meal replacement and although that may be a vintage reality, it was never touted as the ideal. When I made these I grabbed a couple and ate them with a fresh cup of coffee. That was breakfast. 

Eaten hot from the oven, these muffins provided the cereal part of a good breakfast along with fruit, coffee or hot cocoa, and perhaps eggs. Later in the day, served at room temperature or re-warmed in the oven still hot from cooking dinner, they saved the household cook from making a second type of bread on a non-baking day. Since they aren’t very sweet they would go well with a dinner menu. 

These muffins taste sweeter at room temperature, although they also go down well with a smear of butter. They are chewy, dense quick breads.

The recipe basics

The recipe starts with sour milk. You can easily make sour milk yourself by adding a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to a cup of milk. Since the recipe calls for a cup and a half of milk you would add a tablespoon and a half of vinegar. Regular white vinegar will work, too, if you don’t have any apple cider vinegar. However, apple cider vinegar seems to produce a slightly thicker product.

Bowl of oatmeal mixture with a measuring cup of flour next to it and an empty teaspoon measuring spoon on the table.
Oatmeal and sour milk, with baking soda and egg added and flour standing at the ready.

The next morning you mix in some baking soda, an egg, salt, flour, and sugar. Then you bake them. I used a mini muffin pan, which helps them cook all the way through. Since this is an older recipe it offered no oven temperature outside of “hot.” I baked these minis for 15 minutes at 375º to give them a bit of brown on top. I was using gluten free flour. If you use regular flour, baking them for 13 minutes might be enough.

Mini oatmeal gem muffins still in the muffin pan, fresh from the oven.
Fresh from the oven with gluten free flour, which gives less of a browned top than regular wheat flour.

Whether you eat them with your morning coffee or tea like I did, or incorporate them into a proper vintage meal, these oatmeal gem muffins are good to have in your repertoire. They mix up easily, cook quickly, and need only a few everyday ingredients.

Oatmeal Gems

Small oatmeal muffins for breakfast or anytime.
Prep Time15 minutes
Cook Time15 minutes
Course: Bread, Breakfast
Cuisine: American
Keyword: muffin, oatmeal
Servings: 8 people

Equipment

  • 1 mini muffin pan

Ingredients

  • 2 cups rolled oats
  • 1 ½ cups milk
  • 1 ½ tbsp apple cider vinegar
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 cup flour Gluten Free 1 to 1 flour works fine.
  • tsp salt
  • ¼ cup sugar

Instructions

  • 1. Mix the apple cider vinegar and the milk. Let stand ten minutes to sour.
  • 2. Place the oatmeal in a medium bowl and add the milk. Stir, cover, and set in the refrigerator overnight.
  • 3. In the morning, preheat oven to 375º F.
  • 3. Add baking soda, egg, flour, salt, and sugar to the oatmeal mixture. Mix well, and fill the wells in the mini muffin pan.
  • 4. Bake mini muffins for 13 – 15 minutes. When they are done, the tops should pop back when pressed lightly. Or use the tried and true toothpick method to check.

Notes

This recipe was tested with Bob’s Red Mill 1 to 1 Gluten Free Baking Flour. Use gluten free oats if you need them. 

If you try these, please leave a comment to let me know how you like them. When I make them again I may sprinkle a little sugar on the tops before baking, or I might stir some mini chocolate chips into the batter. This is a variation unknown in 1919, since chocolate chips weren’t invented until 1937.

Interested in more vintage cooking? Check out this recipe for Breakfast Cocoa or vintage Iced Coffee!

Cooking Techniques · Recipe Collections · The Vintage Kitchen

Iced Coffee – The Hot New Trend. Or Not.

When the days get warm, I start to long for a nice iced coffee. Sometimes I swing into my favorite coffee shop as I’m out running errands or shuttling offspring from one meeting to the next. More often, though, I set up the percolator on the stove and brew a nice big pot. Since I’m one of two coffee drinkers in the house, that big pot doesn’t have to be tremendously huge. Eight cups of brewed coffee produces many delicious glasses of iced java in my kitchen.

Coffee percolator and glass of iced coffee. An open book sits in front of the coffee maker and glass. Text on image reads Make Yourself a 1920s Iced Coffee.
Enjoy a refreshing vintage cold cuppa while perusing the pages of a 1920s book.

Once the percolator does its thing and the coffee is nice, hot, and fresh, I let it sit for a bit. If you use a percolator at home, you know that fresh brewed coffee is hot. Really hot. It’s a lot hotter than any coffee that comes from a drip machine. So I let the percolator sit for a bit if I only brewed the coffee to ice it.

After the coffee is reasonably cool, I fix myself a beautiful glass of iced goodness. If I’m feeling especially decadent I add some chocolate syrup so I have iced chocolately java goodness. How thankful we are that the coffee shops of the 1990s introduced us to the wonderful reality of iced coffee in the summer!

Hold on a minute. The all-knowing Internet says that iced coffee (the frappé version) was invented in 1957. In Greece. By a Nescafe salesman who couldn’t find hot water when he needed it.

If you read the article at the link, and then look at the recipe below, what the sales rep was attempting to do was create an established drink, the frappé, without ice or ice cream to chill and thicken it. And using instant Nescafe coffee instead of brewed coffee. He did come up with a new taste and texture for a frappé, but the drink itself was well known.

Photo of iced coffee from 1920. Glass topped with whipped cream, with two straws for drinking.
This is iced coffe in 1920. Refreshing, cool, and topped with sweet whipped cream.

Let’s turn the clock back a little. While paging through a magazine that arrived in U. S. mailboxes during the summer of 1920, I found a photo and caption extolling the deliciousness of iced coffee. The food editor suggested topping it with sweet whipped cream and serving with a straw. Sound a bit familiar? The process was so simple that no detailed recipe appears with the photo. Pour chilled coffee over ice into a glass. Add a nice inch-high dollop of whipped cream to the top and stick a straw into the glass. Serve.

And then, only a few years later, a cookbook featured a selection of iced coffee recipes. Instead of one “pour fresh coffee over ice and drink” suggestion, readers received almost an entire page of tantalizing coffee recipes. The iced coffee revolution had arrived. The year: 1924.

Here are four of those iced coffee recipes, written in current language. I include the original base recipe plus three variations. If you don’t have a cocktail shaker, an electric blender or smoothie maker will work. Blend just until mixed. You don’t want to heat up the coffee after chilling it and mixing it with ice or ice cream.

So the next time you take a refreshing drink of ice-cold coffee, you can thank vintage cooks going back to 1920 and maybe even as far back as 1840s Algeria. But that’s another story.

Iced Coffee for a Warm Day

This 1920s iced coffee recipe and its variations will keep you historically cool on hot days.
Prep Time5 minutes
Cook Time20 minutes
Cooling Time2 hours
Course: Drinks
Cuisine: American
Keyword: coffee, cold, Frappe, iced

Equipment

  • Coffee maker
  • Cocktail shaker (for frappé or frosted variation)

Ingredients

  • 4 tbsp coffee ground for your coffee maker
  • water to fill the coffee maker to the 4-serving line
  • 4 tbsp sugar optional; may use less (or more) to taste
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream (double cream) optional; may use less (or more) to taste
  • 1/2 cup vanilla ice cream For Frosted Coffee variation
  • 3 cups ginger ale OR apple cider For Cider or Ginger Ale variation
  • ice to fill 4 glasses 1/3 – 1/2 full preferably crushed

Instructions

  • Brew 4 cups of coffee.
  • Let cool for at least 2 hours, especially if you use a percolator or another method that produces very hot coffee. If making this in advance, chill in the refrigerator for several hours.
  • Fill each glass halfway with ice, and then pour the cooled coffee over.
  • Add sugar and cream to taste.

Frappé Coffee Variation

  • Fill a cocktail shaker 1/3 with ice, heavy cream, and sugar. Add freshly-made chilled or cooled coffee and shake. Serve. Repeat for the other three servings.

Frosted Coffee Variation

  • Combine 1 cup strong, chilled coffee with 2 tablespoons of vanilla ice cream in a cocktail shaker. Shake until the ice cream dissolves, and serve. Repeat for other three servings.

Iced Coffee with Apple Cider or Ginger Ale

  • Fill each glass 1/4 full with ice. Add 1/2 cup chilled or cooled coffee, and then top with cider or ginger ale — one or the other, not both.