Vintage Recipe Card Series - Traditional Plant-Based Cooking

Testing and re-making traditional British recipe cards from box sets into vegan recipes ideal for modern home cooks. Use these recipes for inspiration to create weekly or monthly vegan menu & meal plans. Helps solve the problem of what's for dinner or tea! These are real working recipes direct from my own home kitchen so photos are rustic and homely just like me!

Welcome to my Vintage Recipe Card Series which is a personal cooking project where I am working through real British vintage recipe card sets from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Each week, I test and adapt 7 dinner recipes and 7 desserts, with most weeks including an extra recipe such as a homemade soup of the week which is a useful recipe for lunches. There will also be a "cake & biscuit tin filler" which will feature a useful baking recipe that will fill up your cake or biscuit tin for everyday treats or when visitors pop in for tea. All the recipes will be the actual ones that my family have been eating that week.

These recipes come from original card collections including Kathie Webber's All-Star Cookery Card Club, 1978, 1980, & Marguerite Patten's 1967 recipe cards, & Delicious Meals Made Easy recipe cards from the 1990s, and others I've collected over the years. Some recipes have been lightly adapted while others have had the core ingredients reworked into plant-based versions while keeping the essence of the traditional dish.

You can use these recipes to create your own longer-term such as a monthly vegan & plant-based meal plan or you could use each week as a menu plan. Do feel free to adapt the recipes, especially the savoury ones, to suit your own preferences, cooking methods, ingredients, etc., as the best recipes are versatile.

🌱 Why this series?

Traditional recipes connect us to our history, our families, and the rhythms of everyday life throughout the seasons from times past. This series brings that tradition, nostalgia, & social & generational connection into the present with recipes you can actually cook and enjoy today, whether you're vegan, plant-based, vegetarian, omnivore, have egg or dairy allergies, or simply curious about vintage home cooking and want to reduce your dairy, eggs, and meat intake.

I will be sharing:

My vegan & plant-based adaptations which are prepared with ordinary easily sourced ingredients.
The original recipe card (photo of the original photo and original recipe from my own personal collection).
My own finished recipe photo so you can compare to the original!
Notes on substitutions or updated methods.
Occasional memories, stories, top-tips, or quirky surprises found on the cards!
Anything I can think of that I feel will be of use to you preparing these recipes in your own homes. Do feel free to drop me a comment with your feedback or suggestions of what you would like to see in this series.

🔗 Explore the series

Click below to view each week's full collection of recipes:

More weeks and collections will be added over time as I work my way through these fun nostalgic box sets. These recipes are real working ones that my family are actually eating during each week and photos are quickly snapped in a our family kitchen before the food is consumed so styling opportunities are limited! Some recipes I may not enjoy but I will be still including as you may have better luck and it may just be a matter of personal taste. If you prepare any of the recipes it would be wonderful if you could leave me a comment to let me know how you got on. Thanks!

🫖 Something for everyone

Whether you're here for plant-based meal inspiration, vintage recipe research, or simply a good helping of food nostalgia & fond memories as you look over the original recipe card photos, I do hope you'll enjoy cooking (and reminiscing) alongside me. Feel free to explore the series at your own pace and don't forget to check back as new weeks are added!

All the best

Jacq x