Odd Ingredients Common in Old Recipes
Your grandmother’s recipe box holds more than nostalgia. Flip through those yellowed index cards and you’ll find ingredients that seem to belong in a different world entirely.
Some sound alarming. Others just plain strange.
But people used them without thinking twice, the same way you reach for vanilla extract today. These weren’t exotic ingredients reserved for special occasions.
They sat on pantry shelves next to the flour and sugar. Understanding why they appeared so often reveals something about how people cooked before supermarkets sold everything pre-made and food safety became a national obsession.
Ammonia in Cookie Dough
Baker’s ammonia, or hartshorn, smells terrible when you open the container. It smells worse when it hits the oven.
But generations of bakers kept using it because it produced cookies with an incredibly crisp texture that baking powder couldn’t match. The chemical—ammonium carbonate—completely evaporates during baking, leaving no trace of that awful smell in the finished cookies.
You can still buy it at specialty baking stores, though most modern recipes have moved on to more pleasant-smelling leavening agents. Old Scandinavian and German recipes often call for it, especially for thin, crispy cookies that need to stay crunchy for weeks.
The smell really is that bad, though. Open the container outdoors if you decide to experiment with it.
Suet from the Butcher
Beef kidney fat showed up constantly in old British and American recipes. Not just any fat—specifically the hard fat from around the kidneys and loins.
Bakers rendered it down or shredded it raw into puddings, pie crusts, and steamed desserts. Christmas pudding traditionally contains suet.
So do proper mincemeat pies, which originally contained actual minced meat along with the dried fruit. The suet created a particular texture and richness that butter couldn’t replicate, especially in steamed desserts that needed to hold their shape for hours over simmering water.
Most people have never touched raw suet, let alone cooked with it. Butchers once gave it away or sold it for pennies.
Now you have to special order it, and younger butchers sometimes don’t even know what you’re asking for.
Blood as a Binder
Blood sausage and black pudding still exist, but older cookbooks treated blood as a standard kitchen ingredient for all sorts of dishes. When families butchered their own animals or bought fresh from a butcher, they used every part.
Blood went into pancakes, soups, sausages, and even cakes in some regions. The blood acts as a binder and adds richness.
It doesn’t taste metallic when cooked properly—it just creates a deep, savory flavor. Scandinavian blood pancakes (blodplättar) remain popular in Sweden.
French boudin noir and Spanish morcilla continue traditions that once existed everywhere. Modern health regulations make fresh blood harder to obtain.
Most people recoil at the idea now, but it wasn’t considered strange or gross. It was just another ingredient, like eggs.
Rosewater in Everything
Victorian recipes drowned desserts in rosewater. Cakes, cookies, candies, custards—if it was sweet, someone probably tried adding rosewater to it.
The flavor dominated nineteenth-century American and British baking in a way that seems excessive today. The popularity made sense before vanilla became cheap and widely available.
Rosewater provided a distinctive flavor that made plain cakes and puddings more interesting. Middle Eastern cooking has never abandoned it, but Western recipes gradually replaced it with vanilla extract as that became affordable.
You can still buy rosewater, usually in the international section of grocery stores. A few drops go a long way.
Use too much and your cake tastes like perfume.
Rennet Tablets for Pudding
Junket, a milk-based pudding set with rennet, appeared regularly on dinner tables throughout the early twentieth century. Rennet—an enzyme from calf stomachs—causes milk to separate and gel, creating a delicate, custard-like texture without any cooking.
Mothers made junket for sick children and served it as an easy everyday dessert. The tablets dissolved in warm milk, then the mixture sat until it firmed up.
No baking, no fussing. The result was mild, smooth, and gentle on upset stomachs.
Junket tablets still exist, though you have to hunt for them. Most people under sixty have never heard of them.
The dessert fell out of favor as other options became easier and as fewer people felt comfortable using animal enzymes in their food.
Lard in Pie Crust
Every accomplished baker once kept a tin of lard in the kitchen. Leaf lard—the highest grade, from around the pig’s kidneys—made the flakiest, most tender pie crusts possible.
The fat has a higher melting point than butter, which creates distinct layers in the pastry. The shift away from lard happened gradually as vegetable shortening entered the market and as people became more concerned about animal fats.
Health advice in the 1960s and 70s particularly demonized lard, though nutritionists now acknowledge it’s no worse than many alternatives. Serious bakers have rediscovered lard.
The crust really does turn out better, especially for savory pies. You can render your own from pork fat or buy it already processed, though quality varies dramatically between brands.
Sour Milk for Quick Breads
Before everyone had refrigerators, milk soured quickly. Rather than throw it out, cooks used it in biscuits, pancakes, and quick breads.
The acid in soured milk reacts with baking soda to create lift, similar to how buttermilk works in modern recipes. This wasn’t spoiled milk in the modern sense—milk that had gone dangerously bad.
It was milk that had naturally fermented and thickened slightly, developing a tangy flavor. Raw milk sours differently than pasteurized milk, which tends to just go bad.
Old recipes that call for sour milk often confuse modern cooks. You can substitute buttermilk or add vinegar to fresh milk to approximate the effect.
But the original ingredient was just milk that had sat on the counter a day or two too long.
Calves’ Feet for Jelly
Gelatin comes in neat little packets now. Before commercial gelatin became available, making jelly meant boiling calves’ feet for hours to extract the collagen.
The resulting liquid cooled into a clear, wobbly jelly that could be sweetened for dessert or used in savory dishes. Elaborate Victorian molded desserts required enormous amounts of this homemade gelatin.
Aspic—savory jellied dishes—appeared at fancy dinners, with everything from fish to vegetables suspended in shimmering gelatin made from boiled bones and feet.The process took hours and created an unpleasant smell throughout the house.
Commercial gelatin arrived as a miracle product, and within a generation, almost nobody made it from scratch anymore. A few traditional recipes still specify homemade gelatin, but most people use the box.
Saltpeter for Color
Sodium or potassium nitrate appears in old recipes for cured meats, particularly corned beef and ham. The chemical keeps meat an appealing pink color instead of letting it turn gray during curing.
It also inhibits bacterial growth, making preservation safer. People called it saltpeter and kept it on hand the same way you might keep curing salt today.
The amount used was significant—enough to be dangerous if someone consumed it in large quantities regularly. Modern food science understands the risks better, and contemporary curing salts contain much lower concentrations of nitrates.
You can still buy sodium nitrite for home curing, though regulations vary by location. Old recipes often call for amounts that would be considered excessive today.
The meat won’t kill you, but it’s better to follow modern proportions.
Borax as a Preservative
This one sounds truly alarming. Borax—the same stuff sometimes used for cleaning—appeared in food preservation recipes through the early 1900s.
People added it to butter, milk, and other perishables to make them last longer without refrigeration. The practice wasn’t secret or shameful.
Cookbooks included it matter-of-factly. Commercial food producers used it too, until laws started regulating food additives more strictly.
Borax prevents bacterial and fungal growth effectively, but it’s also toxic in sufficient quantities. The FDA banned it as a food additive in 1906, though enforcement took time.
Some recipes from the 1910s and 20s still mention it. Don’t use borax in food now, obviously.
But understanding that people once did helps explain why food safety regulations became necessary.
Isinglass for Clarification
Fish bladder gelatin sounds medieval, but professional brewers and cooks used isinglass into the twentieth century. The substance, made from the dried swim bladders of certain fish, creates an extremely pure form of gelatin that’s nearly flavorless and colorless.
Brewers used it to clarify beer, causing the yeast and particles to settle out and leave crystal-clear liquid. Cooks used it for delicate jellies and desserts where regular gelatin might cloud the result.
The process of making isinglass was labor-intensive and unpleasant, involving cleaning, drying, and processing fish bladders. Some traditional British brewers still use it, though most have switched to vegetarian alternatives.
Old recipes that specify isinglass can be adapted to use regular gelatin or agar-agar, though the results differ slightly.
Sassafras for Root Beer
Sassafras root gave traditional root beer its distinctive flavor. People dug up the roots, boiled them to make a strong tea, and combined that with other herbs and spices.
The result tasted complex and medicinal in a way that commercial root beer only hints at. The FDA banned sassafras oil as a food additive in 1960 after studies linked safrole—a compound in sassafras—to liver cancer in rats.
Modern root beer uses artificial sassafras flavoring or substitutes other ingredients entirely. The traditional version had a sharper, more resinous flavor.
You can still find sassafras root sold for tea in some areas, though commercial food products can’t contain the oil. Old recipes for homemade root beer often list sassafras as the primary ingredient, and people who remember the original taste say nothing quite matches it.
Caramelized Sugar for Coloring
Before food coloring came in bottles, cooks made their own by burning sugar. Heat white sugar until it turns black, add water carefully to stop the cooking, and you have a dark liquid that tints gravies, sauces, and baked goods brown.
This technique appears constantly in old cookbooks, particularly for darkening gravy or making gingerbread a deep brown color. The process requires attention—sugar burns easily and the smoke tastes acrid.
But done correctly, it creates a natural coloring agent with a slightly bitter, caramel undertone. Commercial gravy browning still uses this principle.
But most modern cooks reach for a bottle rather than burning sugar in a pan. The homemade version works fine and contains nothing but sugar and water, though it requires practice to get the color right without making the flavor too bitter.
When Strange Becomes Normal Again
Some of these ingredients have circled back to respectability. Lard, for instance, appears in trendy restaurant kitchens.
Rosewater never left Middle Eastern cooking and has returned to Western pastry shops. Others remain firmly in the past, abandoned for good reasons related to safety or simple convenience.
The oddness we perceive in these old ingredients often reflects changes in our food supply rather than changes in common sense. When people raised their own animals, used blood and suet naturally.
When refrigeration didn’t exist, preservation techniques that seem dangerous now made perfect sense. When commercial products weren’t available, cooks made do with what they had.
Reading through old recipes reminds you that “normal” shifts dramatically within a few generations. What your great-grandmother pulled from her pantry without a second thought might horrify you today.
And what you consider standard kitchen staples might baffle someone fifty years from now.
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