The Spirit of Seventy-Six!

In honor of the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, all recipes through July 4, 2026 will be from Centennial and Bicentennial cookbooks and the 1796 first American cookbook. Enjoy this look at the (gastronomic) spirit of ’76 as we head into the sestercentennial!

I’ve also published a Sestercentennial Cookery with recipes and photos.

Hot Cheese Puppies: Mrs. I.R. (Norene) Mercer’s Savory Bits, from the 1976 Garvin County Bicentennial Recipe Book.; seventies; 1970s; cheese; salty snacks; recipe; America’s Bicentennial; Garvin County, Oklahoma; deep frying; deep fried, deep fryer

These are a variation on hushpuppies, and any spices you like will “spice it up”. A great snack or appetizer to pop into the deep fryer just before or just after the fried chicken or fried fish.

Drop in again soon for another vintage recipe! I’ll have a different recipe every Sunday afternoon throughout the year. Keep an eye on this page or subscribe to the RSS feed for further details. You can also browse past featured Club recipes as well as some of the vintage promotional cookbooks I’ve used as sources. And I collect many of these recipes in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book.

Recipe blogging:

Originals:

Inspirations:

Archives:

The more you know about food, the more you can enjoy life. — Elizabeth Gordon (Cuisines of the Western World)