The Spirit of Seventy-Six!

In honor of the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence in the United States, 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!

Lemon Pie: Lemon Pie, from the ca. 1881 New Centennial Cook Book from L. E. Brown & Co.; lemons; pie; nineteenth century; 1800s; America’s Centennial; 1876

This recipe is from a few years after the Centennial, but it’s such a wonderful pie that I’m using the cookbook’s name as an excuse to run it this year in my Sestercentennial series.

It’s a bit like a lemon marmalade pie, incorporating as it does almost the entire lemon, from the juice to the skin.

You could also bake it as a cobbler, in an 8x8 pan, serving warm with ice cream.

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:

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Happiness is macaroni. — Eddie Doucette (Macaroni Menu Magic)