Vintage at heart

In nearly every box I bring home from an auction, lies a hidden treasure. It's not the thing I bid on, it just happens to be in the same box... just waiting for its moment to shine. For this pretty heart label, that moment came yesterday.

I have four stacks that I sort auction things into. One is for stuff I will list on ebay, another for etsy, a third for Etcetera (our local thrift store) and the fourth one is for keeping. The hidden treasure almost landed on the Etcetera stack until I realized what I had... a 1964 copy of the Farm Journal's Freezing & Canning Cookbook -- Prized Recipes from the Farms of America. A treasure in itself... filled with canning recipes for every kind of pickle and preserve you can imagine. The owner used this book quite often judging from the number of recipes she handwrote and slipped between its pages, recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines and some even pasted onto the color photo pages in the book. Recipes for chokecherry jelly, no cook pickles, dilly beans, cranberry wine, and frozen sweet corn.

And then there was the heart... folded in half and tucked into this book long ago... the label from the heart-shaped baking pan that includes the recipe for Sweetheart Cake. That it emerged three days before Valentine's Day tells me this recipe deserves revisiting... so on Sunday I'll make a Sweetheart Cake for my sweetheart and celebrate V-day in a decidedly vintage way. (Both the label and the book are now on the keeper stack.)