Recipe | Bacon Buns

Few food items are so good that they can actually be used as currency, but Bacon Buns are one of those rare exceptions. From the outside, they look like ordinary rolls. But the surprise is on the inside – a savory filling of bacon, ham and onion tucked inside a pillowy, soft dough. The recipe originates from Lithuania, where they call the buns “Lasineciai”. There was never any written recipe – it only existed in the memories of Grandmothers and Great Aunts in our family. Luckily, someone finally followed Mrs. Sobut while she was making bacon buns and recorded her every move and measure. From that original recipe, I’ve refined and revised so that even the amateur cook can create these magical buns in their own kitchen. If you try your hand at the Sobut-Buber-Mayer Family recipe, please let me know how it goes and if you have any comments or feedback.

Bacon Buns taste best fresh from the oven, but the next best thing for day-old buns is a quick zap in the microwave (wrapped in a paper towel) for 12-seconds.

Review | Vintage Cookbooks

I started collecting vintage cookbooks about three years ago, but not for the recipes – for the food photography. Food photography has come a long way since the 60’s and 70’s. But you can’t blame the nasty-looking food entirely on the pictures – there were also a lot of recipes that make you want to laugh and puke at the same time. Some of my favorite “delicacies” and “luxuries” include Weiner Winner Pizza, Molded Pork Loaf (shown below with the caption Cool Molded Pork Loaf is an appetizing work of art.), Danish Garden Salad (the white loaf shown below) and Spicy Liverwurst-Ham Nibblers. And for those of us who didn’t spend their 20’s and 30’s at key parties with ironed hair, we think of Jello as a dessert food. But some of the best savory food photography and recipes in my collection come from the pages of my vintage Jello cookbooks. So, a toast to my first blog post (and all of those brave baby boomers who ate Ring-Around-the-Tuna): “May all of my posts that follow be more appetizing than this.”