To Grandmothers House We Go

Soap from different places of stay

If you have ever gone to an estate sale or cleaned out someones house that has lived there a long time, you usually run across some interesting things. You learn so much about people by looking at the things they collected, saved, took pictures of or even things they kept as souvenirs.

We are currently in the process of cleaning out my Grandma's house that she and my Grandfather lived in for almost 50 years. As I go through their things to save, throw away or sell, I see so much stuff that made me think they have so much of these or question, What is this for? I  have to remember that they lived through the Great Depression and World War 2, so times were different in the way you lived.

My dad found a box full of my Grandparents recipes that they used to make food. My dad doesn't cook, but wanted to find his Dad's famous french toast recipe. Since I have a love for food and I do like looking at recipes, I decided to tackle the never ending box of recipes.

I had to remember that they did not have the internet or blogs to look up recipes, just newspaper, books, and passed down recipes.

In the end, I didn't find the french toast recipe in this pile, (only took 1 hour to sort through) but I did get some new recipes to try. This is what the pile looked like after I picked out the goods.

And here are the goods I found and will have to try:

Magic Casserole (does include my favorite: Mashed Potatoes in recipe)
Crunchy Oven Fried Chicken (made with cocktail peanuts and peanut butter)
Carrot Cake
Pineapple Cake
Lemon SUPREME cake (apricot nectar added)
Butler Chocolate Pie
Sock-It-To-Me-Cake
Lime Cheesecake (my mother in law will like this)
Banana Split Cake
Coconut Buttermilk Pie

Sounds like we will be having Chicken and lots of Cakes and Pies.


Not only did they collect all these recipes, I found so many soap bars (as pictures above), handkerchiefs, petite white gloves, aprons, scarfs from different places, doilies and my favorite: mason jars.

What type of things did your grandparents save or collect?