Introduction: In this article, Katie Rebecca Merkley searches old newspapers to find – and then try – recipes from yesteryear. Katie specializes in U.S. research for family history, enjoys writing and researching, and is developing curricula for teaching children genealogy. She has a website: krgarnergenealogy.com

Some recipes are passed down through the generations, but some are forgotten. Many people have memories of something that Grandma used to make, but not everyone is lucky enough to have her recipe.

What can you do if you don’t have the recipe? The next best thing is to find a similar recipe in the newspapers. Newspapers have published recipes for centuries. Sometimes that favorite recipe came from a newspaper clipping Grandma saved decades ago.

Certainly, you can search old newspapers for recipes. I found some recipes in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives spanning different eras.

Pre-1800 Newspaper Recipes

On GenealogyBank’s newspaper collection search page, you can organize search results by year. I did this to find the oldest recipes in GenealogyBank’s newspaper database. Many recipes before 1800 were DIY medicines and home remedies. I dared not try any of those.

The oldest edible recipe I found was a soup recipe in a 1741 newspaper. I figured that’d be safe to try. Note that it is written differently from how recipes are written today.

This soup recipe was meant to feed an army without needing bread. Thickening it with oatmeal made it filling. It is interesting to note that the recipe calls for turnips, then lists other vegetables that can substitute “where turnips cannot be had.” Before refrigerated trucking, people were limited to fresh fruits and vegetables available locally. So, it makes sense that recipes would be written to accommodate that.

Presumably, this soup was cooked in a large pot over a fire. If it were cooked for an army, that might have been a campfire. A woman cooking this for her family might have done so in a fireplace. I cooked it in a stockpot on a modern stove.

I used smaller quantities of ingredients than the recipe called for, yet it still nearly filled my stockpot. I didn’t need enough to feed an army; I only intended to feed my husband and me. However, we had too many leftovers, so I gave containers of soup to family, associates, and neighbors. Everyone liked the soup. The only complaint was that there were too many peas.

German Recipes

Because my husband and I both have German heritage, I looked up German recipes in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives.

I found several German recipes on a page filled with recipes and ads, and I sent a copy of that page to my mother-in-law. She made the Beef Rouladen when some of her children and grandchildren were visiting. She reported that the grown-ups were more interested in it than the kids.

Another recipe that came up in that search was for German Chocolate Cake, which I later discovered isn’t German at all. Samuel German, an American, invented German’s Chocolate, which is used in German’s Chocolate Cake (renamed to German Chocolate Cake). The cake recipe was first published in Dallas, Texas, newspapers in 1956 or 1957.*

The newspaper recipe I found was published in Houston, Texas, in 1957. My mother-in-law and I baked it together last summer. When I looked up the history of German Chocolate Cake, we realized the newspaper recipe I had found may have been the original one first published in Dallas.

We shared the cake with the family that was gathered that day, and everyone loved it – though my husband complained the cake didn’t have enough frosting.

My Own Newspaper Clipping Recipe

My own recipe collection includes a newspaper-clipping recipe. I do not remember when or why I added that clipping to my recipe collection, but I suspect it came from the local newspaper when I lived in Alabama. The local newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama, is the Montgomery Advertiser, and GenealogyBank has old issues of this paper.

When I followed the Elephant Ears recipe, cinnamon got everywhere. The recipe used canned cinnamon rolls, so the Elephant Ears tasted like them. My husband liked them more than I did.

There were more recipes in the newspapers than I had time to cook. If you don’t have a copy of a beloved family recipe, you might find something similar in old newspapers. If you use the date and place features of the search engines, you might find recipes from specific times and places, as I did. Cooking these recipes can help you connect to your ancestors.

* History of German chocolate cake, report, Perplexity, Perplexity (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/a86d0c31-6fd4-4a50-a47e-9a974f8cab80: generated 6 January 2026); generated from query “Does German chocolate cake have German origins?”

Create a free account at GenealogyBank for 7 days to start your journey and discover the stories your ancestors left behind.