Growing A Fragrant Year: Violas For March and Part of April

{A Fragrant Year is an ongoing series shared throughout 2024 highlighting twelve fragrant plants, trees, flowers, shrubs and herbs added to the New England garden landscape, month by month, surrounding a house built in 1750. This series was inspired by the 1967 garden book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. If you are new to the blog, catch up with our first introductory…

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A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts: Chapter 5 - The Lost Item is Revealed

{Spoiler Alert: This is the final installment in a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost in 2008 and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.} There’s a quote by an unknown writer that states… “What’s meant for you will never miss you, and that which misses you was never meant for…

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Growing a Fragrant Year: February's Helpful Hazel and the Greenhouse Diaries

Witch hazel isslustration by Leonie Bell Circa 1960s With a scent ranging from sweet yeasted bread to bubblegum, the centuries-old Hamamelis virginiana (aka the common witch hazel) kicks off Month #1 in this year’s Greenhouse Diaries series. In case you missed our introductory post last month, our theme for 2024 is a Fragrant Year, where we’ll be sharing twelve months of perfumed plants, flowers…

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Italy's Chicken Canzanese and The Family of Artists Behind The Recipe

It’s just the start of 2024, but here in the Vintage Kitchen, there is a finish line coming into view. This year we will be wrapping up a five-year project that first started here on the blog in 2020. I’m so happy to say welcome back to The International Vintage Recipe Tour. What started out as an intended year-long project of cooking 50 recipes from 45 different countries in 2020 has now taken…

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Welcome to a Fragrant Year: The Greenhouse Diaries Return for New Growing Adventures

The Greenhouse Diaries are back with new inspirations and a whole new year of growing adventures to explore and discover. Like last year, these new diary entries center around what can be grown in a petite 4×6 greenhouse in our four-season New England climate, but starting this month there is a brand new theme, different from last year, that is guiding our gardening goals in 2024. Our mighty,…

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A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts: Chapter 4 - One Last Journey

The view from seat 21A {Spoiler Alert: This is a series of blog posts detailing the real-life story of a 100-year-old item that was lost over a decade ago and how it found its way home in 2024. Follow along from the beginning of this story at Chapter 1: It Arrives.} This part of the lost item story is about numbers. Not numbers relating to complex math or phones or registry digits, but numbers…

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A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts: Our 2021 Blog Series Is Finally Back with New Chapters

It’s been two years and five months since this story began unfolding on the blog. Back then, the blog series with the impossibly long title – A Monumental Story of Real-Life Serendipity Told Over Many Parts detailed, in installments, the story of a mysterious package that was sent by a random stranger to the Vintage Kitchen in the summer of 2021. Inside the package was a valuable 100-year-old…

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Reading While Eating: Seven Favorite Books Discovered in 2023

Just in time, before we say goodbye to 2023, I didn’t want the year to leave without posting the annual recommended book list that has become a favorite here on the blog. This year’s selections center around nature, literary figures, artists, the art of collecting, and the curation of home in all the ways that make it personal and unique. As is the way every year, these books were randomly…

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Bar Hemingway's Ritz 75: A Vintage Champagne Cocktail from Paris

The history behind Bar Hemingway’s Ritz 75 runs long. If a cocktail could talk this one would tell many stories. Included in its 100-year lifespan are snippets about several greats – Ernest Hemingway, a New York nightclub, a French hotel and the best bartender in the world. And those are just tips of the ice cube. Even more stories lay below the gin line. This cocktail’s core combination of…

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Holiday Classics: A Vintage Cranberry Relish Recipe from Historic Connecticut

Undoubtedly the most well-known food to come out of Mystic, Connecticut is pizza, thanks to the 1988 movie Mystic Pizza starring Julia Roberts… The real-life pizza shop that inspired the film is still serving up hot pies every day in this beautiful, bustling, historic port city, but there’s a long-standing tradition of other delicious New England fare that has made Mystic, CT a go-to source for…

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It's Finally Here! Our Annual Shop Sale is Today

Happy All Souls Day! Just wanted to pop in with a quick reminder for all our intrepid culinary adventurers and history-fueled home decorators… our annual one-day-only 40% off shop sale is today! There are a bevy of new (old) heirlooms that have arrived in the shop recently, so if it’s been a bit of time since you last visited hop on over to the shop to see our latest collections. Some of our…

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Calling All Souls: Our Annual 40% off Sale is Almost Here!

As soon as the pumpkins make their debut on the front porch, and the leaves shower down from the sky, and the extra-large soup pot makes its first appearance on the stovetop since early spring we know that the time is near. Our annual Vintage Kitchen shop sale is just ten days away! Mark your calendars for November 2nd, and on that day you’ll discover an extra treat – a deep discount – 40% off…

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Highlights from the Summer Garden & a Big-Time Surprise Visitor

A visit from the deer we call Juna in June. Before summer ends officially on September 23rd, I didn’t want the season to go by without a garden update on how the seedlings fared once they left the greenhouse in spring. Given the late date, this is sort of like a summer wrap-up post told mostly in images – a view of our New England garden from June to mid-September. Don’t miss the real garden…

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The Magical Second Life of Samuel Gottscho and a Locally Inspired Recipe to Match

Orient Point, Long Island en route to Southold, NY When Samuel Gottscho began his professional photography career at the age of 50, it was a leap of faith and a vast change from the garment industry salesman job he had known all his adult life. By this point, as he entered into his fifth decade, he was a husband and a father with a young daughter to raise and a long-time reputation in the…

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A One-Pot Recipe for Your Pup: Homemade Dog Food Back by Reader Request

To view the full 30-Days graphic that includes all 30 bowls, click here. This past January, we shared a post highlighting thirty days of homemade dog food that we made for our pup, Indie, during the month of December 2022. As much a photo collage as a visual guide on the types of food that Indie has been eating throughout her life here with us, I wanted to dispel the myth that cooking for your…

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The Handmade Tablecloth: A 1916 Immigration Story

Every family has some tales when it comes to history and the lineage that connects us to ancestors who lived a long time ago. If we are lucky, they are long-winded stories full of color and detail and a relatable sentimentality that can carry our imaginations far across cities and centuries connecting us to relatives we never met. Other times, there are family histories that are just one-liners.…

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The Greenhouse Diaries Entry #8: The End of the Beginning

The final selection of writing in Katharine Sergeant Angell White’s Onward and Upward In The Garden is dated March 28th, 1970. “By March,” she writes, “for those of us that live in the Northeast, the summer seed and plant orders are in. From Washington north to the Canadian border and east to Maine, the tender seedlings and plants raised in hotbeds, cold frames or greenhouses now must wait for…

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