by Susan Hibberd

Created on: July 20, 2011   Last Updated: July 21, 2011

Collecting vintage recipe pamphlets is a great hobby. It is a lot cheaper than many other hobbies, and gives you a fabulous insight into the lives of people in days gone by.

Where Can They Be Found?

Recipe leaflets can be found in a variety of places. Online, they can be bought from specialist stores and auction sites. In the town, you can find them in antique bookstores and thrift shops.  However, the best place to find genuine, vintage recipe pamphlets and books is from garage sales.

Try to find sales that are held as a clearance of an older person’s property. These are more likely to have genuine pamphlets. Sometimes they are in a worse condition than you would find in an antique store, butthis is a bonus. It adds to the history of the piece to think that a housewife has used the pamphlet to provide meals for her family.

Does Condition Matter?

Recipe pamphlets are part of what is described as ‘paper ephemera’, which means that they are only meant to be used for a short time and then discarded. This means that finding a mint, pristine copy is very hard to do. If you find one, hold on to it!

If you want to collect the pamphlets because of their potential value in the future, try to get pamphlets in the best possible condition you can.

How Old Will the Pamphlets Be?

Pamphlets have been produced from Victorian times. Before this, housewives would records recipes in a personal notebook or ledger. Once printing became cheaper, companies who produced ingredients would give recipe pamphlets away with their produce to encourage more sales.

Vintage recipe leaflets can be found from each era, and you may choose to collect from only one era, e.g. the war years or the 1970s, or you may aim to collect a range of leaflets so that each decade is represented.

Should You Specialise?

As well as specialising in different eras, some collectors will collect vintage recipe pamphlets from different regions, countries or for particular types of produce.

Baking is a popular subject for specialist collections, as companies such as Bero and Stork produced leaflets to promote their own products, as well as the bakeware companies such as Pyrex, who wished to promote their own products. The range of leaflets available is so great that you could even specialise in one of these companies in particular and still never finish !

Other areas of specialisation could be fruit, tinned food, early American, world foods, 1950s, post-war or pre-war, Betty Crocker, or fish and

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