Giblet gravy, anyone? Old-time holiday recipes resurface from Manitoba Hydro

NOTE: This story was originally published on Dec. 27, 2017

Gather your turkey drippings, candied cherries, and crates of butter and brown sugar.

Manitoba Hydro has reissued a booklet of classic Christmas recipes that harken back to a more lavish time — when there weren't 24-hour fitness centres in every neighbourhood.

"People reading this will know it was done in a different time, before there were concerns of cholesterol or fat content or that type of thing," said Bruce Owen, spokesman for Manitoba Hydro.

"Obviously, people like to indulge over the holidays [and] with some of these recipes you are definitely indulging."

For example, the recipe in the booklet — titled An Old-Fashioned Christmas — for dark Christmas cake calls for one pound (nearly half a kilogram) of butter, three pounds (almost 1.5 kilos) of brown sugar and eight eggs.

"Right there, you can feel, 'OK, I'm putting on weight now, just reading about it,'" Owen said.

The 17-page booklet, which Owen believes was originally issued back in the early 1940s by City of Winnipeg Hydro, includes cooking instructions for everything from the main-course turkey to stuffing, relish, puddings, sauces, salads, pies, pastries, cookies, cakes, candies, icings, tarts and even Norwegian Christmas bread.

A Hydro employee found a copy inside her mom's house earlier this year and brought it to the office. Hydro's social media manager, Riley McDonald, then came up with the idea of republishing a recipe each Thursday on the corporation's Facebook and Twitter pages, Owen said.

"Almost instantly, it became a bit of a hit with our customers," Owen said, noting the posts are being shared many times. "And there were a number of people saying, 'Thanks for posting this recipe — can I have the whole booklet, please?'"

Fun for Open Fires

So Hydro reprinted the booklet replete with the old illustrations, games and holiday decorating tips.

If you're interested in the decorations, save your soup can lids for cutting into the shapes of stars, bells and flowers, and then painting with nail polish.

There are also tips for hosting a successful Christmas party, with advice on table settings and name cards, while the Fun for Open Fires category suggests ways to festively colour up the flames in your fireplace.

Use evergreen twigs to create a tiny fence around the frosted cardboard house that will be set up as the centrepiece on the children's table. Mothballs can be turned into dancing snowballs with the help of citric acid, the booklet suggests.

Owen can't say for sure whether the recipes still hold up or not — he hasn't heard back from anyone who has tried any of them out.

"No one yet who's gone and said, 'Hey, the ornamental frosting recipe was absolutely a smash,' or 'the mock almond icing was also great,'" he said.

"I mean, some of this is stuff you still make now with turkey, you just don't call it giblet gravy anymore. Other stuff in here, I'm not too sure if people have made in a long time."

Owen can't offer his own reviews, either, because he hasn't tried any himself.

"I'm on kind of a dietary thing. I've gotta watch my weight, gotta watch my figure," he said, but quickly added he won't promise to hold off.

"I like the chocolate cookies and the Christmas shortbread — shortbread you can never have too much of."

The booklet is also available at the Manitoba Electrical Museum and Education Centre, 680 Harrow St., or by contacting  Hydro through its Facebook or Twitter pages. You can also read it below.

"We're always looking to try to do different things using our social media and engaging our customers. And this has proved to be a surprise hit," he said.

"There's no harm in trying something different but you don't want to be making some of these recipes every day of the year."