20,000 old Seattle recipes sat in our newsroom - so we cooked a feast

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

When the food team at The Seattle Times rediscovered a filing cabinet in our newsroom with more than 20,000 old recipes, we made a party platter headlined by "merry beef roll-ups."

This summer, The Seattle Times will move a few blocks east in South Lake Union to a new office. There's no room in the new space for, say, a hulking metal filing cabinet stuffed with thousands of recipes dating back to the 1930s.

These treasured recipes were collected over the decades when The Times had a test kitchen in which home economists tested recipes published in the newspaper.

Back in the day, the newsroom ran recipe contests and published "a huge assortment" of recipes from the 1930s to Y2K, categorized and filed between the cabinet's 42 drawers. They're "jammed with 3-by-5 cards in various states of disrepair, some yellowed and torn, but remarkably intact," as described in 2003 by longtime home economist CeCe Sullivan. To this day, "one 13-inch-deep drawer alone holds recipes of molded salads of every kind and from every era."

To ballpark the total number of recipes, I counted one row of average volume: VEGETABLES, Lima Bean to Cucumber.

There were about 550 recipes - including a Depression-era "bean loaf" that (optimistically) served eight (4 cups beans; 1 cup tomato soup; 1 cup dry breadcrumbs; 1 egg; 1 onion; 1 cup "chopped nut meats"; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley).

The catalog reflects decades of change in Seattle, inside the newsroom and around the region we cover. Years of recipes and tips, from lean times to midcentury prosperity, recording the days when women entered the newsroom as home economists, many writing under the pen name "Dorothy Neighbors" at The Times.

Dorothy Neighbors went from pseudonym to department name to trivia answer as this newspaper and others changed and expanded their food coverage beyond the home kitchen. Our newsroom's recipe filing system and its test kitchen died off in the 2000s because of the internet - to connect a few dots - and the way it changed and shrank the journalism industry.

In 2003, Sullivan noted how "a recipe's name gives a clue to its era," as when dishes became Franco-phied after the 1961 publication of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Combing through the filing cabinet, I found massive portions of meats and canned goods in the 1950s. "Slim dips" and "bikini pizzas" in the early 1970s. Recipe names and labels on the cabinet that would be called "problematic" or "cringeworthy" today, like the rows of "foreign" foods like "Chinese disc" (1978; pita stuffed with water chestnuts and sliced turkey, coated with corn oil and chutney and served with cranberry sauce).

We'll have to come back to the Seafair Fried Chicken or perhaps Angels on Horseback, a prizewinner back in the day. Less of a rush to test the gargantuan Maurice Salad or Jeremy's Crab Louie, with one man-sized portion."

Spend enough years with these recipes and you'll see a shift from modest home cooking toward the age of the home chef, with a focus on Northwest ingredients.

In 2011, former food critic Nancy Leson talked to longtime Seattle Times food editor Sharon Lane about the recipes: "Every Wednesday … a home economist would clip the recipes from the paper, glue each to an index card, date it and file it. Computerization put an end to that task. The papers' home economists went home for good and those recipe files, for the most part, became relics."

Ultimately, our food team in 2026 faces a predicament Leson and Lane considered 15 years ago.

"In a few months," Leson wrote in 2011, employees "will be moving from the historic Seattle Times building to cozier quarters next door. Recycle bins at the ready, we've been told to clear the decks and purge our files. And when I inquired about our old recipe collection, the Times' food editor fixed me with a defiant stare.

We're hauling them across the street, and they'll stay there if I have to sit on them!'"

Rest assured, we'll find a happy home for this big, gray treasure chest.

After sifting through hundreds of recipes, I asked one of our regular Seattle Times recipe testers, Danie Baker, to make and eat lunch with our food writers, Jackie Varriano and Bethany Jean Clement.

Results varied. Here's what they had to say about the experiment.

Opening thoughts

Bethany Jean Clement: Over my years at The Seattle Times - more than a decade now!? - I had occasionally delved into our card-catalogue-style recipe file to marvel at How Times Have Changed. The clipped-out recipes, quaintly adhered to index cards, bear the handwritten notes of when they were tested and published in the paper, back when The Seattle Times had a test kitchen (and people had handwriting!).

The ingredients of yesteryear: so many canned goods, so much shortening, all the Jell-O. Some bizarre cultural misapprehension and appropriation. An evolution in American cooking, or at least part of it, was in all the little drawers - then, in a pandemic-times newsroom reconfiguring, the cabinet disappeared.

Until now - when, with its future uncertain, it has returned to wreak its vengeance!

Jackie Varriano: I only discovered the recipe archive (behind a locked door, no less!) in the last year. And I only spent a few blissful minutes thumbing through the cards, believing that surely I would have more time with them at some point, someday, when I didn't have so many deadlines and other stories in my brain. Now, time has run short, and I might owe a "thank you" to my editor for making us do this before we move. I love thinking about and laughing over old recipes. It's a window back in time.

And, like the pegged jeans of my youth, not every trend should last forever.

Bethany: Right?! Looking at and laughing over old recipes - great, yes, here for it, especially with you. Actually eating them, though …

Merry Beef Roll-ups: March 10, 1968

Bethany: No shade on Danie, our taste-test chef - the blame lies with the era on this one. The name alone is some serious trad wife stuff; you just picture someone swallowing their mother's little helper and merrily roulading the 1968 afternoon away.

From bite one, Jackie and I both tasted time-travel - a sort of blunt comfort-food salty-savoriness without any real depth. We were anti-surprised to learn that it contained a can of condensed mushroom soup (plus "butter or margarine," and shortening, too). Any flavor offered by a small amount of fresh herbs got decimated by a 90-minute cook time - though Danie made the wise executive decision to sprinkle a little fresh parsley on top to alleviate the total monotone.

Jackie: On paper, I understand this recipe. It's like Swiss cake roll - but make it beefy - and calls to mind one of my favorite family Christmas traditions: braciola. However, while braciola features a thinly pounded steak rolled up with Parmesan, breadcrumbs and parsley that gets long-simmered in tomato sauce, this finished product was about as far from merry as you can get.

I even like cream of mushroom soup! But this had no evidence of a nice sauce. Overly salty and leathery beef. Sad potatoes and carrots stuffed inside. Why would anyone ever eat this when they could just make a nice pot roast? Maybe a boeuf bourguignon if you're feeling fancy.

Bethany: Yes! Or the last step suggests that you "serve with a green salad, dinner rolls and deep-dish apple pie" - 100% would eat, just delete the sad beef.

Jackie: Agree that a green salad, dinner rolls and deep-dish apple pie as a meal sounds incredible. We're easy to please!

Northwest Chanterelle Saute: Sept. 4, 1985

Bethany: OK, this was the most successful - least unsuccessful? - recipe by far. Sauteed mushrooms are A Good Thing, and this preparation gives early Martha Stewart: Walnut oil! Madeira! Fresh rosemary! It's mercifully uncomplicated (except for a flambé for extraness, which Danie opted to skip). And it's even meant to be local and seasonal with the chanterelles, though since it's not actually fall, those got subbed with shiitakes, oyster mushrooms and creminis.

Jackie: Early Martha Stewart is by far the kindest description for this recipe. I had forgotten about the Madeira, but it makes me want to get a bottle. Buy some fancy mushrooms and walnut oil! Try my hand at a flambé and maybe even add in some thyme. Because this recipe is very much something that deserved to survive the '80s.

Bethany: Notably, this one has stats on calories, fat, etc., per serving at the end. Modernity!

Fran Bigelow's Gold Bar Brownies: Oct. 11, 1989

Jackie: Why, Fran? Why? Why would one ever destroy a perfect, fudgy brownie by placing 10 (10!?!) chopped Gold Bars inside, destroying any hope of a cohesive brownie-to-candy ratio?

Bethany: And Danie actually only used eight of them, after we all agreed the amount was absurd! A Fran's Gold Bar is a simple thing - toasted almonds, buttery caramel (made with actual butter!), high-quality dark chocolate - and it's still around for a reason. They also cost more than $6 each. You couldn't taste them at all in these brownies, which came out relentlessly oversweet. What a waste! We wanted to time-travel back just like an hour to rescue the Gold Bars. Or to 1989 to put a stop to this madness. My teeth hurt thinking about it.

Jackie: I can't believe that the recipe also called for icing! Icing! These were not only oversweet, but a crumbly mess with hardly any actual brownie holding together the mass of chopped almonds and chocolate shards.

This could possibly work as an ice cream topping, or maybe as a side to some unsweetened whipped cream, but it just doesn't work as brownies. Why try harder when there are so many delicious and simple brownie recipes that exist?

The overall experience

Bethany: So many thoughts! This tour through Ye Olde Cabinet of Cookery was … visceral. It's one thing to read a recipe and judge it by your imagination of its merits (or lack thereof!); actual taste-testing really reveals the flaws, making the ways that ingredients, methods and minds have changed super-stark.

The Merry Roll-ups made me want to make cream of mushroom soup from my own recipe for a simpler, better comfort-food situation. The Would-Be Chanterelle Saute showed such a leap forward in culinary thinking. The Gold Bar Brownies went for a luxe thing and just overshot by a mile - but made me appreciate anew that nowadays, sweet baked goods usually get a tempering dose of salt. (And I think Fran's famous gray salt caramels, introduced in 1998, played a part in popularizing that, so we forgive you/thanks, Fran!)

Jackie: I worry that we didn't do the archives justice. A spin through some other recipes turned up results for buttermilk rolls from 1958, deviled chicken wings from 1968 and a Gorgonzola apricot dish from the Yakima restaurant Birchfield Manor from 1986. There's plenty to laugh at, but also a lot more that we could've enjoyed - and gotten some ideas from, too. Maybe a few of these recipes will end up in my desk at the new office.

(Editor's note: Danie Baker will test out more recipes from the files this year! Follow along at seattletimes.com/life/food-drink.)

The recipes

Merry Beef Roll-ups (March 10, 1968)

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients:

* 1½ pounds thinly sliced round steak (about ⅛-inch thick)

* 1 cup diced potatoes

* 1 cup diced carrots

* ⅓ cup chopped onion

* 2 tablespoons butter or margarine

* 1 can (10½ ounces) condensed golden mushroom soup

* 2 tablespoons chopped parsley

* ½ teaspoon dill leaves, crushed

* Salt and pepper to taste

* 2 tablespoons shortening

* ¼ cup water

* ¼ cup chopped canned tomato

Steps:

1. Cut steak into 6 pieces (8 by 4 inches). In saucepan, cook potatoes, carrots and onion in butter until partly tender.

2. Stir in ¼ cup soup, parsley and ¼ teaspoon dill. Sprinkle meat with salt and pepper.

3. Place about ⅓ cup stuffing mixture near center of each piece of meat. Roll up. Tuck in ends and fasten with skewers or toothpicks.

4. Brown in shortening in skillet. Pour off fat. Stir in remaining soup and dill, water and tomatoes.

5. Cover and cook over low heat 1½ hours or until tender. Serve with a green salad, dinner rolls and deep-dish apple pie.

Northwest Chanterelle Saute (Sept. 4, 1985)

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients:

* 1 tablespoon walnut oil

* 1 pound chanterelles (or commercial mushrooms)

* ¼ tablespoon minced garlic

* 1 sprig fresh rosemary

* ½ cup Madeira wine

Steps:

1. Heat walnut oil until very hot. Add mushrooms. Sauté for about 2 minutes.

2. Add garlic and rosemary. Continue to sauté for another couple of minutes.

3. Add wine, heat through, stand back and flambé. When the flambé dies, cover and steam until mushrooms are tender. (If you have problems flaming the Madeira, add just a little high-proof brandy to ease the job of burning off the alcohol.)

Note: Danie Baker did not flambé the mushrooms for our taste test.

Fran Bigelow's Gold Bar Brownies (Oct. 11, 1989)

Yield: 1 large tray of brownies

Ingredients:

* Brownies

* 8 ounces coarsely chopped almonds

* 1 pound 2 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped

* 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped

* 1 cup butter, room temperature

* 1⅓ cups brown sugar

* ½ cup sugar

* 2 teaspoons vanilla

* 5 eggs

* 1½ cups flour

* 10 Gold Bars, coarsely chopped

* Icing

* 1½ cups whipping cream

* 1 pound semisweet chocolate, finely chopped

Steps:

1. Lightly grease a 15-by-10-inch jellyroll pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper and lightly grease again. Place the almonds in a baking pan and roast in a preheated 350-degree oven for 10 minutes, until light golden. Stir occasionally. Cool.

2. Place the semisweet and unsweetened chocolates in the top of a double boiler; place over hot water to melt. Remove from the heat when almost melted and stir until completely melted. Cool.

3. Cream together the butter and brown and granulated sugars. Add the vanilla; beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat for 2 minutes. Pour in the melted chocolate and mix well. Slowly add the flour. Fold in the almonds and Gold Bars.

4. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for 30 minutes. The crust will be dry on top and the brownies will bounce back when touched in the center, but will still look wet. Cool on a wire rack.

5. To prepare the icing: In a large saucepan, bring the cream to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate, whisking until completely melted. Stir the chocolate occasionally until cooled but still pourable.

6. Pour over the brownies and spread. Let set before cutting into 1-by-2-inch rectangles.

Note: Gold Bars are a chocolate-coated caramel candy bar that are still sold today by the Seattle chocolatier Fran's.

Note: Danie Baker used eight Gold Bars instead of 10 and did not make the icing for our taste test.

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This story was originally published May 17, 2026 at 6:43 AM.