Vintage Baker brings sweet obsessions to Milwaukee
When Jessie Sheehan stumbled into an antique shop and bought her first vintage baking booklet, she didn’t anticipate it would spawn a new career.
Yet the former actress and lawyer kept adding to her collection, and became a baker, blogger and cookbook writer. She turned her obsession with vintage baking booklets into her second cookbook, “Vintage Baker” ($24.95, Chronicle Books), published in May.
Looking at trends in taste, Sheehan found commonalities and outliers in recipes, noting the evolution in the kitchen from the early 1900s to the 1950s. Finding a slice of life through booklets from brands like Hershey’s, Nestle and Knox Gelatine, Sheehan updated favorites and created new recipes like Butterscotch Potato Chip Balls, Coconut
Blitz Torte, and Chocolate-Marshmallow Walnut Fudge with Sea Salt.
Sheehan, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Matt, and their sons Oliver, 15, and Jack, 13, will be at Delicately Delicious, W62N608 Washington Ave., Cedarburg, as part of the Cedarburg Wine & Harvest Festival. She’ll sign books 1 to 4 p.m.
Sept. 16 and will do a hands-on baking class from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 19.
Delicately Delicious will have copies of “The Vintage Baker” plus Silver Cake with Pink Frosting by the slice or full cake orders and Butterscotch-Potato Chip Balls for purchase during the month of September. Order forms and class sign up are at delicatelydelicous.com.
Additionally, Boelter Superstore will host her demonstration class from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Sept. 18. Cost is $37.50 per person.
Question: How did you get started baking? Answer: When I graduated from college, I was an actress in New York City. I didn’t go to law school until I was in my late 20s. My dad was a law professor and it seemed to make sense…
I went to law school, clerked for a year, practiced for two years, got pregnant and never went back.
When Oliver was 2 and Jack was 1…the one thing I was super into was eating and thinking about sweets, if not making them yet.
I live in Brooklyn in Red Hook. In 2006, Baked had probably been open a year. https://bakednyc.com I went in and said hey, I want to work for free and learn. They looked at me like I was insane. Who comes in and says they’ll work for free?
I also wrote a note to the head baker, I went a little crazy with the exclamation points. I went in a week later, the head baker was there. I got a job.
I’d measure granola, seal the bags. I graduated to making loaf cakes. After 9 months they hired me. Then the two guys who ran the bakery wrote a cookbook and wanted testers who weren’t professionals. I started testing recipes, then started helping develop recipes.
Q: How did you set about choosing recipes for your new book?
A: The first thing was what kind of sweet it was, a lemon pie, or some kind of chocolate cookie. The second thing would be the name of the recipe, like I’d see fig pincushions. I am not even a Fig Newton person, but there is no way I wouldn’t put that in my book because it is such a whimsical name.
I’d also take recipes I saw everywhere, like the sand tart.
Q: What is the most unusual recipe you remember coming across?
A: One that got cut from the book, kind of special but weird, is called whipped Jell-O. One category of (vintage) booklets is Jell-0 booklets. They’re incredible, the illustrations are amazing, and they tell a story like “How Jell-O saved my marriage.”
Q: How many booklets do you have?
A: People do give them to me now. My recipes were on the cover of Fine Cooking in July, a story on no-bake desserts. There was a woman working at Fine Cooking. She had two bags of booklets she was planning on taking to the dump. There were Nestle booklets and Hershey booklets, which are coveted by me.
I really only collect the baking ones. I have at least 100, and I’m always looking. There is a used cookbook store in New York, (Bonnie) Slotnick’s. She has her own collection. We kind of “played Barbies” — we sat on the floor and went through cookbooks.
Q: How did you end up coming to Milwaukee?
A: My maternal aunt lives there. I’ve been going to Milwaukee my whole life. My husband is one of eight. One of his brothers lives there. I definitely have Milwaukee connections.
What is so great and funny, a good example of social media…. Jennifer Goldbleck owns a bakery in Cedarburg called Delicately Delicious. She was an Instagram follower and asked, would you want to come to Milwaukee?
Q: What’s your must-eat in Milwaukee?
A: Somebody wrote me on Instagram about kringle. I don’t even know what that is, but I have to find that.
Table Chat features interviews with Wisconsinites, or Wisconsin natives, who work in restaurants or support the restaurant industry; or visiting chefs. To suggest individuals to profile, email nstohs@journalsentinel.com.