A Thrift Store Find Gave Me My New Favorite Soup Recipe

I’m easily influenced by food trends on TikTok. From imitation crab bites crisped in the air fryer to creamy lemon Boursin pasta, if TikTokers are swearing by it, I want to give it a try. But recently, I stumbled upon a TikToker doing something that combined two of my favorite things: cooking and thrift store shopping.

Victoria Scholes is deep into a now seven-part series she calls “buy and try,” where she purchases vintage dishes with recipes printed on them from thrift stores and then brings them home to make the recipe. She’s cooked everything from crab meat quiche in a beautiful vintage baking dish to tomato soup in a vintage soup bowl.

Vintage Dishware with Recipes on the Side

For years, I’ve passed over this same beautiful dishware featuring illustrated, retro recipes, because I wasn’t sure what I’d do with them. Until I saw Scholes’ videos online, it never occurred to me to attempt the recipe printed on each. And so, I headed to my favorite thrift store with a plan: Whatever vintage recipe dish I found first, I’d give it a try in my own kitchen.

Although I feel like in the past I’ve seen pie plates, soup bowls, and other vintage recipe dishes all over my local thrift stores, I struck out at four different stores before finally finding my unicorn. There, on a Goodwill shelf, were two soup mugs zip-tied together—one with a recipe for onion soup, the other with a recipe for mushroom soup.

The Onion Soup Recipe From the Side of the Bowl

The onion soup felt meant to be, as I immediately recognized the mug from one of Scholes’ TikToks. I decided I’d dive in and try the same recipe, which a bit of research told me was a recipe for caramelized, creamy onion soup, not French onion soup as I assumed.

The challenge to making a recipe printed on a vintage dish is the lack of step-by-step instructions, but I’m an avid home cook, so I took stock of the ingredients and lined them all up on my kitchen counter.

Ingredients (as printed):

• 3 large onions
• 1 ounce butter
• 1 quart white stock
• 1 clove
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 blade mace
• 1 ounce flour
• salt and pepper

Although the steps weren’t printed on the bowl, I figured it out easily. I started by halving and thinly slicing three large onions, then sauteéing them in butter for about two hours on a low simmer, until they were soft, translucent, and caramelized. Next, I stirred in flour and allowed the mixture to cook through.

The recipe called for “white stock,” but after researching that it’s basically homemade bone broth made from chicken, veal, or fish bones, I decided to follow the path of convenience and use store-bought chicken stock. After letting the onions and stock simmer for a few minutes, I added the spices: mace, salt and pepper, a whole clove, and a bay leaf. Then, I added milk, splitting the pint the recipe called for between milk and heavy whipping cream to give the soup some extra creaminess.

Once my soup was fully combined, I simmered it on my stovetop for about 30 minutes to allow the flavors to come together. The result was a creamy and flavorful dish that tasted nothing like French onion soup and gave more of a cream of crab soup vibe in texture. It’s a soup I would make again, especially on cooler days when comfort food is calling.

The Takeaway

Overall, my vintage dish recipe experiment was a fun way to combine my love of combing through thrift store aisles with my passion for cooking. I can totally see why Scholes has made an entire series out of showcasing her thrift store finds in this way, and I will definitely try making the mushroom soup recipe that was printed on my other soup mug.

It’s a fun way to feel connected to the past, and making the recipe and eating it out of the vintage bowl made me feel like I was cooking with someone’s grandmother, learning how to make one of her treasured recipes.