VintageRecipeCollector

Vance Garrison, 54, lives in Whitefish, Montana with his wife and two grown kids. After years as a big-city head chef, he now cooks for a working ranch—cast-iron breakfasts at dawn, slow-smoked brisket at dusk, and hearty suppers that feed hungry hands. He left the white-tablecloth world behind but never stopped chasing flavor. His cookshack is lined with hundreds of rare, vintage, and dog-eared cookbooks: 19th-century trail recipes, Depression-era church pamphlets, forgotten Cajun and Appalachian gems. He’s convinced there’s a whole universe of taste most folks never meet. When he’s not at the stove or splitting firewood, Vance is fermenting, curing, or testing some long-lost technique he dug up from a 1920s volume. To him, real food isn’t about foams or garnishes—it’s about honest ingredients, fire, and people who eat like they mean it. Scratched on a board above his grill: “There’s a whole world of flavor most never know about. My job is to make sure they do.”