While visiting my brother and sister-in-law, I helped to sort through some papers from my parents’ home, long since vacated. I came home with a new collection of old recipes and am touched to be leafing through pages that my mother handled years ago.
My favourite collection is written in a steno pad, in my mother’s distinctive fluid handwriting. The first thing I notice is that there are no mistakes, no scratched-out words or letters overwritten to make corrections. That stands out to me, as I often make mistakes when writing by hand. I suppose that because it’s so easy to correct errors while typing on a computer, I’m a little less careful when writing.
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I am struck by how different the resources are today versus when my mother wrote out those recipes. Her recipe collections – and I will add that she had a reputation for being a good cook, a frequent prize-winner at numerous local fairs – fit into one drawer in her kitchen. My sprawling collection involves cookbooks that occupy two bookcases, several binders and boxes of handwritten recipe cards, any that I want to source online, sets of cooking magazines and several drawers in a filing cabinet.
The recipes, themselves, have stories to tell – about the times and about my mom. I estimate they were written in the late 1930s and into the ’40s and ’50s. There are recipes for pies and cookies, preserves and plenty of jellied salads, most of which started with unflavoured gelatin. Not high on the recipe hit parade in the early 2000s, jellied salads had a big fan base when Mom chose her recipes.
There are no recipes in that collection for meat, poultry or fish dishes and few for vegetables. That’s because she wouldn’t have needed them. Those main course dishes would be the same week in and week out– meat, potatoes, vegetables, sometimes gravy or dressing, and she’d have known how to cook those without further instruction.
Some of the pages in the steno pad were clean, the recipes likely never used. I have some like that in my collections, too, recipes that looked good, but that I have never got around to preparing. The ones with a long diagonal line running through them must have been disappointments that weren’t up to her standards.
The recipes she made over and over are easy to identify. The pages are splashed and splattered, making them almost impossible to read. Some of the favourites were strawberry shortcake, Helen’s pumpkin pie, dad’s cookies, molded pineapple ring and Duchess Salad.
Here’s her Duchess Salad recipe, for a cool summer salad plate.
Duchess Salad
- Boil 1 2/3 cups water. Pour it over 1 3¼ oz* package of lemon-flavoured gelatin. Add 1/4 cup sugar, 3 tbsp lemon juice, 3 tbsp pineapple juice, 1/2 tsp salt. Chill jelly till about to set.
- Combine it with 2 cups shredded cabbage, 1 cup canned pineapple, 1/2cup chopped celery, 2 tbsp chopped pimento.
- Pour into mold. Chill until set. Unmold on lettuce, serve with mayonnaise.
10 servings.
* Note: 3 1/4 oz= 92 g. Currently, packages of jelly powder are 85 g, close enough for me.
Mom’s favourite recipe for lemon pie, was not hand-written or as old as the recipes in her steno pad collection. I’ve copied the recipe, verbatim, from the church cookbook it appeared in. I couldn’t resist bumping up the lemon flavour by adding lemon zest to the filling and adding a pinch of cream of tartar to the meringue.
Judy’s Lemon Pie
From Recipes from the Kilmartin Kitchens, compiled by the Ladies of Burns’ Presbyterian Church, Mosa, 1978.
- In a saucepan combine 1 c. sugar, 1/3 c. cornstarch, 1 tbsp butter. To this add 1 3/4 c. boiling water. Boil this until thick. Then add all at once 1/4 c. lemon juice, 3 beaten egg yolks.
- Remove from heat and pour into baked pie shell and top with meringue made from 3 egg whites beaten until stiff with 4 tbsp sugar. Brown meringue under broiler till golden.
A clarification for the brownie recipe printed in the July 2 edition of The Guardian: the amount of cocoa is 75 mL or 1/3 cup. Sorry for the confusion that anyone requiring the Imperial measurement experienced.
Margaret Prouse, a home economist, writes this column for The Guardian every Friday. She can be reached by email at [email protected].
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