Mostly stuff grandma didn't make, and one big surprise

Today, I'm posting something very special to me. I inherited my grandma's recipe box. Here is a view of the side, which had a fruit bowl print (repeated on both sides).

Here is the front, which is pretty similar. 

Most exciting of all, this had a flip-up top that could hold a recipe card while the cook... well... cooked.

And for the maybe three readers who don't know me personally, no need for too many condolences. My grandma was 102, heartily sick of everything, and cranky AF. I loved her dearly and miss her, but she was READY to go. (And if you've ever wondered where I get my delightful personality, there's a big clue. 😆)

I wasn't really sure what to expect in the recipe box because I rarely saw grandma use a recipe. She just made stuff. (Again, kinda like me.) When I dug through the recipes, very little seemed familiar. She often had multiple copies of recipes that I don't remember her making even once, like Bisquick's Impossible Lasagna Pie (which made another appearance as "Lasagna Squares").

Or Zippy Zucchini (which had the same name for each appearance).

The Zesty Carrot Salad was stained up enough that I think she probably made it at some point, though I have no recollection of it.

I am not at all surprised to see that she had a variation for an oil-free version, though. Grandpa had heart trouble and this was from the low-fat era. Back then, subbing in Karo syrup was the "healthy" variation.

I saw multiple recipes for things she definitely made, but these are not for the actual versions she made. For instance, I found two recipes for cranberry salad, and NEITHER is the one she made for holidays. This first version doesn't even have Jell-O, and grandma's version was Jell-O based.

The next one has gelatin, but it's missing key ingredients like crushed pineapple and orange juice concentrate.

(If you want to see the recipe my grandma actually used, S.S. from A Book of Cookrye made it a few months ago. It was definitely not in this box.)

Grandma also had a couple recipes for cutout sugar cookies. She made cutouts for Christmas every year (and often randomly at other times too). I still use that same recipe every December and know it's not either of the ones from the recipe box.

I can't really imagine grandma buying cake flour or having cream on hand (well, once they stopped owning dairy cows, anyway...). Weird that she had a recipe calling for these ingredients. (And her version uses both almond extract AND vanilla. It's not a "choose one" scenario.)

Her recipe doesn't use confectioners' sugar or butter, either, so I know this isn't the origin of the cookies she actually made.

My favorite thing about this recipe is the ad on the back for "Mood Watch Ladies."

The ad notes that buyers can use Master Charge to buy this monstrosity, so that dates the recipe to sometime between 1969 and 1979.

But I did find one recipe that I remembered very well, and it kind of choked me up that it was so stained. Grandma must have used it. So you're getting the story whether you want to know it or not, just because I want to tell it.

The summer between high school and college, I moved in with grandma and grandpa. One day when I didn't have to work (I was a cook for a nursing home), they had to go somewhere in the morning and would be home around lunch time. Grandma asked me if I could have lunch ready when they got back and told me to use the ground turkey she had in the fridge. I decided to make up a recipe, and when they got home, my grandpa ate three servings at lunch. He was a man of few words (and generally preferred dessert to anything else), so that was about the highest compliment he could pay. Grandma asked me to write down the recipe so she could make it again.

If you can't read the title, it's "Guidelines for [blank]'s Casserole." (The blank is my real name. I blotted it out, but "Casserole" is nearly unreadable for some reason.) Neither grandma nor I were particularly careful about following recipes and I hadn't really measured anything when I made it anyway, so "guidelines" seemed right for the title.

I had pretty much forgotten about that day until I found this, and I can't believe how clearly I remember it decades later. It's like grandma left me one last present hidden amid all the recipes that I don't remember her making. 

You could find mainstream-America-obscure veggies here in the days before Food Network!

When I initially wrote about The Unabridged Vegetable Cookbook (Nika Hazelton, copyright 1976, but mine is from the 1980 Bantam printing), I discussed how it introduced foods that seem commonplace now but were new to mainstream America back then, like salsa, hummus, and kimchi. I didn't even mention something else that was special about this collection, though. It also includes a lot of vegetables that mainstream readers may never have heard of. The produce is not just European veggies that are rare here, either, but veggies from all over the world, and from cultures that the more mainstream cookbooks tended to either ignore or Americanize so heavily that the original, likely hard-to-find ingredients wouldn't even be mentioned. 

Granted, I don't have the knowledge to judge how similar these recipes are to ones that might be considered "authentic," but I am impressed that these veggies showed up in a mainstream cookbook from 1976 at all.

There are a couple of recipes for akee (more commonly spelled "ackee"), including this one that's supposed to be a beloved Jamaican dish.

As someone with boring European ancestry who lives 50 years after this book's initial print run, I still only knew about a[c]kee from watching Food Network shows.

There's a recipe for calabaza.

I only knew about calabaza from watching Food Network shows.

There's a recipe for dasheen.

I only knew about dasheen from watching Food Network shows.

And there is also a recipe for winter melon. 

I only knew about winter melon from watching Food Network shows.

There's a recipe for callalou (more commonly spelled "callaloo"-- which are the leaves of the dasheen root, if I understood the book correctly).

I only knew about callaloo from... say it with me...

Nope! I tricked you. I don't remember seeing this on a Food Network show. I'm a lazy academic who only knew Callaloo as the title of an African-American literary magazine. So I didn't even realize it was food-related!

In short, while white Americans have learned a lot more about recipes from non-European cultures than we did 50 years ago, this book also shows that a lot of common-elsewhere veggies are still not well-known here. (Or maybe that I'm just hopelessly behind the times? Probably a little of both...)

A workbasket full of berries

Something about the cover of The Workbasket from May 1970 feels a bit like a Barbie doll trying to act enthusiastic about having to wear the hand-knitted vest Aunt Clara made. It only comes out when Aunt Clara visits, obviously, but every time is one too many...

I'm not here for the fashions, though. Even though The Workbasket is mostly craft projects, I get it for the recipes. May was berry month, so there's nothing too terrible-sounding in here. Well, actually, the name of Berry Cream Crowdie doesn't sound too appealing to me.

Anything with a crowd in it automatically makes me nervous! But considering this is just a thick, creamy dessert with a crowd of berries on top, it's not too scary. (And yes, I realize "crowdie" doesn't refer to the berries. Apparently it's a type of soft Scottish cheese, which I'm supposing the gelled milk-and-cream mixture is supposed to approximate.)

May is a good month for strawberries, so I wasn't too surprised to come across a recipe for Strawberry-Almond Pancake Torte.

Waking up to basically a layer cake of pancakes, strawberries, and whipped topping doesn't sound too bad. I am kind of surprised that the editors thought they could get away with calling this "glamourous," though. 

The picture looks more like somebody had an idea for a craft project that involved spackle and coasters, and they gave up halfway through when they realized how poorly it was turning out...

The magazine wasn't too concerned about whether the berries would be likely to be in season yet or not, though, as it also ran a recipe for Elderberry Jam. (Elderberries are more of a late-summer crop than a May one.)

And I'm mostly running the recipe so I can tell my only elderberry-related story. My grandma had just gotten brand new linoleum floors in the kitchen and was so proud of them. When we visited, my dad wanted some elderberry jelly, but had to open a new (home-canned) jar of it, and of course he managed to break it and get it all over the brand-new linoleum. So... that didn't go over well. 

There are also instructions for creating a frozen blueberry puck.

Very convenient when you want to bake a surprise blueberry pie. (Not so convenient if you consider the awkward circular space it will be taking up in the freezer in the meantime.)

And even less convenient when you realize you still have to make your own crust and bake the thing for an hour. (If you want real convenience, it's easier to just buy the pre-made pie.)

If all these fruity desserts seem a little too healthy, there's also a Delicious Cake-Pie Dessert.

So, just in case you didn't think chocolate cake was indulgent enough, this version comes in its own pie crust. (You can tell Workbasket's audience must have been older women since nobody seems too concerned about the coming of swimsuit season!)

And finally, because Lace maker would be disappointed not to know what people were supposed to tat in May 1970, here's the tatting project: Spring and Autumn Mini-Pictures.

These look tiny, so maybe they wouldn't be too hard? (Who am I kidding? Tatting looks super-complicated.)

In any case, I am looking forward to the bounty of berries in the coming months! (And hoping that I don't end up having to clean too many up off the floor, but knowing how clumsy I am, that seems unlikely unless I just bypass the berries altogether...)

Some Very Good notes, misspellings and all!

As much as I make fun of Favorite Recipes of America: Meats Including Seafood and Poultry (1966), I know that whoever owned this book before I did really loved it. How do I know this? They left notes.

Sometimes, the notes are rather minimal, such as those for Pork Chop-Pineapple Casserole.

"Very Good" admittedly doesn't give us a lot to go on, but considering this is their opinion of cream of mushroom soup combined with canned pineapple chunks, it's enough for me to know that this earlier owner and I have Very Different ideas about what is Very Good.

Other notes show that this cook liked to modify recipes to their tastes and what they had on hand, and they wanted to remember those variations. Not only do we know that Oven-Chip Chicken is "Great"...

But we also know that crushed taco chips can be subbed in for the potato chips, and lemon pepper will stand in for the plain pepper. Plus, this person will not let extra butter go to waste (I hear you on that, cook from the past!), and they can always go for a little extra garlic salt.

I did learn that our tastes don't always diverge. In Battuto for Roast Beef, the unknown cook subs in onion salt and garlic powder for actual onion and garlic.

That's something I'd do. Not to get too detailed, but actual fresh alliums tend to make my digestive system unhappy, while a tiny bit of the dried stuff for flavor is usually fine. Plus, this cook would rather use "sesma seed" than caraway seed, a substitution I heartily recommend because caraway seeds taste the way I imagine poison tastes. 

And to round out our recipes with the cook's notes with yet another interestingly-spelled variation, here's Scalloped Potatoes with Salami Slices.

I love knowing that "pepornie" can be subbed in for the salami! And if you want to know what this recipe looks like in black-and-white, this is the only recipe from my selections that has a photograph.

You just have to imagine the darker-gray bits as pepornie circles, rather than salami quarters, for this to be accurate to the variation. 

The extra notes were a Very Good surprise in this book, making me even gladder I picked it up.