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Joyce Kiefer |
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Here are four of Joyce's mom's old cookbooks, much-used for generations. |
Learn about your ancestors by studying their recipes
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
Before he wrote “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt taught English at New York City High Schools. When he arrived at Stuyvesant High–the elite campus of the city’s schools–he knew he had to challenge his jaded students to get their attention. They and he were tired of mining poetry for obscure, elusive meanings. What to do?
According to his memoir “Teacher Man”, he began with the universal truth that teenagers think a lot about food. He gave the class an assignment: Bring in a cook book and be prepared to read a recipe aloud. The students, most of them striving for admission to the Ivies, thought their charming Irish teach had gone daft.
But he had a point and the kids got it when some brought musical instruments to play as accompaniment to the readings of, say, lamb stew or Swedish meatballs. They heard rhythm in the list of ingredients. They picked up the emotional content when a student read out a favorite dish. Their senses and imaginations were pricked as if they were reading poetry.
Recipes and cookbooks can also be gateways to our own personal stories.
The oldest cookbook I own goes back to the turn of the 20th century. “Our Cookery Book” is a small, coverless collection of simple recipes mixed with ads for wood stoves and gas lanterns. It gives menu advice, such as what to serve an invalid. The book belonged to my maternal grandfather, who was a cook for the Pacific Steamship Company. He picked it up in Australia. Occasionally and only if I promised to touch it carefully, my mother would dig it out from the back of the kitchen drawer where she kept her other cookbooks: “Modern Priscilla,” A Sunset book with drawings of a mother and her helpful daughter who wore a pinafore, a binder called “Kitcheneering”, and a spiral-bound steno-style book from GE that came with her first refrigerator.
I would flip the pages of my grandfather’s book to “Ox Tail Soup.” The end of the recipe read, “Note: A kangaroo tail may be used the same way.” Bring out the digeridoo.
I never met my grandfather. He died before I was born. But I knew, through the pages of his cookbook, that he was intimate with a world where they ate kangaroo and treacle and fed fricasseed brains to sick people. I could only shine my imagination on the strange lands lapped by the Pacific Ocean that lay beyond the Golden Gate of his hometown of San Francisco. But he had actually set foot in these places. With his book he built me a bridge to the land Down Under.
My mother clipped recipe sections from Family Circle Magazine and stuffed them into a small red binder with the title “Kitcheneering, Julia Lee Wright, Director, Homemakers’ Bureau.” The clipping labeled “For the Boys at Camp” was ominous, despite the cheery introduction. The pages came from the issue dated August 8, 1941–months before Pearl Harbor. The Nazis had already marched through Europe. The intro read, “‘He’s in the Army now.’ This little ditty is fast becoming a theme song in many homes all over the country.”
You can hear the bugles as you read the recipes for Dandy Andy Cupcakes and Rookie Cookies. I was attracted most to the “armored edibles”, a drawing of cupcakes and brownies still in their pans. That’s how soft baked goods should be mailed to avoid crushing, the magazine advised. With Depression-tuned thrift, it went on: “We made the rounds of the dime stores for our pans and found them in all shapes from 5 to 15 cents.” Surely, it implied, our boys were worth 15 cents plus postage.
The recipe for frosted brownies looked delicious when I first read it several years after the War, but my mother and I never tried it. She thought any dish calling for more than one egg was too extravagant.
I became interested in cooking at age 10 when a family friend gave me a book of recipes for kids called “Fun with Cooking.” The girl in the photos was about my age. She wore a white pinafore, something I hadn’t worn since age 5. Still, she seemed credible. I make her Golden Stuffed Eggs to this day.
She inspired me to compile my own cookbook–recipes clipped from Better Homes and Gardens Magazine. The names had a certain beat: Hamburger Spins, Jackpot Casserole, Grape-Nut Whip. My favorite dish was the one I never made –Surprise Meatballs. The caption with the attached photo gave the secret away: “In the center of each meatball, a prune and stuffed olive.” I was drawn to recipes for the creativity more than the food.
Mom allowed me to try some of these recipes but I had to cut them in half, reducing the quantity of each ingredient by 50 per cent. Why risk wasting ingredients, she asked, when the dish might not turn out? Some recipes flopped because I wasn’t good at arithmetic. What do you do with 1/3 cup?
When I became a housewife myself, my sister-in-law sent me a booklet called “The Joys of Jell-O.” I was delighted. Jell-O was the fairy godmother of canned fruit. It could turn fruit cocktail into a shimmering jewel that would surely vibrate well to the thrum of a cello. What more could a budding hostess want for her table? Perhaps the Cherry Cheese Charmer or the Ring-Around-the-Fruit.
My favorite was the Upside Down Cake. Press one layer of white cake into a pan lined with slippery sliced canned peaches set in Jell-O dissolved in some of the heavy syrup. When set, flip it out onto a plate and decorate with Dream Whip. The book failed to mention how easily Jell-O dishes can slip into disaster and reduce a bride to tears.
Times and tastes have changed. We’ve learned that red dye is bad and carbs make us fat. We meet friends for dinner at restaurants now. If we do cook for guests, we look to healthy gourmet-type cuisine.
But there are constants in the stories of our lives, such as favorite holiday dishes that survive all fads and admonitions. When I turned to the inside cover of the Easter edition of “Christianity Today”, I saw a full-page display that featured a bunny-shaped dish lined with French fried onion rings and filled with a familiar gray-green mixture. Just by looking I could taste:
2 cans Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup
1 cup
milk
2 tsp. soy sauce
1/4 tsp. ground black pepper
8 cups cooked cut
green beans
2-2/3 cups French’s French Fried Onions.
This classic “String Bean Dish” goes well with the Beatles, the Stones, U-2, or Cold Play and the best chapters of my life.
©2006 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are the property of the author. All rights reserved. This column first posted April 22, 2006.
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