Mom’s Recipes Stirred Up Some Fine Dining

If cookbooks and recipe cards marked with stains and notes are indicators of a good cook, my mother Bea must have been one of the best.

Cooking and baking was a large part of what defined her. She didn’t have the most cookbooks. I know she had a version of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. Doesn’t everyone in these parts? She also had a number of those space-saving, half-size spiral-bound church fundraiser cookbooks. They were perfect for cooking large quantities of something you could make in an hour or less and bring to a potluck event at, say, a church. They notably did not include recipes for things like lobster or steak tartare. 

I don’t know where her cookbooks ended up but I inherited her individual recipes stored in a wooden index card drawer loaded with at least 200 recipes. Most were handwritten on index cards or just notepad paper. Some index cards were typed, I’m sure by her. There are even some crumpled newspaper recipes in there.

Now, I generally don’t cook. I can heat a pizza and make Sturdiwheat pancakes. But mostly I just eat whatever Catherine makes. She must have figured those recipes would be worth keeping in case I asked for something Mom used to make.

Mom’s cards were organized by type. The good stuff like baked goods, frostings, fillings, desserts and puddings were toward the front. Making them got more compliments than meat and potatoes so those few recipes were in the back. Besides, she was already an expert at the basics. Do you really need a recipe for fish sticks? She did have a recipe for Ann Landers’ World Famous Meatloaf which must be really good because it’s in there twice.

Some recipes had notes about the quantities. She often had to feed as many as seven in one family sitting and more when we had company. She also had scribbles about which ingredients to cut or increase. These were possibly warnings and indications of previous failures, such as “boil slowly!”

Many of the recipes included the name of the person she got it from. She could then give credit to that person if someone complimented her on it. It also was a reminder of who to contact, if they were still around, for advice if the end product was unsatisfactory.

Examples include Marilyn’s Lefse, Ruby’s Feather Rolls and Crazy Cake, Pearl’s Raspberry Dessert, Olga’s Delicious Dessert, Harriet’s Broken Glass Pie and Alberta’s Cherry-Berries On A Cloud. Some of the names are better than the end product. Mock Chow Mein anyone?

Some of the recipes sound really good but I’m not sure she ever made them. Or maybe she did and didn’t tell us. I know there were some things she just never had much luck with such as lefse. That might have been more about the look than taste. We ate it but she preferred buying perfect lefse at the church Christmas bazaar, prepared by a congregant expert. She eventually was able to make edible lutefisk. I helped by melting the butter.

There’s a “radio recipe” for “salad to go with fondue.” I bet that was from Joyce Lamont on WCCO. I’m not sure we ever had that salad but we ate fondue a lot. Talk about a long dinner. It was fun for the first 10 minutes but it took an hour to get full. Luckily, fondue was a short-lived fad. I’ve seen brand new sets at garage sales.

The salad recipe section is dedicated to mostly cole slaw and fruit salads. Examples include Cucumber Jello Salad, Purple Lady Salad, Ladonna’s Overnite Salad and Circus Peanut Salad. Uffda. If we ever had what I think of as a salad – lettuce with croutons and dressing – the dressing used was always Henri’s. As a kid I didn’t know any other kind existed.

There’s a recipe called Forgotten Meringue Dessert that has you preheat the oven to 400, then shut it off and insert the meringue to rise overnight. She includes a note: “DO NOT PEEK.” I wonder why. I don’t think she made this more than once. The recipe card is too clean.

She didn’t make recipes that called for liquor. The recipe called Bourbon or Rum Balls suggests that you can use orange juice instead of the 1/2 cup of liquor. Another one for Rum Cake calls for a grand total of two tablespoons of rum.

Many of her recipes were designed to be both tasty and cheap to make so it’s not surprising that there’s a recipe for catsup. There’s also one called Pizza Burgers which are made with Spam and ring baloney. Yum.

Mom made a Chef Boyardee pizza from a kit once. It was devoid of anything resembling a good pizza but what did we know? She never made it again. For her tastes (and Dad’s) it was way too risky to make anything spicy. Zesty was not in her vocabulary. Goulash was as spicy as it got with her and that was from a church cookbook. Corn added color.

There are internet services now that help you create your own book of favorite recipes, highlighting the creations with photos. Yeah, that would be a nice tribute to Mom but it sounds like a lot of work.

I think I’ll just see if Catherine will make me some of Ida’s Cream Waffles.