Yesterday after work when I got in to my dad's place (after this week, I definitely wanted to make sure that I was out of town. You can't make me work if you can't fiiind meee...), I went to grab down my mother's recipe box because I wanted to see if I could find her gingerbread recipe. The cake, not the cookie. You know, the stuff you have with hard sauce. Now, I know very well that I could find three hundred (or more) recipes for gingerbread with hard sauce just via cooking's magic pixie -- that'd be Google, these days -- but I just thought that I'd see if I could find the family one before I started looking for ones from other people's families.
Or other people's research kitchens, I suppose.
That's Mom's box on the top left of the slightly-less-pointless-than-usual photo, by the way. It's kind of... how shall I put this... butt-ugly? No, I should be politer. How about
dated in design? At any rate, it's absolutely stuffed with recipe cards, to the point where you couldn't fit another in if you tried. Some are just commercial advertising cards, but the vast majority are either in my mother's excruciatingly neat handwriting or
her mother's excruciatingly neat handwriting.
It must have run in the family, the excruciatingly neat handwriting, but it certainly skipped me. I always said that my mother didn't really know what to do about a left-handed child.
Anyway.
When I went to reach for the box I was somewhat surprised to find a stack of cards on top that showed no indication of the maternal line. Turns out that they were recipe cards from my
paternal grandmother that my uncle had kept at his place.
Hmm.
I'd never really seen any of my grandmother's recipes. Oh, I'd had her cooking, of course, but for whatever reason -- very possibly Grandma Ol's tiny, tiny kitchen was high on the reason list -- all of the teaching side of grandmotherly cooking when I was growing up came from the maternal side of things. When I showed interest in these newly (to me) discovered cards, Dad mentioned that there were also some small recipe books.
Guess what I did last night?
Let's just say that I haven't quite made it to Mom's box yet.
Looking through Grandma's cards was interesting (there were an awful lot of wine-making recipes there, Grandma...) but almost more interesting was the stack of recipe pamphlets. You know the sort of thing: some advertising geniuses decide that the way to create demand for their product is to prove that it can be used for anything. Some products work better than others, obviously. The good people of the 1960s Kellogg's book did all right, because cereal's pretty easy to use in baking. The earlier Atora Beef Suet book from England was a bit disturbing. Apparently the better way to health is to put a spoonful of beef suet in your hot milk at night? And it cures consumption? Who knew? The Reynolds Wrap guide to barbeque cooking was kind of hilarious (for a handy cooler for your party drinks, line a wheelbarrow with Reynolds Wrap and fill with ice. Yeah, you'd like that kind of overusage, wouldn't you, Reynolds?), and the book in the front introducing the brand new product of
shell-less sunflower seeds is pretty close to already becoming a family joke between my father and me. Basically, you take any recipe you can think of and ADD SUNFLOWER SEEDS!!!
There were a couple of actual historically interesting pamphlets in the stack, though. The one you see labelled
Milk in the photo didn't have a date on it that I could easily find, but it had to have been fairly early since it described storing milk by putting it in a scalded jug, covering the jug "tightly" with a plate, and then storing the jug on a shelf inside a basin filled with cool water. You have to make sure that you replenish the water regularly, of course. Another pamphlet, this time from the Alberta Government, told housewives how to use the new method of freezing to preserve foods. And don't think that you were just sticking things in your refrigerator freezer (or "zero unit"), folks. You were preparing things in large quantities -- including making syrups and brines -- to take to commercial cold storage lockers. In waxed cardboard or tins. Some cold storage lockers may even offer the new plastic containers, ladies, which are more expensive but can be reused.
Every town used to have its own cold storage business, you see. The town I grew up in had one. The building's now just a regular store, but my father can remember when you used to go down there to pick up the meat or produce you had put away earlier in the year. According to the pamphlet I was reading, you paid about $12 a year for a locker able to store about 180 lbs or so.
Life's changed a bit, wouldn't you say?
I get a kick out of reading old recipes and could probably natter on about changing ingredients and changing tastes, but my wrist -- oh, I don't think I told you about my wrist. Tomorrow, maybe -- is telling me that I've been typing long enough for now. Besides, after a week of not having time to post, and a week before that of Oh, Never Mind (yes, that's last week's official title), the blog's probably going into shock at the thought of having to carry all of these words.
Thought I'd leave you with the recipe that I took today's post title from, however. Drawing by Yours Garlicky, a few years ago. It's from an old herbal. Try it if you want to, but I think that maybe I'll pass this time. Having earworms is bad enough...
