Not long after Christmas, I cleaned out a few cabinets. It was what I optimistically thought was the beginning of a winter project that would lead to a fresh start for the new year and a better organized house. The project, like most of these projects, stalled about the middle of the second week. One of the leftover parts were piles of stuff on the dining room table.
So, this morning, I sat down to tackle some of the mess. The stack I chose was from one of Mama’s kitchen cabinets and consisted of torn out recipes, written out recipes, instructions for long defunct appliances and some very old recipes from several generations of cooks. Of course, I spent most of the rest of the day perusing the oldest recipes. I discovered how to make whitewash, using a complicated process with ground rice, a peck of salt, unslacked lime, lots of boiling water and a sieve. I think that is supposed to be unslaked lime, but I don’t know what that is either. I read directions for washing clothes that involved boiling the clothes and adding “a little kerosene” to the boiling water. Did people really do that? And how much is a little?
To my delight, I found several recipes for making mincemeat. I think about mincemeat every Thanksgiving and wish for a good mincemeat pie. A look at the recipe convinced me that I won’t be making any and if I tried, I would have to lie down in a dark room for the rest of the week. One recipe was made with pears and, oddly enough, another was made with the surplus of green tomatoes that you have in your garden at the end of summer. I think I found the chow-chow recipe that Gertrude Dansby used to make every summer, when we had a bounty of green tomatoes, peppers and cabbage. I discovered how to make blackberry cordial, and Mrs. Flowers tea cakes. Mrs. Flowers lived across the holler from us when I was growing up and I might have to try that recipe because I remember her tea cakes. The main difference from other tea cake recipes I’ve seen is that it only uses the yellows of the eggs instead of the whole thing. Many of the recipes called for sweet milk, which is a term you don’t hear anymore. I think it was a southern term, because a friend of mine once asked for sweet milk at a restaurant up north and the waitress told him they didn’t have any such thing.
I found a recipe for a sandwich made with pineapple and chicken, which breaks one of the commandments in my life – the commandment that says thou shalt not mix fruit with meat. I think it’s in the Bible somewhere, probably in Leviticus. If it’s not, it should be. The only exception is grapes in chicken salad, which are allowed. Aside from the pineapple on the sandwich, the instructions say to mix pineapple juice and a dash of nutmeg and pour it over the sandwich. That sounds even worse. Speaking of dashes, I was a little curious about some of those measurements. A dash, I had heard of, but one recipe called for a speck of salt. If it’s just a speck, why even bother? I found a recipe cut from a newspaper for stuffing that involved white bread. It did not surprise me to see that the author of the recipe was from Michigan, but it did surprise me that anyone in my family would have saved it. People in the north don’t know anything about making dressing and they apparently don’t know that it’s a dish made in a big glass pan, not stuffed in a bird. I also found instructions for trussing a bird, which I had heard of but didn’t realize that it meant to sew a chicken up to roast it. My only question is “why?”
I found a handwritten recipe for carrot sandwiches, made with cooked carrots, raisins or prunes and nuts. I found it in a ragged little notebook that I’m pretty sure was from my great-grandmother Colley’s recipes.
There was a recipe for rusk, whatever that is, and Nesselrode Pudding. It also included something called marguerites, made with orange juice and marshmallows, and several kinds of fancy teas. One is Bulgarian tea, which has a mixture of cherries, pineapple and lemons, added to tea with sugar. One of the stories my great aunts told was about drinking Russian tea as children. They considered it an exotic treat at the time but realized later that it actually was just tea with fruit juice added.
Some of the recipes I found were written in my own handwriting, briefly jotted down with so many abbreviations I had to work to decipher them. The thing they all had in common is that there was no name for the finished product. I might try to make them, but I have no idea what I would be making. Might be a cake, might be a cookie, and it only lists the ingredients so I wouldn’t know how to cook it. I found one long list of ingredients that called for medons. It took me a few minutes to figure out that it was supposed to be medium onions. I don’t know why they had to be medium onions, or at what point small onions become medium onions or medium onions become large onions. It also called for a half cup of salt, and I’m pretty sure this was a recipe I tried once for refrigerator pickles which might have been really good if they hadn’t been way too salty. Another mystery recipe called for bak po, which I assume is baking powder, and it took a while to remember that 2 cu mi translates to 2 cups of milk. Another one, in handwriting I did not recognize, was something that used 7/8 cups of sugar, butter, cream cheese and powdered sugar. I’ve never seen anything ask for 7/8 cups of anything and I have no idea what the result of this recipe would be or what you would do with it after you got it mixed up.
In reading over this, I think it explains why I never get anything done at my house. It certainly explains why my dining room table is still covered with stacks of stuff and I have to eat my meals somewhere else. What is harder to explain is why I, a mostly reluctant cook, just spent the better part of a day looking at recipes I will probably never try to make. Except maybe the tea cakes.
