Family Recipes

My thanks to my sister Pat for suggesting this fun blog while I was searching for Mother's Date Loaf recipe. Yes, the one I turned into Fuzzy Date Lump.
 
Every family has them - recipes handed down from your mother, or perhaps her mother. If you are my age, you grew up eating your momma's cooking. We didn't have much choice back then -  in my home town when I was growing up there were a couple of hamburger stands, George's Cafe downtown and a coffee shop or two. That's it. But primarily it was the culture of the times. Families ate meals that moms prepared, using recipes that were tried and true. The kind of recipes that instigate phone calls that go, "Momma B? Merryanna is sick and she is really craving your potato soup. Can I get that recipe?"

Sometimes you ate other mothers cooking too. Church-wide dinners were common, and we have a family recipe labeled "Chicken Crunch for 20" and one for "Funeral Casserole" that begins "3 million potatoes, peeled and sliced." Really. A well-kept family secret is that for years my mother's Chicken Casserole, served at many a church function, contained no chicken. We raised rabbits, you see. I don't know who was first brave enough to bring KFC to a church dinner, but it didn't happen when I was growing up.

Sometimes the church ladies published a cookbook, and those books are guides to straight-forward, no-nonsense home cooking. You won't find arugula and portobello mushrooms in these dishes: "Fayla Brown's Meatloaf," "Mary Donohue's 5 Cup Fruit Salad" and "Cora Anderson's Bean and Cornbread Casserole." These books tend to be heavy in the pie and cake sections; in one of them is my Grandmother Anderson's Angel Food Cake recipe - with instructions on tending the wood-burning oven she baked it in!

Often, there's a comment or two in addition to the ingredients. Here's my mother's recipe for what we call her "White Ball" candy. She starts out with a message to the recipient: "Say, I got the recipe for the candy you tasted. Here it is."

And after the list of ingredients she instructed "Mix with hands (This makes a terrible amount. I made half  & that was lots)." Then some instructions about the paraffin "Paraffin comes 4 blocks to pkg. Use one." And she finishes with "Yum, Yum."

As my mother's abilities declined, my father took over the cooking duties. Here's his recipe for Taco Soup.

Jason doesn't remember, stressed as he was, but it was a batch of Pop's Taco soup that we enjoyed the evening we met our son-in-law-to-be for the first time, out at the lake.

I myself have prepared several batches of "Copper Carrots" - far and away the favorite of both our children - and Mom's "What's Quacking" shoe-peg salad for company pot-luck meals (much to the surprise of my co-workers).

And sometimes the recipes become heirlooms. Julie has framed two of my mother's recipes; one a very delicious and very famous (at least in our family) Apple Pie recipe, and this is the Fresh Apple Cake recipe. Equally delicious and now a treasure on her grand-daughter's wall.