Two Treasures

I'm thankful for two treasures I was able to keep - Mom's recipe box, and her Betty Crocker cookbook which she bought in April of 1951. I love seeing "food ways" from that time! It seems to be centered around home and family, and making food pleasing to look at as well as good to eat.

I'm still figuring out this blog-posting thing, and I think the pictures might be posted from the bottom up! Anyway, the pictures above show Mom's recipe box and the cookbook. The one recipe sticking out of the box is for "Mahogany Cake" that she and her mom (my grandma) got from a lady out in western Kansas during the "Dirty '30's." Mom said they would make this cake twice a day for meals during harvest time, and that was Mom's job to make the cake. They also had fried chicken and potato salad to go with it - that was their standard harvest meal at the time. I've made this cake, and it's good.

In the photo with the cookbook open, you can see by the spatters on the page that Mom made this particular cake often. (I guess we had a thing for chocolate cake! I still do.) That was a "standby" while I was growing up. Saturday morning usually found Mom and I in the kitchen making something like this, or maybe pie (including pastry trimmings with butter and sugar and cinnamon, then baked), or cookies. I like to sift stuff into bowls, but back then, we would get some clean newspaper, lay it on the counter, and sift the dry ingredients into a big pile on that newspaper. I can still picture that! Then we'd spoon it in from that, pouring out the last of it from off of the paper. Another thing I remember is, that instead of a cooling rack for cookies, we'd put a white tea towel on the table, sprinkle it with sugar, and put the cookies on that. I also remember that distinct smell when a pie spilled over and burned on the bottom of the oven!

Another photo shows a handwritten page Mom had tucked into the cookbook for safekeeping. My brother wrote a report on "Bread" while in grade school, and she kept it all those years. (He got an A-minus!)

There are lots of sections in that cookbook, and I think each section has a color layout of foods from that section. I always drooled over them! The two above show pies and main dishes. There's just a certain way about how they're set up and fixed that's different than what you see nowadays.

One thing that made me laugh as I went through the recipe box was all the recipes there were for jello salads and date puddings! But it was also great fun and sweetly nostalgic to see the recipes and who they were from --- Mom's friends, co-workers and sisters-in-law. That, I think, is even more precious than the actual food. Food is good, but it's the people involved, and the memories, that make it all extra-sweet!