S EVEN INHERITED RECIPE BOXES make up my collection. I’ve had them with me now for so many years that I can remember at least four different places they’ve resided in my office, each for long periods of time. Amulets, icons–call them what you may–I always work with them in view; they are that important. And then recently, I discovered that they contain the code to life itself.
These boxes are part of my story, as much a part of my lineage as the looks that I inherited. That’s because these boxes contain the story of the women in my life, and link my husband’s and my ancestral nourishment from South Dakota to Indiana, back to England, Scotland and Germany. In that they reveal who we are, I guess.
My mother-in-law was Lillian Hart Smith, of the Hart Family Round Robin Newsletter, which I wrote about recently. Her recipe box may be my favorite, though it has two clones that astonish me. The first was made for her daughter Janet, who died in her early twenties, which is why the box came back to Lillian, and then got passed along to me. The second is a derivative of Lillian’s, made for my husband when he went off to college. That she thought he would cook just hushes me with its charm. The three boxes viewed together are a treasure beyond rubies, in part for the recipes, which I’ll feature here in the coming weeks, and in part because they reveal what was cooked when, who sent what recipe to whom, and in part because some of the recipes are just too damn funny to be believed.
In fact, whenever my husband gets sad, I simply read to him at random from one of his mother’s file boxes, and always, he smiles.
Consider if you will, Lillian’s Spam Chop Suey. For that is all I want you to do with it. No one–and I say this with the most dire of warnings–should eat this. Its four basic ingredients are Spam, fat, rice and a can of cream of mushroom soup and after reading it, I made a little survey, and was amazed to find that many (most?) of the recipes in her box, in fact, includes some combination of these four.
I began to push those four ingredients around the plate that is my crazy imagination, searching for alternate uses for them, and decided that they made yet another handy way to explain genetics. As readers of TSP know, I love to dabble in alternate ways to explain who we are.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s say that the genome is my mother-in-law’s recipe file box. If there are 23 little colored tabs sticking up within it–beef, poultry, cheese, casseroles, hors d’oevres, etc.–they are the 23 chromosomes in the human body. Within each of these are genes, or, in this case, the recipes, including, of course, the Chop Suey with its four basic ingredients.
The human genome equivalent of these ingredients are adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, written in genetic transcription as A, C, G and T, and just like Lillian’s four staple ingredients, these four are always present in every gene.
The old-fashioned world of the recipe box–index cards neatly in place, always on the ready–works well when considering how I email them, particularly to my dear friend Elizabeth, creator of Learning to Bake. Both of us inherited an uneasy sense of dinnertime being catch-as-catch-can, where children retrieve olives from warming cocktail glasses and call it vegetables. We both hoped to not pass this on to our daughters.
Back and forth between us travel a fluent battery of recipes that get saved. Ready to go with the touch of a file attachment button, these recipes are simply cloned.
By contrast, like many of those recipes in ladies’ auxiliary collections, my mother-in-law’s recipes are written by hand, copied over and over for her children and friends and therefore prone to typos and changes, but always with the same basic ingredients. This process is pretty much what goes on in replication, where the gene is copied and passed along. In the box she made for her youngest child, my husband, she adapted the Chop Suey recipe to a serving for one; in her large-box version it has what it takes to make it for 20.
When we married, my husband brought his mother’s recipe boxes into our home and I brought mine. For holidays, we undergo what genetics calls recombination, when we unite our two family’s inherited holiday recipes and lay it out in the form of a single feast before our unsuspecting child, who will grow up thinking that this is the food–including the Spam Chop Suey–of her ancestors.
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In 1983, when I got my first apartment off campus with three of my friends, my mother meticulously re-typed recipes for what she thought would be easy meals for college girls – like beef stew and lots of things with chop meat. Hers were collected from years of McCalls Magazines in the 60′s & 70′s – years when McCalls had the best recipes!
Hi, Elissa: And so your mother was teaching you genetics in her own, maternal way, passing along the story of who you are. Since we are what we eat, it makes sense, yes?
I have two similar “boxes”…one in the form of a book that my Aunt gave me when I graduated from college. She wrote out some of the “staples” for me, along with Grandma’s apple pie, Aunt Pat’s coconut candy, etc… I’ve added things intermittently since, and I love that book.
The other came in the form of 3×5 cards. As a group gift at one of my bridal showers, my bridesmaids asked everyone to bring a couple of recipes to put in a basket for me. What I love about them is twofold. One, they are “real food” – things my friends and family actually serve their friends and family. (Though I LOVE cookbooks, sometimes I read things in a cookbook and think “who actually eats that?!?” I never think that in my basket). Second, they are written out in people’s handwriting. I’m struck by how seldom it is we see each other’s handwriting any more, and there’s something about that detail that makes these recipes even more precious to me. I can tell who a card is from from writing on the envelope…will my children ever be able to do that? They, instead, will identify with people’s ringtones or something, right?
Thanks for the post…as usual, great fun to read!!
Oh, Jean L., this is wonderful. Two collections! Hurrah for your Aunt Pat, and huzzahs to those fabulous wedding shower women. I have never heard of that shower tradition think it is perfect-perfect; in their own handwriting! Oh my. We are taking this ladies’ auxiliary cooking seriously here at TSP, and would love it if you’d send in one of those recipes either from your Aunt or from the shower women-sisters. Hope you saw this story about my husband’s mother and her sisters and how they kept a letter going for more than 50 years stuffed with recipes and news. http://thesisterproject.com/roach/the-recipes-go-round-and-round/ Enjoy! And do consider telling us if you are a burger or a burrito. http://thesisterproject.com/roach/my-burger-or-burrito-genetics/
Marion, I concur with your theory and applaud your application of the scientific method. That Cream of Mushroom soup is one of the most elemental building blocks not only of all prepared food but of the big recipe of who we are must be true. While I’ve never read the ingredients in a can of Cream of Mushroom soup, I suspect if you did it would read something like: “Cream of Mushroom, salt”. Since “cream of mushroom” can’t be broken into smaller bits, it must – by default – be a building block. And as you say, you are what you eat. Hence, we all are some part Cream of Mushroom (and salt).
I’d like to further suggest that the extent to which you are Cream of Mushroom or any other food can be simply determined by an analysis of your recipe collection. Just as a study of your family tree can tell you the mixture of ethnicities that combine to give you your particular flavor, a study of your recipe cards can reveal what ratio of what edible building block you are.
My guess is that I am approximately 80% pie and 20% brine. This deduction is due to the fact that most recipes in my collections are inherited from my Meme, Anna Mae LeFevre. She was an apron-wearing, wood-stove-using, save-your-bacon-fat-on-the-back-of-the-stove, master chef specializing in the art of pie making and pickling anything that came out of the ground. Her recipes are scrawled on 3×5 cards and list ingredients but no quantities or means of measurement. We suspect this is because she used the same chipped coffee cup to measure everything – flour, spices, liquids, etc. I’m quite sure she used the various age spots in the ceramics as a means of measurement. But I’m not sure. I saw her make an apple pie hundreds of times. While I know the exact ingredients, I’m not sure of the exact measurements. Without that cup, the best I can do is “clone” what I saw.
But a clone is just that – a replica of the original real thing. Discovering the building blocks is one thing. Knowing how they are mixed together to create the desired product is a whole other mystery. But, based on the premise that we are what we eat, it’s a mystery worth solving. Because it’s the key to who we are.
Thanks for another fun thought experiment!
Dear Missy: The phrase, “Great minds think alike,” was surely a recipe of words cooked up by the women, for the women, of the women from whom so much was dished out with a cracked coffee cup. Anna Mae LeFevre deserves her place here, in your heart, as well as in the hearts of us all as we daily reach for what we use to measure out in handsful the food we give to those we love. This is a story whose worth is beyond even Kate’s Homemade Butter. http://learningtobake.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/kates-homemade-butter/ Thank you.
Tucked into a photocopy of my great grandmother’s 1897 “Housekeeping Book,” (which includes goodies such as Pork Cake and Corn Starch Cake!) is a copy of my grandmother’s ice-cream stand adventure. She and two friends (sisters three!) had an ice cream stand in 1912. They called it Nichols, Parker, Nichols and Co. The beautifully hand-written page lists the ingredients for the ice cream — milk 3 qt @ 8 cents; root beer, 2 bot @ 15 cents, ice, salt, junket, and more. From their $25.35 taken in they deducted $8.40 in expenses and divided a grand profit of $16.95 . My grandmother was a wonderful cook and sharp business woman. Her “Sister Project,” gave her a great start.
Hi, Joanna: Oh, what a gift, indeed, to find such a treasure tucked in an heirloom cookbook. And we’re begging you now: That Pork Cake recipe. We’d love to have you share it with the sisters here at TSP. Sounds like my kind of thing, indeed. Thanks so much. Come back, recipe cards in hand, please.
Glad to share the 1897 Pork Cake recipe:
Chop fine 1 lb of salt pork
1 pint of boiling water on pork
1 pint of molasses
1 lb sugar
1 teaspoonful of cinnamon, clove, allspice, nutmeg
4 eggs
1 lb of raisins, citron, currants and flour enough to make as stiff as fruit cake.
Baking powder.
No hints as to size or baking temp or time. They just knew those things.
This sounds glorious:
Apple snow
Beat the whites of 3 eggs to a stiff froth then add slowly 5 or 6 tablespoons full of stewed apple, and float on custard or whipped cream.
And from the “Facts” section:
Tomatoes: clears complexion. Juice taken internally acts on liver and cleans eyeballs. [To heck with the Visine after a long night]
A treasure, indeed.
Well, that is simply gorgeous, though there is an argument to be made that a pint of molasses could change a person’s mind on canabalism. But don’t quote me. I just happen to think that molasses is among the better inventions to come from human hands.
Now, apple snow sounds like it came from the gods themselves, as does my new favorite use for tomatoes.
Thank you, sister Joanna.
Marion, the way your mind works is delicious. So many moving parts! I’m particularly fond of this system – applying recipe-box logic to the chain that binds it all.
I don’t have a recipe box, but I do have several sets of Mom’s full-color recipe cards, the subscription kind, rumaki and swiss fondue, copper pots and firelight. Each one has her penciled annotations; adjustments, question marks, crossouts and do-overs, and I pore over them as before-and-after code, what the young wife expected and what she got. With that view it’s a collection of expectations, and a very good read. Thanks for such a lovely post.
Dear Marilyn, the phrase “what the young wife expected and what she got,” is one of the more provocative phrases I’ve ever read. Who of us who has not witnessed that, either in a friend, a relative–or, of course–ourselves? Lovely. A lozenge worth walking around with as writers, letting it melt under our tongues, to witness what we taste. So very good. I commend you. What a great place to start a memoir. http://thesisterproject.com/roach/category/by-marion/on-writing-memoir/ Thank you. Please come back. We’ll be hoping to read you again soon.