The Recipes Go Round and Round

RECIPES ARE POWERFUL STORYTELLERS. Never was this point driven home to me like when I first encountered the Hart Family Round Robin Newsletter, a tradition of my mother-in-law’s and her seven siblings, all children of the Depression, and prolific recipe-swappers (always on their homemade stationery, of course, above).

At its simplest, the power of recipes to tell a tale can be seen in a family cookbook whose pages are literally spattered with memories. But recipes also reflect a wider story, and can relate a time in an entire nation. For instance, it’s no surprise to find that cookbooks published during Prohibition eschew alcohol, and that those printed during the two world wars are stringent in how they ration delicacies.

So it is with “charity cookbooks,” or those lovely collections printed by the ladies auxiliaries we’re featuring here at TSP. For those published before women had the right to vote, many of these projects served to galvanize women while also slyly developing their business skills.

It’s a wonderful thought, isn’t it, that food can bind together people in a common, powerful purpose? I love it, even as I realize that these purposes can range in value from the global, such as the right to vote, to the most tender, as when sisters try to stay in touch while helping one another live within their budgets.

This was the case with my mother-in-law and her seven siblings, all preacher’s kids from the dusty Midwest, who never took a nickel for granted. These were people who would rarely call long distance, and so when they married and spread out, kept in touch with a family mailing that always included recipes.

The Hart Family Round Robin Newsletter was actually a package of letters that traveled every month from Edith Smiley Hart to each of her children, of which she had one every other year for 16 years, with her husband, the Rev. Seth Isaac (“S.I.”) Hart, before he left her for another women in the congregation. But that’s another story.

In order, those children were: Lorene, Iona, Lillian, Elizabeth, Luella, Dan, Ray and Adina. My mother-in-law was Lillian, who became a preacher’s wife and learned not only to make do, but to pass along her tips on how to do so, removing her letter each month from the packet, and slipping in a new one, recipes included, and sending it off to the next sibling in line.

In his early life, my husband witnessed this letter each month as it arrived at their home; was read to from it as a child; he ate what was made from its recipes; he laughed and cried at the news it brought, and learned to quietly watch the concern roll across his mother’s forehead when the news that was not for his ears was silently digested at the table.

When Lillian died in 1989, the circle wrote to him, and asked him in. Soon, we took delivery on a box of colored stationery, the pages printed with the logo of the heart and the robin. I remember that he held the box to his heart as he headed off to type.

My husband took his duties seriously, each month removing his letter from the thick package when it arrived and swapping a newsy typed update and swiftly mailing it off. He would read to me from the letters as he had been read to, and sometimes I’d cadge a recipe or two from the sisters before he sent it back out. Within a few years the regimented six weeks between deliveries became eight and then 10, as the news first of illness arrived in the packet, and then of deaths. The letter lived for more than 50 years, making its way around America, until recently there was little more than heartbreak in its pages. In the last six months we lost Elizabeth, then Adina and then, just recently, Luella.

Because of that letter I know that in 1964, the deep fried fish dinner at the Daisy Dell in Rapid City, South Dakota was $5.95. And, since it was the big-ticket item on the menu, my mother-in-law set out to replicate it at home for her family. Someone named Don W supplied her with the recipe, scribbled on the back of a delivery of perch fillets, in which he reveals (if only to me) the secret ingredient.

“Mix a very thick batter of pancake flour,” wrote Don, “and 7-Up. Rinse and dry the fillets, dip in batter and fry in deep fat until a medium brown color. Delicious.”

If you make it, please be sure to pass it on.

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