Tucked away on a shelf in the back of a closet — and next to the cast iron corn muffin pan — I found this little pamphlet, dated 1952. According to the Forward:
The recipes in the following pages are offered to you as gems out of colonial days when my grandmother, Mrs. Rebecca White, settled as a young girl in the Mid-West in 1864. These recipes have been used in her family and mine ever since.
Some of these dishes I remember from a very long time ago, but they’re hard to find anymore. And there are a lot of them — 30 pages with an average of 5 recipes per page.
Here’s a sampling:
Lettuce – Coon Valley Style
Take a nice head of tender lettuce and pull it apart and wash. Cut a slice of ham into small squares; put them in a pan and fry a nice brown; dip the ham out and put in a tablespoon vinegar, beat an egg light, add to it 1 teaspoon sugar and one-third cup sour cream. Mix all together and add to the vinegar; when hot pour over the lettuce and ham, having them in a dish together, first the lettuce and then the ham on top.
Even better:
Irish Potato Pie
2 good sized potatoes
1 pint sweet milk
2 tablespoons butter
3 eggs
1/2 glass good brandy
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup sugarGrate the potato; add butter and sugar beaten well together; then the milk and yolks of the eggs and the white of one; reserve the other two whites for frosting; add brandy and nutmeg just before putting in the oven; bake with an undercrust in a quick oven; ice with one small cup of sugar and the whites of two eggs and flavor with lemon. Spread on top and set in oven until a nice brown.
4 Comments
Kind of like Nannybelle, or Jane Watson Hopping, in the Pioneer Hopping in her pioneer women’s cookbooks.
I love these old cookbooks, and use them on a daily basis, just because they are the real voices of American cooking, and they know what the hell they speak of.
Thanks, biscuit. I just got down some of my old cookbooks to read.
pb
My mom and dad used to collect the ladies societies and similar cookbooks, and I have a bunch of them somewhere packed away. They can be real gems.
The author of these recipes seems to assume a certain degree of culinary expertise in her headers – an undercrust in a “quick” oven, assuming (I think) that the extra egg whites are to be beaten into a meringue before baking.
But, then – baking in a wood-burning oven, or an unpredictable gas-fired oven and have anything turn out well implies a huge amount of culinary expertise..
I love to read old cookbooks.
A “quick” oven means a hot one, about 450° F. An undercrust would just be a bottom pie crust, possibly pre-baked. I think you are right about the meringue topping.
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