My Mother’s Recipe Box
The recipe box my mother kept her recipe collection smelled like lard and the bulk of the recipes were for cakes and cookies. She frequently corralled school-age kids to copy over recipes for her. The recipes were from everywhere; CBC Radio, her daughters-in-law, her friends and neighbours; clipped out of the Western Producer and the district home economist’s newsletter. She even had a recipe for Scotch Tablet obtained from a 4-H exchange visitor who could kill, clean and pluck a chicken in record time as well as make candy.
Baking was not part of my mother’s family tradition; she grew up in a distinctly non-cooking family. Her father had been raised in military barracks where bread was baked in a communal oven and the Sunday roast was bought from the military kitchen. Her mother had lived a well-to-do life with a live-in cook until the age of ten, when death and poverty caused the family to split up and she was sent to boarding school.
My mother never baked anything until she married a farmer in the Dirty Thirties, and then she had no choice; bake it or do without. She baked bread, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, biscuits, and pies. Her husband’s family were noted cooks; Grandma Milligan could look at a roomful of people and exactly estimate the amount of flour, milk and fat to make enough biscuits to feed everyone.
One famous Christmas my mother decided to make cookies from around the world and tried every recipe from the Alberta Gas Cookbook. I remember only one, pepper nuts, which we were horrified to find, had real pepper in them and were as hard as stones.
We preferred the following recipe from the recipe box.
One-Bowl Chocolate Cake
One-Bowl Chocolate Cake
1 ½ c. flour
1 tsp. soda
½ tsp. salt
1 c. sugar
½ c. lard
½ c. cocoa
½ c. milk
1 egg
½ c. boiling water.
Put in bowl and beat for 3 minutes.
Cook at 350 for about 25 minutes.
The ingredients reflect the times of the recipe. Lard was considered essential in this recipe; saturated fats were not an issue in the 1950s and voluntary vegetarians and veganism unheard of. It wasn’t necessary to indicate the pan size (but my mother always made it in a rectangular pan) nor was an icing recipe needed. The test for doneness – to stick a toothpick in – did not have to be specified for an experienced cook. One-bowl chocolate cake is famous in my family. It predates the cake mix, and could explain why cake mixes were seldom made. Who would need one, when the one-bowl cake took three minutes?
My mother made this cake at least once a week. The time I remember best was when she baked and iced the cake and left it on the counter for the minister’s visit. When she went to cut the cake, she discovered a series of little bird tracks; my pet budgie had checked out the cake thoroughly (but not left any droppings, that was lucky). I can’t remember if she served the cake anyway, but she told the story a lot of times.
Oliebollen (van Jill)
8 c. + flour
2 c. lukewarm water
4 tsp. sugar
4 tsp. salt
½ c. shortening
2 eggs
1 pk. yeast in very warm water – rise 10 min.
2 c. + milk
2 c. raising or peel or currants
2 c. chopped apple
Make a stiff batter, add fruit – rise about an hour.
Cook in hot fat dropped from 2 spoons (to shape).
There are many stories in this recipe. For one thing, it reflects my mother’s openness to culture. I married a Dutchman and our first New Year’s together, he wanted to have oliebollen, but he did not know how to make them. My mother figured out that oliebollen were a type of deep-fried fritters and created a recipe for him. It created a bond between them that lasted for forty years, until she died. I think my mother probably got this recipe a few years after her initial effort, when she visited my brother and his family who spent a year in Holland. My mother used the Dutch, “van Jill” as opposed to the English “from Jill” to indicate that her granddaughter had given her the recipe.
The value of a recipe box should never be underestimated. Experiencing the past through food is a wonderful thing.
