Dar's Recipe Box

I called my Grandmother Dar and soon her whole world followed even friends from her school days.

She was a good, old-fashioned cook with a treasure trove of recipes gleaned from friends, family, publications and her own imagination.

Dar died in her late 80s, 56 years ago. I have her recipe box chock full of culinary wisdom, most of it in her own handwriting. I doubt that she ever dreamed it would be handed down through the decades and would travel the world.

I was looking through it the other day to figure out what to take to a Canadian supper. (Swiss for pot luck) It will be part of a house concert (violin and piano). The hostess assigned types of food by alphabet group. I could go with A for Adams or N for Nelson. I'll do the N category, a main dish.

Maybe I'll make Dar's Scalloped Corn. I should do a dry run to make sure I've got it right. 

 Scalloped Corn

• 1 pound of creamed canned corn.
• 1 box Uneda* crackers.
• 1/4 pound butter.
• Real pepper. 
• Put rolled crackers not too fine in a bowl. Add enough milk until like a cream roll and add 1/2 butter and mix.
• Put butter on bottom of casserole.
• Add mixture and dot with pieces of butter.  
• Let stand till all milk absorbed.
• Bake one hour at 350°F (190°C).   
• Center will rise.  
• To check if done put knife in middle and it should come out clean. 
• Don't forget the pepper. 

                                            

* Not made since 2009. Will try Ritz as a substitute which I can get here or maybe another. I remember what Uneeda biscuits taste like.

Lucille's Oatmeal Bread - one loaf

• 1 cup reg. Quaker Oats
• 1 teaspoon shortening
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1 teaspoon salt
• One yeast cake.

• Scald oatmeal with two cups boiling water.
• Add shortening, salt and yeast cake dissolved in luke warm water and mix well.
• Add four cups of flour more or less bit by bit until dough is stiff.

• Knead on floured cloth making a smooth ball.
• But in well-greased bowl in a warm place until twice the size.
• Punch down. 
• Fill a loaf pan 3/4 full and let rise again.
• Bake in pre-heated 375° (190°C) oven. 
• Make rolls of left-over dough.

Dar didn't say how long to let the bread bake. I checked several bread recipes to get an idea. After half hour and regularly thereafter I opened the oven and knocked on the center. It will sound right, a bit hollow. Like Dar, I became a gut cook.

Because she was writing the cards for herself the directions would not pass the muster of a cookbook editor. For me there's joy in touching what she touched, trying to duplicate childhood favorites.

My mother Dorothy Sargent Boudreau had a food column in The Lawrence Eagle Tribune called Stove Stories. https://stovestories.blogspot.com/  A couple of those columns are in the recipe box. Well after my mother's death, I came across other columns and put them in a blog. Blogs did not exist when she was alive, but if they did I'm sure she would have written one. 

Maybe there was a cave family in prehistoric times, sitting around the fire talking about the time grandmother burned the mammoth meat.

These recipes reinforce my belief that food comes with a human history and a personal history, something reinforced when my I touch Dar's handwriting.