Let's eat

Several months ago Marge's sister in Nebraska was telling Marge about a cookbook she was working on for their church. Most everyone Marge's sister knew sent her recipes of one kind or another, so Marge sent her some of her recipes as well as mine. In time we bought one of the finished cookbooks, and it is fun reading in it about the food but also about those who used the recipes. As I was reading and going over the recipes I got to thinking it might be really neat to do a family cookbook. All the recipes would be tied to my mom's parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Denmark.

So for several months I've been working on getting recipes from my brother and sisters and cousins and on and on. The worst part is I may have waited too long. All of my aunts and uncles from Mom's side of the family are deceased. So all that's left are the cousins and such, and most are my age give or take 10 to 15 years or so. I wish now I'd been getting the cookbook going 10 to 20 years ago. Oh well, we can't go back so we'll deal with what we have.

I love old cookbooks. Not the ready-made fancy ones from some company or such, but the old church or school cookbooks. Those are really cool. Its fun to read through the recipes and see what they were cooking and eating. My one sister, for instance, said she remembered Dad making vinegar pie. That one was new for me. It turns out, one of my dad's sisters made a cookbook called "Blondie's Kitchen" with one of the recipes being vinegar pie. I never knew she had made a cookbook, but it turns out she actually made two cookbooks. She grew up on a ranch in Nebraska so the recipes are all country ranch recipes.

But honestly, we all have our favorite foods with many of them made and put together from memory. Many are just concocted and never even written down. My older sister had seven children, and she cooked for a bunch of ranch hands in Western Nebraska at a ranch called Rush Creek Cattle Co. One thing she made most every morning was pancakes. No recipe. Totally from memory. I used to stay with her and Don, and those pancakes still stand out in my memory. Now I've got to get Marge and my sister hooked up so sister to wife can transfer and write down a recipe. One ingredient I know for sure is that the liquid in the pancakes is buttermilk.

Several summers ago I attended a grower meeting just south of Miner, Missouri. After meeting there, we moved the meeting to Haywood City which is just south of Miner and east of U.S. 61. After the meeting, we met at the community center in Haywood City and had barbequed chicken and turnip greens and sweet potato pie. I've tried turnip greens myself, and mine are just plain. Mine lack something, or I should say lack a lot. I tried adding some hog jowl and pieces of ham, but they aren't like those. One of these days I need to have David hook me up with his mom and have her show me how to make a mess of turnips greens. No recipe exists. All from memory.

But isn't this how many recipes were passed on from generation to generation? Nothing written down! Recipes are learned by helping make a dessert or a pie or a roast or whatever. Most never used measures like a teaspoon or tablespoon or such. Put a dab of salt and pepper and pour about a cup in. They knew how to cook.

One thing that I remember Mom making was chicken and noodles. And since Mom passed away, I haven't had chicken and noodles that even came close to tasting like hers. Marge's are good, but they aren't like Mom made. Most of the time she probably used one of her own chickens, probably hand -icked out of the chicken pen. Dad had bent a hook on the end of a wire that one could use to reach out and hook a chicken's leg. It worked. I remember there being noodles all over the kitchen and dining table to dry. The noodles were sliced so thin, they almost had one side. Now and then, she would have dumplings on top that kind of resembled globs of dough chucked on top. Awesome chicken and noodles.

Mom could cook, but so could Dad. But most of what they cooked was grown and raised right there on the ranch northeast of Arthur. Every year Dad butchered a hog or two, at least one Jersey/Brown Swiss steer and gosh knows how many chickens. I'd bet at least a hundred or more.

Many don't cook like their parents did nor do they use the tried and true cooking pots and pans and skillets. One of our wedding gifts was a cast iron skillet. Can't get much better than that. Many are "take the lids off the cans and dump and heat and eat." I still remember sitting down to the table at Mom and Dad's with a roaster in the center filled with a 6- to 8-pound beef roast, carrots, onions, potatoes and cabbage. For a country boy, life couldn't get much better.

As I look back through the years, one thing I regret is not writing many of the stories and events and things like recipes down. Getting it down on paper so that those later on have a record of past events. Marge made vinegar pie for me, and it was kind of a way to reach back to Dad who's been gone for 40-plus years. Wish now I could sit down with him over a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.