A Favorite Recipe Lost
March is Women’s History Month and Lisa Alzo at The Accidental Genealogist has posted 31 prompts for celebrating the women in our lives. I, of course, am late getting started, but here’s today’s prompt.
March 7 — Share a favorite recipe from your mother or grandmother’s kitchen. Why is this dish your favorite? If you don’t have one that’s been passed down, describe a favorite holiday or other meal you shared with your family.
Cooking was not my mother’s joy or strength.
She did it and she did it fairly well–especially since her boundaries were fairly fixed. We lived in a rural area where it was almost too hot to have a garden–at least for my red-haired, fair-skinned mother. And we always had beef in the locker in town, and later, in our home freezer. I was shocked once to hear a friend’s mother talk about how tired she was as a child of eating lobster. But she was a child of maritime Canada–I was a child of the Texas plains, and we ate beef. My mom was known to sneak in a package of bologna or liverwurst occasionally, but it was never put on the table as the main dish. She did pass to me her skill at making gravy–one of the secrets is letting the flour cook a bit first–I later learned this was called “making a roux” in official cooking terminology. The other secret is having the right utensil to stir to keep from having lumpy gravy as the liquid (usually milk in our case) is added. Mom’s utensil of choice was some sort of coiled, springy metal thing probably originally intended to beat egg whites or somesuch.
But at some point she had a great recipe for a dessert that has been lost. She got it from her best friend Phyllis, and when I moved to the same city Phyllis left our small town for, I called her, but she couldn’t remember the recipe. I can see it written on a scrap of paper and stuffed in the recipe drawer, but I cannot re-create it nor can I find one despite handy sites like AllRecipes that let you type in the ingredients and provide you with a recipe using those foods.
It started with graham cracker crumbs. I think it probably had sugar and seems like some whipped egg whites folded in. These, along with some undoubtedly additional forgotten ingredients, were patted down into a 9 x 13 pan and baked for a bit. Then, what made it truly amazing, a boiling mixture of crushed pineapple and I can’t remember what else poured over it right as it came out of the oven. This resulted in a yummy gooey bar that was so good, at least as I remember it.
And maybe it’s the best kind of recipe. I certainly don’t need the calories, but I relish the memory of cooking in my mother’s kitchen, from recipes she’d scrawled on scraps of paper, making food that had come from her shared friendship with other women at the church. I was able to locate her “quick” fruit-cake recipe after many years through the magic of the Internet, so perhaps the pineapple, graham-cracker bars will eventually appear as well.
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