3x5s Needed. Lined. No Kittens.
I have pickling cucumber seedlings going. Livvie prefers dill pickles to cucumbers, so I figured I’d grow the bush type of small pickling cucumbers this year. I can use them fresh as well as canning them. It’s not like they don’t taste good. I was looking at the seedlings this morning, and I had a bit of a sad heart for a moment. My Great Aunt Helen used to make very spicy hot dill pickles. They were fantastic, and they were addictive. She passed away from ovarian cancer back in the early 90s, and no one had ever gotten the recipe from her.
I’m not even sure she ever wrote it down.
I’m a firm believer in being able to cook without following a recipe for every single thing. Some of the best food I’ve ever made has been a result of just getting a feel for what I had on hand and chucking ingredients at the meal. I have a bazillion cookbooks that ended up in a box in the attic of our old house because I so rarely used them. When I do find recipes that intrigue me I usually screw around with them to see how they’ll turn out (Except baking. Baking is chemistry, and most of the time you cannot fuck with it).
I also believe, though, that there are family obligations to pass along recipes.
Aunt Helen wasn’t prideful or anything like that. She didn’t fail to pass on her pickle recipe because she wanted to be the only one who knew how to make them (I cannot handle that attitude in cooking unless it’s a recipe that’s bringing you cash flow). If it WAS written down somewhere no one around these days knows where to find it. Her oldest son passed away, as did her husband, and the youngest son lives with his family in the midwest, and we don’t hear from him often. I think the issue, as so often happens with many things, was that she figured she had all of the time in the world.
That recipe is gone. I’ve popped around on the recipe websites searching for hot dill pickle recipes, and there are about 463,000 of them. Where the hell would I even begin?
I’ve got my Grandmother’s recipe box, and most of the cards inside are the cards that came with the box when she bought it. There 
are very few handwritten cards in there, but thankfully there’s a recipe for Blueberry Pie that has, “The One I Make,” written in the top corner. The box does not contain her step-sister’s German Potato Salad recipe, and it doesn’t have my Great-Grandmother’s recipe for cinnamon rolls.
Both recipes were family legends. Both lost.
The thing about finding a gazillion and four recipes for these on the internet is that while they might turn out to taste really great the history isn’t there. I can prop my laptop on the counter and follow a recipe, teaching Livvie how to add this and maybe stick a pinch more of that in, but the stories are gone. It’s not that I can’t tell her about how my Aunt Helen used to work in a factory full of smoking men, and every day when she would come home to eat lunch she’d put on a house dress and hang her work uniform on the clothesline in the yard to air it out before re-dressing herself and returning to work, because obviously I can do that. The connection to the food itself is lost, though. I’m sure Mrs. So and So of Scot Run, Pennsylvania was a lovely woman, but I don’t know anything about her as I follow her recipe for Hardwood Mulch Flavored Peanut Brittle.
Food heritage is one of the most important things a family can share.
I’m guilty of this failing myself, and I need to stop it. Almost everything I cook on a regular basis that I developed myself is locked inside my own head, and no one else has access to it. I need to write this shit down. It somewhat relates to my acknowledging the other day that we could be gone at any moment. I also realize, though, that even if I die at 98 I’m such a procrastinator that I could take these with me to the grave anyway.
Livvie cooks with me every day that I’m making something more difficult than slapping something on the grill. If I’m adding ingredients to something, I have her place her hand over mine so she can “help.” As time goes on I’ll be throwing her in to see if she can sink or swim. I figure when she’s five or six I’ll get everything out on the counter for her and say, “There. Make a cake.”
That wasn’t done for me. I regret that terribly.
My grandmother used to make a cake that was my mother’s favorite. It was a chocolate cake, and it called for sour milk. It was Mom’s birthday cake every year, and thankfully that recipe survived, and Mom typed it onto a card for me. I made it as the cake for my wedding to my ex-husband, and it was a FAIL. Huge fail. Epic.
I have no idea what I did wrong. That was the first and last time I ever tried to make it. If I had been able to watch my grandmother in the kitchen while she made this cake fairly regularly I might have had a handle on it by the age of 24. I got out the recipe the other day because I, like a moron, poured about 2 cups of sour milk down the drain before I remembered that I had a use for it.
I’m going to let a few cups of this gallon jug go sour this time, because I am going to get this cake right if it kills me. I have the stories to tell when we put this cake together. I can tell Livvie about my grandmother having to beg for a second shoe voucher for my mother during WW2 because my mom had been sprayed by a skunk and her shoes were destroyed. I can tell her that in the early 20s my grandmother bobbed her hair and her father almost disowned her (considering that as a child she had set her hair alight with one of the candles on the Christmas tree, one would think he’d have been on board). I have thousands of stories about my grandmother. The kitchen is and always will be the place to tell them.
One of my projects for this week is to type up the instructions for the foods I make regularly. It should take, what, two interrupted days?
Meanwhile, if any of you have a recipe for hot dill pickles- toss it my way. Along with the stories that go with it.
19 Responses to “3x5s Needed. Lined. No Kittens.”
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- - March 24, 2010
Are You Gonna Eat That? by Julie Summerell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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I would love to have your step-by-step pickle recipe. I’ve tried pickling once or twice in the remote past, and failed miserably. I want to try again this year and would be happy to have someone’s personal instructions to follow instead of some random thing I picked up off the ‘net.
Great post.
I have a recipe that was my great grandmother’s which was written down specifically for me by my aunt. As kids my siblings and I would spend at least one night a week with my aunt baking cookies. I always thought that it was a long held family secret. My freshman year in college I learned that the recipe had always been available on the packaging of a very common product found in the grocery store(No it wasn’t the toll house chocolate chip cookie recipe). It nearly broke my heart.
I still have the recipe card though and despite the fact that I haven’t made the cookies in years, every time we move it gets taped inside the pantry just in case the mood strikes. Just having it there comforts me and reminds me of both my Great Grandmother Ingabord and my Aunt Carol.
For years I thought the toll house recipe was Grandmom Magic. I had no idea it was from the back of the bag. Same with pumpkin pie and the Libby’s label.
I do not have a spicy dill pickle recipe but I do have an excellent German potato salad. It is my mom’s best friend’s recipe, who incidentally is German. It is super easy although I do scald my hands peeling the potatoes while they are hot.
Mom loves cooking so the most she would let my brother and I do would be to stir or to wash the lettuce for the salad. I pretty much started cooking when I moved out on my own. I did know how to make cookies by then at least.
I’d love the recipe if you could email it to me.
I write down recipes from family members often, but I never get any backstory. That is a good idea. The only problem is trying to convert their “handfuls” or other ambiguous terms.
Like “How long do you cook it?” “Til its done.”
Or “How much cocoa do you add?” “Til it looks brown.” Uh, ok.
As for the pickles, if you can find out a few of the ingredients, there are forums where you can say you are looking for a recipe for stuff and it had this and that in it and people with try to help.
That’s not a bad idea. Thanks!
http://onceuponagourmetgin.blogspot.com/2009/04/gin-is-serving-homemade-spicy-garlic.html
These are pretty tasty.
Those looked incredible. What does it mean by “green hot peppers?”
My heart of my heart longtime friend, Braak, lost her mother to pancreatic cancer 15 years ago. Twenty years ago, we had visited with her one summer and she’d given me a passel of her best recipes, the ones she served that week, written in her own hand.
Last fall I was able to order a custom cake pan and wrapped the recipes in ribbon, in the pan, along with a new but old looking dishtowel. She couldn’t call for days because looking at the cards made her sob with joy. All these years, I’d forgotten about those cards, tucked underneath the thousands of meaningless cards in my recipe cabinet.
Somehow finding those cards (by accident, a tard kitten knocked over the recipe file) made all of 2009 worthwhile.
You made me cry. I don’t know anyone on the planet who gives gifts as perfect as yours.
old recipes that call for sour milk were for unpastuerized unhomogenized, un-fucked-with milk that just went…sour. not bad. there’s a big difference. you can’t take milk from the grocery and let it go “sour.” if you have a recipe calling for sour milk, add about 1 tablespoon of cider vinegar or white vinegar per cup of milk. promise, it’ll turn out OK.
i feel your pain on the lost recipes. i used to have an old wooden cranberry box that i snatched from my mother’s kitchen after she quit cooking. it had recipe cards in it from 2-4 generations past. stuff you’ll never find in a cookbook. yes, even german potato salad (kartoffelsalat mit speck, as my grandma used to call it). it was basically, as i recall, bacon, fried, then removed from the pan. add vinegar & seasonings to the pan, then add the cooked potato and bacon back. yet without the recipe card it doesn’t taste right. all that went up in smoke (how do i put a value on that, insurance man???)
God that sucks ass. I am SO sorry you lost those. We only have a small firebox that’s getting stuffed to the gills, and I told Rich I want an actual fire safe, one of the smaller ones, just for that reason. I’ve carried this recipe box around for decades, and I’d lose it if anything happened to it.
I guess I could scan the cards. But the box itself is important to me as well. Just how worn it is from the years of being touched by her hands.
How I wish I could have a piece of my Grandmother’s corn bread, prepared by memory and from scratch and cooked in an iron skillet in a woodstove. She died when I was 15 (she was born in 1889!). Dad tried over the years to recreate her cornbread and occasionally came close but never quite got it right. I have his iron skillet now and I keep on trying. How I wish I had known to ask her about it when I had the chance.
We always think there’s all the time in the world too. They’ll always be around.
I’ve got my paternal grandmother’s iron skillet and my brother has the maternal’s. We talk about their cornbread and their fried steaks and fresh sausage but no amount of trying can duplicate any of it.
My mother made a strawberry Bundt cake that was so legendary t it was mentioned at least twice, maybe three times from the pulpit by different people during her memorial service. The testimonials were accompanied by sidelong glances at me in silent command to FIND THAT RECIPE. Long story short, I eventually excavated it and reproduced it. It’s heaven. Thanks for a blog topic. *cheeksmooch*
Thanks. I enjoy your writing.