Cook Til Done: Travels Through My Grandmother's Recipe Box

In the same way that I’d like to read every book before I die, I’d like to cook every recipe. Almost. Just as I’d like to read every book that’s not science fiction, computer how-to or automotive technique, I’d like to cook every recipe that isn’t too difficult or time-consuming or doesn’t have entrails in it.

I’m compulsive. I can’t skip one. So there with my grandmother’s recipes, I plod through 55 years of clipped, scantily jotted notes, and my family serves as the wary clientele. 

When my grandmother died in 1982, she left behind two small file boxes filled with recipes. Some recipes we copied for everyone, as they were favorites. The stuffed cabbage. The noodle kugel. The hot water gingerbread. But most often she didn’t write those down as she made them often enough to know how to cook them without reading a recipe. So I have Rose’s blintz soufflé, Doris’ babke, and salmon quiche from some event or other, written on the back of a place card.

Then there are the ones cut from the paper. Parade magazine. Or from the woman who wrote weekly recipes in our local paper with, inevitably, 2 days later, an apology in the paper for the ingredient surreptitiously omitted. “We regret to inform you that the recipe for cranberry mold in Saturday’s paper forgot to mention two packets of gelatin.” I never have found the regrets section of my grandmother’s file boxes. 

I’ve been cooking my way through these for years. I try not to skip, but stuffed derma is not compelling, nor is the avocado gelatin ring. Still, taking the time to cook what my grandmother either did cook or intended to cook brings me into her kitchen with her smallness, her quick curse when something slipped from her fingers, her kitchen at the lake where chicken was served every baked way but the way I’d eat it. 

I tell my mother when I’ve made a recipe of my grandmother’s. “She never made that,” is most often the reply. But she intended to! So I must cook it.

On “From The Desk Of Isaac Shapiro, M.D. F.A.C.P” is Calamondin Nut Bread. The calamondin is a small, bitter orange. (I don’t know who Isaac Shapiro M.D. was.) My mother took on this challenge, made from calamondins stolen from the Florida neighbor’s tree late at night. It calls for 3/4 cup of pureed fruit.  That’s about 75 calamondins, and I think you have to peel them, a task not unlike trying to peel cherry tomatoes with your fingernails.  And calamondin marmalade calls for 4 cups of the fruit -– the neighbor’s yearly harvest.

There are 7 tuna casserole recipes, none of which have potato chips on the top, which is the only way I’d get one of my two children to eat it. My favorite one is “Hot Teen Tuna Buns” which has entirely different connotations today than when printed in a magazine in 1957. "1/4 lb. cubed process (sic) American cheese, 3 chopped, hard-cooked eggs, 2 tablesp. pickle relish, one 6 ½ or 7 oz can chunk tuna, one tablesp. minced green pepper, 2 tablesp. minced onion, ½ cup mayonnaise, 3 tablesp. chopped stuffed olives. Use to fill 6 hamburger buns, split, then buttered. Wrap each in foil; refrigerate. At serving time, bake wrapped, at 400 degrees, 15 min; unwrap to serve. Makes 6. Double recipe for 12." Directions I guess I’d appreciate if I’d never seen a kitchen or been to first grade.

Then the final comment, “Warm welcome for teen-agers, served with sparkling grape juice and nut brownies.” Although I have had teenagers for 5 years now, I have yet to welcome them in this manner.

Some I have no idea what to do with. Beet mold, for instance, written in my grandmother’s loopy cursive:

Beets 1 ½ c. 
Water 2c.
Horserad. 2T
Vinegar 5T. 
juice 1 ½
salt ½ tsp
2pkg jello
1 c celery 

That’s it.  No other clues.  But I hold onto it because it’s in my grandmother’s loopy cursive.

That’s why I keep Mock Gefilte fish. And lemon mold. And Mary Hugo’s fresh tongue. Well, her recipe for fresh tongue.

I’ve found some favorites. Sweet and sour meatballs. Pear nut torte. Bananas Foster, which was really fun to burn intentionally.

I’ve found ways to cook food for Passover that I’d never serve to guests. Chremsel. Passover fruit puffs. Farfel Charlotte. Frances Kredenser’s Passover Sponge Cake.

But most of all, I’ve found a way to keep my grandmother around my own kitchen table so that my own family can spend a little time with the small, swearing-when-she-dropped-something, crying-when-laughing woman I grew up with, with whom I never cooked, whose food I hardly ever ate. 

- this piece first appeared in 2008 on Rokovoko, an online blog.