Cooking Schmooking
It is a family puzzle – why did Nancee inherit Great Aunt Eunice’s cookbooks? “She just wanted me to have them,” I said. While my sister pipes in, “Maybe she thought you might actually cook one day.”
Clubs, churches and towns put out cookbooks and Aunt Eunice would keep them all. If she ate something she liked, chances are she got the recipe. She may never have used it, but she took the recipe and filed it anyway. A homemade cookbook full of recipes is testimony to that.
Odds are I’ll never make any of these recipes. In thumbing through the old cookbook, I can’t help but smile. A pinch of this and a few grains of that. A trace of grease here and a gulp of molasses there.
I need to add 25 drops of lemon juice to one recipe and butter the size of an egg in another. Guess I can’t make the next recipe either. It calls for a teacup full of flour and all I can find is a coffee mug.
A teaspoon of saleratus left me puzzled until my sister mentioned that was baking soda. Isinglass...did I have that in the cabinet? Yes, that is unflavored gelatin.
I questioned when I would ever use the recipe for cabbage salad. It called for 20 pounds of cabbage and it serves 75 people. On my measuring cup I could not find a gill, but understand that is half a cup.
Knowing the terms, I was eager to cook. I turned to the back of the cookbook. Mincemeat pie for the holidays sounded different. First, I would need one medium size hog’s head.
I simply closed the pages of the cookbook shut.
Nancee Harrison is a past columnist for the Greene County Daily World. Visit www.blondeladywithdarkroots.com or email her at blondeladywithdarkroots@gmail.com or send comments to Nancee, Daily World, box 129 Linton IN 47441.
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