When Family Recipes Go to Someone Else: What Do You Do?

So Sylvia, how are you doing today?

I am absolutely great.

It's been a good Monday

I'm glad to hear that.

But I have one question for you.

Uh-oh

Yeah, I know, right?

Do you wish that you had one of those neat little recipe boxes, you know, the kind that are all handwritten

lovingly so with perfect handwriting and script in tidy categories and alphabetically ordered just right?

That would be in my recipe dreams, but that's not the reality for me or for most of us either.

wrapped in Saran Wrap

Oh, no.

I couldn't believe it.

It was actually my mom's wedding present in 1959, her Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook

So I'm gonna guess since your mom was such a good cook that she didn't make any of those recipes

I am sure she did not make any of the recipes in the cookbook, or very few that she had

stuffed in the cookbook, but I do know of one that she actually made

Well, I got a cookbook as a stand-in for one that I really

wanted, but I'll tell you what happens later on in the show about that one

I can't wait to hear it.

I'm sure it's a good story

Oh, it is.

So on that note, folks, thank you for being here.

, We're glad that you're listening today.

This is Family Tree Food and Stories.

I'm Nancy May

And I'm Sylvia France.

Follow the show.

Leave a review and tell us where in the world you're listening from, maybe even Omaha, Nebraska

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- Sylvia France: Every episode really comes down to two of the same things.

It's a piece of real history, and a question we're still trying to answer.

I like to think of it as history and mystery of food

I love that part, There's always a little mystery in everything we eat.

Eh, well, maybe not.

Let's hopefully not too much.

But today both of us are talking about recipes, how that actually got into our hands or your hands, and what you

do with each one, , and the ones that still won't give up their stories

Well, I think it's right now a good time for a proper toast

I agree with you.

I'm ready to drink just about any time.

Oh, no, that doesn't sound too good though.

But

As long as you're not driving, you're good

No, I'm good.

We're just sitting here at the mic, which might be even more dangerous.

But what's in your glass, Sylvia?

Well, by looking at what you're holding, those

look like they could've been your mom's champagne glasses.

Am I correct?

You are correct.

They were a wedding gift, and that was a gift to me when we got married.

It's not a book, but it does tell their own story

I think I would rather have the champagne glasses than the, the Saran Wrap cookbook myself

Well, , I think we're ready to toast with a Negroni

Oh, yes.

It's one of my favorites, and I know it's yours as well.

It's equal parts gin, Campari, sweet red vermouth over ice with an orange peel

So where did the Negroni come from?

Well, legend has it a bartender in Florence just added gin to the count's usual drink in

1919 and nobody ever wrote down exactly why he made the adjustments

Ooh.

And the ones that we got, however, we got them

To the recipes that we've got, however we got them,

And not knowing why.

I like that part.

So my mom had this chicken dish that she made, and I always asked for it on my birthday.

She never wrote it down that I know of

Never.

It's hard to believe she never wrote it down anywhere

Well, apparently she did.

My sister got it.

But she made it over and over until I could make it just by watching her

That's actually the oldest way a recipe moves.

Nobody needed to read or write.

They just needed to be standing in the room enough times with the person who made it and they loved

That's also why most of them don't survive.

I only wrote it down, at least that one, which I refer to as Mom's Birthday Chicken or Mom's Special Chicken,

because a podcast host where I was a guest asked me for the recipe

So the only reason it exists on paper is that somebody

finally asked and your sister didn't fess up that she had it

I know, not at that time.

But that's the only reason that I have a copy of it here, So writing

your own recipe down used to be a luxury though, did you know that?

I did

And well, for others who don't know it, for most of history, wealthy households did it because

it took somebody who could actually read or write to be able to put a recipe on a card or a piece of paper

So it sounds like that a recipe or recipe book was actually a status symbol

Sometimes worse than that though.

Remember our friend Amelia Simmons?

Well, she wasn't really our friend 'cause we weren't there.

I'm not that old.

Excuse me.

But that was from our Revolutionary War series,

and Amelia was the orphan who wrote the first American cookbook

I think if I remember correctly, it was like 1796 or something like that.

Yep, it was, and, , that one was called American Cookery.

She couldn't write it herself because she was illiterate, and she got a transcriber to help her.

Then, mystery here, the transcriber , used their own preferences on amounts of things, and kinda sabotaged her own

words or redesigned the recipes , and then that's what actually got sold

So it sounds like first American cookbook was launched with an actual accusation of foul play

Yeah, no pun- intended, right?

'Cause I'm sure there's a few pieces of fowl that were cooked in there,

The chickens or turkeys or

something

like that, pheasant.

But still, we don't actually know almost 230 years later whether she was right or wrong

So history and mystery in 1796

I love that part.

And regular people, how did they write things down?

Well, they actually had to wait.

Ordinary literacy, especially for women, didn't really catch on until the last couple of hundred years.

. Before that, an average woman writing her own recipe in her own hand basically wasn't a thing

- Nancy May: So even a, few words that somebody else had written themselves was kind of a big deal

It is, and it's really recent, which I did not know

And then printing, well, I think you know about printing 'cause your family had a print shop, right?

They did

Well, that suddenly changes everything where everybody's handwritten recipe now becomes black and white and ink

So they were handing you or selling you what became the recipe box, the actual card in a little tin.

It got because companies were stapling their own recipe to a coupon and mailing it out

can't imagine that.

That must have been a lot of hard work stapling all those recipes

I know, where the… It's like I wonder if you know,

And expensive too, right?

Oh, yeah, especially then

Right?

So the little box that we all picture of grandma having, I

always picture it as this cardboard box with brown things on it.

I don't know why they're brown.

Like, brown fruits and brown whatever.

That's my image of grandma's recipe box

Oh, I always think of it a little bit brighter with blues and pinks and orange,

but, maybe it's just a Southern thing.

So I think it's interesting that the recipe box actually started out as a marketing tool.

It doesn't make the recipes bad.

It just means they didn't start out neutral.

There was a motive behind it

Ugh, there's always a motive behind something in the kitchen, I think

You know, those marketing departments.

so what do you actually have then?

Something written, something shown

Well, for me, my mom left me something written, just barely.

these little books called Make It Now, Bake It Later, and she loved those books.

We'd pick up every new copy of it in the Marion, Massachusetts little gift store whenever we went there.

But she put her notes in the margins, a few words in pencil, mostly whenever she liked it

Was it a check mark or something different?

Sometimes it was a little more, it was a little less, like who she

made it for, and whether she changed the recipe just a little bit to make it better

So speaking of your mom's cookbook, remember you teased

me with the top of the show, the one you said you'd explain later?

Is it time yet?

Well, I can make a time if you want.

So my mom had this Joy of Cooking cookbook, and we used it all the

time, or I used it all the time to make recipes for cookies.

Oh my God, one day I made cookies with too much salt because I read the recipe wrong.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Not very good, yeah.

My dad tried everything that I ever made, and he just took a bite of those.

He said, "Pretty good, sweetie, but a little salty." So

He was very nice about it.

He didn't say yuck

No, no he didn't, including the bread that he cracked a knife in, but that's for another story.

So, but my sister got The Joy of Cooking cookbook and her three-by-five index cards.

Not too many of them, but she had a few.

I think she got those because my sister and her husband were married, I think probably about six years before we were.

But I also think that I got the other cookbooks because my mom

was probably tired of cooking for everybody at that time too

So tell me what you got.

Well, nothing honestly, so kind of pissed me off that my

sister got that cookbook, but I went looking for a substitute.

And I went looking for, just happened by accident, somebody else's thinking, well, if somebody else's

mom loved it, I'm gonna make them a substitute mom at least in my cookbook

I really love that.

I've always asked for substitute moms along the way, especially

in regards to cooking, 'cause we all know why with my mom.

So did you find it

I did.

I found one at the church fair in Western Connecticut at the Immanuel Episcopal Church.

We always pick something up there.

It was a stranger's Joy of Cooking cookbook, her handwritten

notes in it, along with a few little stuffed secrets as well.

I

have no idea who she was, though, but I still love that cookbook

well, I guess it's keeping her memory alive.

Even though you didn't know her, you still have the treasures of her favorite recipes and her

notes

I wish I had her name in it though, , but mine is also now a time capsule of my own stuff.

I stuff it with clippings and notes and, yeah, a few things of my mom's as well, including Grandma's rhubarb wine.

and that apple pie recipe, which is always my go-to

Did you know that there are nine editions of Joy of

Cooking now, and it's still put out by Irma Rombauer's own family?

That's four generations

I did.

But meanwhile, your book's author, Betty Crocker, wasn't even a real person.

Ha ha.

I know, rub it in

Betty Crocker was invented by a committee in 1921

- Sylvia France: So one cookbook runs on an actual bloodline, and mine's been fictional since day one.

Oh, that marketing department again.

You know, I wonder how many cookbooks are still written by families like The Joy of Cooking.

We'll have to look into that one

Oh, I would love to.

So let's go back to my mom's cookbook.

Mine is less orderly than either one of yours, honestly.

My mom's cookbook is a real junk drawer.

Clippings, box panels, recipes she thought she ought to have, whatever anybody handed her at a party

No, that doesn't sound like your mom

Oh, not at all.

Miss OCD, that everything has to be in its place and it doesn't move for at least 20 years.

So that's what I thought was hysterical about this book.

And also, I found this salmon casserole recipe in there, and even funnier, she doesn't like salmon at all.

I also found these recipes dated back to 1974 that were also in things like a popcorn popper and a,

dish that you could make a cake in a Crockpot

Oh.

So you know what?

1974, that's retro nowadays.

It's all back.

You might have to bring those out.

But did she actually love any of them?

Oh, she loved her pecan pie.

We lived in an old pecan grove, and as slave labor, my - brother and I had to go pick pecans on a nightly

basis when they came in so the only recipe that was revered was the pecan pie and then my grandma's syrup cake

Oh, that pecan pie actually sounds like torture as far as memories go but did you like it?

Absolutely not.

Okay.

I can see why

Well, I'm not a big sweet person, so it was like

just karo syrup and brown sugar on top of stuff, and it's just,

Not my thing either, but I get it

So, that's the same way with the syrup cake.

So my mom said everybody loved it, so I put it out on Facebook, and

the only person that came up who actually had it was my first cousin

Hmm.

So now what?

Well, it was interesting.

His retort back was, "Well, did you know where she kept it?" And I was like, "Well, I was thinking a special dish.

I was, you know,

had a, you know, a box, up on the counter." No, it's in her curio that

had all of her favorite treasures, so it must have been very special to her.

And I informed my cousin that I actually have the curio in my dining room, and he's like, "What?"

So he didn't even know I had it, which was funny.

Well, I hope that didn't start, any family wars

No, he knows it's in good hands, and I love it

… Nancy May: So at least we know that somebody loved it, and we just don't know whether she actually made it or not

Well, we did.

We finally got to the bottom of that but the real mystery here is how did she make it?

Because her recipe was extremely very vague

Well, we're gonna hold that thought for a second because I wanna go back to the recipe box.

Because we got a story from one of our listeners, Michelle Raginsberger, who

has a recipe box stuffed with her mom's cards, and her dad built the box itself

Oh, that's so sweet.

You have the cards and something that was built by her father

I know by hand.

It's a plain silver box, nothing fancy, but the size is built exactly for her mom's cards, so they fit perfectly

That must be the most written for somebody specific object we've talked about this whole show.

He Wasn't just storing her recipes.

He was just making sure they would be safe forever

. Nancy May: And you know what?

We've got a picture of that in our Facebook group.

I'm sure Michelle would be happy to share it with others

Speaking of outlasting somebody, after the break we're gonna take a swing at my grandma's instructions and

a few more to see if anybody can actually get what this cake is supposed to be

I'm looking forward to that one

.. So we're back, So if any of this has you looking at what you've got sitting in your drawer somewhere, or you know where you

got it from, start by asking, where did the person who gave it to you get it from?

Not just what the recipe is.

Ask why they made it, who taught them, what it was actually for.

Was it for a celebration or it was just every day?

And, you know, getting that information doesn't need to be fancy or formal or even written down.

You can give them a call, - get it in a text message, or just take a picture of it and send it on down the line to them

so do you have an example of that?

Well, kinda sorta.

I actually have proof that I did make a particular recipe.

It was my mom's nut ring or nut loaf, and I was a Girl Scout.

, I have the recipe card that was taped on the bottom of the plate because

the judges need to have the recipe when we were doing the bake-off.

And I've got a photo of me as a Girl Scout just to prove that I actually did this

I saw the pictures and you're too cute for words.

yeah, don't go there.

it sounds like the plate came with its own footnote

Well, I'm not sure I would call it that, but just a recipe card that I wrote out by hand in my cat scratch.

And some people took it a little bit further there because there's real documented practice of putting recipes on

headstones, which is a little different than a Girl Scout cook-off plate.

I don't know how we got from Girl Scouts to headstones, but that's pretty gruesome still.

Headstone sounds like it's a little bit more permanent than a three-by-five card

But there's apparently a woman in Brooklyn, well, maybe she was a Girl Scout too at some point,

in Green-Wood Cemetery that actually has her spritz cookie recipe carved into her headstone, ingredients and

the details of that recipe right down to the T, or maybe down to the head.

Well, that sounds like a very expensive headstone to me, but I'm sure that it's worth it.

And you know what?

I think it's kind of interesting that I actually, this Southern girl

from Florida, have relatives who are planted in the Greenwood Cemetery

You do, so do I. Talk about small world or maybe small cemetery

Well, actually, maybe not as small as it sounds.

Greenwood used to be one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country over

a half a million visitors a year at its peak, second only to Niagara Falls.

Wait, Niagara Falls?

Are you kidding me?

So people wanted to go to a cemetery on vacation almost as much as, I guess, the honeymoon spot of the country

Well, you know those Victorian cemeteries, they like to have a lunch with their ancestors.

I'm glad I live in today and not then.

so it was on purpose.

It's even why Central Park exists.

Cities saw how much people loved walking around places like Greenwood, so they built parks to match

So two families, yours from down here and mine from up north, opposite ends of at least the Eastern

Seaboard, and we both end up, well, I'll just say it, in the same ditch.

They were planted next to each other.

. For 100 years, that's where ambitious families wanted to end up

Which means everybody's got an actual assignment next time that you happen to be in Brooklyn

I want to go find the cookie lady

Yeah, go find the cookie lady.

I'm gonna presume she wasn't a Girl Scout

No, probably not, but I wanna try her recipe for sure

, Nancy May: I don't know.

Spritz cookies are pretty simple, but still, maybe she's got a different hook

Okay, I guess I was thinking Aperol Spritz, the cousin

to the Negroni.

I got it.

But since we're on the subject of things a recipe doesn't tell you, or maybe what the

ghosts are keeping from us, we can talk about how much old recipes just leave out.

How about that?

My favorite is butter the size of an egg

So that's a real one.

Really threw me for a loop, and it actually works out to be about a quarter

of a cup, which is usually doing a lot of work in that sense for sure

I like a teacup of flour

That one's even worse.

A teacup never has actually been standardized, depending upon who's in

the kitchen and where you are and where you're standing or who's talking about it.

A teacup is usually about a half a cup to a full cup, and if you're me, it's a cup or a mug of coffee, not a teacup.

It's more s- like a 10-ounce cup

Yeah, 12 to 14 for sure at my house.

So two people making the same recipe could have ended up with two completely different cakes

Pretty much.

And then there's yours.

Your Grandma Knight syrup cake, which says, I believe, "Reduce the

heat after almost done," which is, how do you figure that one out?

I had no clue.

Do you?

No, I had no idea.

But a woman named Maria Parola was running a cooking school in

Boston in 1877, and then she ran another school in New York in 1882.

That's sort of predating Julia Childs and Jacques Pépin.

But since we're talking about the ladies here, we'll leave it with Julia.

And she was teaching cooking as an actual subject, kind of like home ec class when I was in school.

I understand she was actually teaching it to immigrants, which I think is cool

Oh, I didn't know that.

I think they probably cooked better than the rest of us did.

But, there was a right way and a wrong way to measure things, and she did that almost 20 years before Fannie

Farmer's Cookbook made a level cup and a level spoon as part of their household phrases and recipes at least

I did hear of Fannie Farmer, but not until recently Maria Parola

I hadn't either until we were doing this episode.

But Farmer's the one who gets all the credit, sadly, and Parola's the one who's

already been standing in the kitchen doing it and showing everybody else how to do it

Well, you know, that tracks with everything else we've been talking about today.

Honestly, the person who actually did the thing isn't the name that always survives.

They get forgotten

No.

Pharma got the name recognition though, . Then there's an actual Fannie Farmer recipe cabinet.

Did you know that?

It sounds like a recipe box to me

Kind of.

It's a little wooden box from 1913.

It was sold pre-filled with all sorts of recipe cards

So that was an actual thing

Yeah, it was an actual thing.

A company called and Klein- Scully and Kleincheckt made them, - and

there's even a magazine ad that we found from 1925 advertising it

So her name got licensed into the exact kind of box we're talking about all this episode

Sometimes the names get written down, sometimes they don't.

So what do we actually do with that syrup cape that you've got there, Sylvia?

Well, I took a swing.

I promised.

It says bake at 400, then reduce after almost done to 350

That's not a time, that's kind of a look-see

That was kind of my guess too.

. Bake it till hot to get the rise going, then back it off once the top

is set but the middle is probably still soft so it finishes without burning.

So I put a toothpick in the middle of it to see if it was still wet when I pulled it out

Kind of sounds like two-stage authentication a la internet although in the kitchen

Kind of like CAPTCHA.

Are you a human being?

A two-stage bake is what I've heard.

It's a real technique still used for dense cakes today.

We just can't prove that's actually what she meant since neither of us watched her do it.

We're not that old yet

Yeah, not yet.

But Have you actually tried making it yourself,

I did.

I just mentioned that, it was one of those things on a whim.

I was going to a meeting of people who were Florida pioneer families, and I brought the syrup cake

Hmm.

So how did it taste?

It actually was too sweet for me, '. But my cousin, my first cousin actually ate it

, he was a prince, and to , put it into context, he did serve our country in

the Army, and so when he would come home on leave, she would make it for him

Aw.

I like that.

I'll have to tell you about the cake that my grandma sent to my dad in a Tupper- well, it wasn't a Tupperware, some

sort of contraption - in the war that actually made it to him somewhere across overseas, but that's for another story.

Oh, I can't wait to hear it.

so before we go, there are five things out of today that you can use

One, cherish what you've got by actually asking about it.

Every splash and grease spot has a story.

A recipe with no story attached is just instructions

And my favorites are the ones that are written out by hand, and ones with the little grease spots on it too

Two, preserve it however you can actually keep up with it, a

journal, a phone note, a text thread, or even a picture you post on Facebook

Do you actually do any of those?

I do.

I have so many people requesting the recipes that I did get that

I have put them on Facebook 'cause that's the easiest for me

Yep, that's a good way to do it.

So anybody who's in our Facebook group, you can get those too, right, Sylvia?

including grandma and I's syrup cake recipe.

I like that.

three, don't let missing instructions scare you off.

. Butter the size of an egg is annoying, but it's not impossible, and yes, there are different size eggs.

But you can figure it out

so call it a quarter of a cup, adjust from there, and let Google be your friend

Four.

So go ahead and make it on your own.

I've had plenty of flops, but they still somehow taste good

So tell me about some of your flops

Well, my mom's Yorkshire pudding never made it.

It always turned into a mess, but my popovers were famous up north until we got down south.

Turns out that humidity and altitude does make difference with a recipe.

I'm still working on that one

All right, I volunteer to be a guinea pig.

And five, document what you make now for whoever comes after you,

and ask your mom, your sister, your aunt, your father while you're at it.

Some people care enough to put a recipe in a will or, as we mentioned, even a headstone

And sometimes your neighbors are really good guinea pigs.

So to the ones that we have the recipes , and to however we got them

To the recipes we love, cherish, and sometimes don't understand

and next time, stay tuned because we're opening a different

drawer, or maybe . we're going into a different shelf in the refrigerator.

This one's about butter and butter stamps and molds, and how you can make one and do it yourself

So thank you for listening and for digging through our own drawers or cabinets with us.

Happy cooking and happy experimenting

Now I am ready for that Negroni.

Oh, you and me both, honey.