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Egg Cups and Other Family Treasures

One of those grandmotherly kitchen "tools" I've always secretly hankered for, but would not be caught dead buying is an egg cup. Made out of china, it's used to boil eggs without their shell. When two egg cups from my grandmother's tzachkis weren't sold at my mother's yard sale, they came home with me. I used them today to softboil eggs and there wasn't a leak. Lovely soft-boiled eggs without the mess of trying to grapple with the shell.

So, here I am, working with a tool I've never used before. I checked my Joy, my Betty Crocker, my Martha Stewart's Cooking school. I couldn't find a recipe for how to cook eggs with an egg cup. They're that out of fashion. Food is fashionable now that we can have whatever we want when we want it being who we are. It's not seasonable, it's not organic, it's not right or wrong. There are a lot of foods for which we've lost the means, or the knowledge of how to make because it is fashionable. I think egg cups might be going the way of my grandmothers.

Re-reading my first stab at writing my own recipe, I see a lot of gaps in explanation. I'm making leaps because of direct experience. The short hand is not a proper guide for someone who might never have made an egg boiled in an egg cup.



It should actually read something more closely along the lines of:

Remove eggs from the refrigerator to begin to take off the chill. Let them warm to room temperature - this will reduce cooking time.

Add water to a pot to the height to cover an egg top, but not the egg top handle. Set pot to boil. When the water is boiling reduce to a simmer.

Crack an egg into an egg cup. Add salt and pepper. Screw the lid tightly. Add filled egg cup(s) to simmering water. Cook 4-6 minutes.

When egg cooked to desired set, remove from cup by scraping out with a spoon into a bowl or eating directly from the egg cup with a slice of buttered toast & a very small spoon.

You send me yours

You send me a hand-written recipe on a 3x5 or 4x6 card, and I'll send you one of mine.

I'm gonna have to use the 4x6 cards. The 3x5s I wrote this weekend are all messed up. My handwriting is too large for the card. Hell, even my script is aging. Anyways, wrote up some of my own favorite recipes: from Joy of Cooking there were the rolled biscuits, piemento chees, and buffalo chicken wings; from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: the brioche, the pecan sticky buns, the vanilla rum cake; from I Like You the Vulgar BBQ sauce. These are recipes and techniques I've used again and again. The thought I kept in mind while writing them out was that at least now I didn't have to haul out the ten pound book. ha!

You know you are loved

when your partner spends ten days helping organize, price, and pack the family treasures with your mother & her sister.

Dave survived. He gets a gold star every day for the rest of the year just for this exercise.

Thank you, Dave

Recipe Box pictures & scanned recipes

I'm photographing & scanning recipes from the recipe box. I'll be uploading some PDFs of recipes from Pillsbury before there was a Doughboy and signed by an "Ann Pillsbury". I have lots of Knox & Princess Gelatin recipes as well.

One of my favorites so far is a recipe to extend butter.

The Recipe Box Club

My plans have changed. Originally, I was to go to Olympus Women's Spa in Tacoma for a soak, a massage and such a thorough scrub-down that your skin peels off in rolls. So, I'm using this time to write in my blog, and go through the recipe box. I plan to cook up one of the recipes & lay out the general logistics of The Recipe Box Club.

The basic premise of the Recipe Box Club is that if you care enough for how good the food tastes, you'd be willing to hand write the recipe down. There are other objectives as well. One is to end up with intimate notes on food and advice which can be handed down through your family. Another is to share good food and companionship. A third one is to carve out time to prepare something you might not give time to otherwise. There's also the point of trying foods you might not otherwise have tried, to explore recipes & cooking that you've never really done before.

The club will be invitation only. At this point, I'd say no children. The invitation should be limited to two people: the invited + guest. RSVP is mandatory so that everyone will have a committed number of guests to prepare for.

For the first meeting, I'll ask each person to bring a single, home-made item, i.e., an appetizer, a pickle or relish tray, salad w/ homemade salad dressing, entrees (how many meat & fish), drinks, desserts, (cheeses? why not?!). They'll bring the hand-written recipe on an index card. We sit down to eat. Now, here's where I haven't figured out the logistical components.

If you like the recipe, whip out your empty index cards & write it down. The original hand-written recipe will be passed to another person maybe by some sort of pre-determined rotation - like if you brought the pickles & wrote the pickles recipe, maybe that recipe gets passed to the person who brought the appetizer, the appetizer person's recipe gets passed to the salad person?

Logistically, I can see several problems. I'm open to comments and suggestions.

Should the meal have a common theme?
How many people can be seated at a table? I think this meeting will create a gathering "bigger than my breadbox" dining table (seats 6) or house. What other options are there for seating a large group of people? Church halls?
If we have to rent a church hall or something, we'll have to collect money first.
Plates, glasses, forks (I now have a plethora of those - in silver, no less!), knives (not so lucky there), etc.
If we rent a hall, will there be a kitchen available?
Clean - up

Anyways, those are my initial thoughts for the Recipe Box Club. Don't hesitate to email me if you'd like to be invited. I'm starting a list.

Heirlooms and a future

My mother is moving into an assisted living facility, so Dave & I went down to help prepare for the yard sale & finish getting her moved in. She'd gone from an 11 room house to a 4 room house without downsizing. When her mother died, Mom's sister had dutifully shipped up her 1/3 of the family heirlooms. So much of it was just going to have to go. Mom was moving into a 13x16 room and her children were well grown with houses full of their lifetime. Neither myself, nor my brothers, wanted the pickle forks, the single crystal salt cellar, the macrame doilies.

It was time to divvy up the family silver, but I needed five plate forks (no matching spoons or knives mind you, with, I might add, the name "Mary" engraved on them) added to my already full silverware drawer like I needed my grandmother's pink bathroom towels. We had fights about how to price everything from the Tupperware Salt & Peppers (vintage 1973) to the price of the rusted pick-axe found in the garage. The family Bible was overlooked, but found by a potential buyer in with the Earl Stanley Gardner paperbacks priced @ 25c. Hugging and laughing and kissing on Sunday, after the successful sale, it was time to pack up and go home after ten days of clearing out, packing, and selling the lifetimes of at least four women.

There are three items I consider my inheritance. One I received at my grandmother's death, the other two I was given last week. The first were twenty or so stories about growing up in Cuba before the Depression. She hand-wrote the stories and because I was the grandchild who asked, I received the originals. The second two items are my mother's and grandmother's recipes and books.

My grandmother's recipes are housed in this old index card holder



Which opens up to reveal a box full of mostly hand-written recipes. The earliest date I've found is 1938, but I haven't finished going through them.

The cards are hand-written, in a variety of hands. These pictures compare my mother's and her mother's. Mom rewrote her mother's notes. These were the first two cards of the index file. They're instructions as to what is a hot oven (450) and what is slow heat (250), what is a standard cup, 2 c = 1 pint, etc., the building blocks of sharing recipes. I'm going to add my 2 cards, rewriting the instructions.

This intimate gift has inspired me to begin a recipe club. What will come from this recipe club is not the printed out instructions you download from the internet, but a box of recipes, written by hand of food you note as "Delicious", or "Mother Anna (Lawton)"s Strawberry Jam, Hattie's Cranberry Jelly. It's food you cared enough to take the time, the effort to write down.

Here's how it's going to work. Meetings will be based around a full meal - appetizer, salads, drinks, entree, desserts, etc. Frankly, I've found a recipe for pickles. I think we need to relearn how to make a nice pickle. For the first go around, I'll ask you to bring one item under a single category. You'll bring your hand-made dish and a single hand-written recipe card to the "meeting." We sit down and eat. We'll swap the single hand-written recipe we brought, so all the recipes in the box won't be just in our hand, but in others' as well. After we've eaten, if you like a dish, you write recipe down on index cards.

I haven't gotten further in my planning than that. I can see where it would probably be best if there was some menu planning, as well as some plates, forks, and glasses. But I think I'll just try to set up a time and a location first. I'll send out invitations. Those who respond will be first given a "Please bring", but at the meeting, we could probably do more - possibly plan the actual menu?

I don't know the Helen Way who wrote this recipe out for Angel Pie below, but it seems like an intriguing recipe.


Here's the recipe:

Beat whites of 4 eggs until they stand in peaks. Add 1/4 t cream of tarter & beat in 1 c sugar. Sprinkle with 1 t vinegar & 1/2 t vanilla & beat a second longer. Now place mixture in buttered pie pan as smoothly as possible. Bake slowly 225 oven from 30-40, "when done remove from oven and cool slightly. Meringue will fall to form a pie crust. Now spread on 1/2 pt cream (whipped) to which sugar and sherry will have been added to taste. Grate over it Bakers bitter chocolate & let stand in refrigerator 6-12 hours.
_______
Much better if 1 t rum used in meringue in place of vinegar & rum in whipped cream & no sherry.

Helen Way