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.
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Much better if 1 t rum used in meringue in place of vinegar & rum in whipped cream & no sherry.

Helen Way