Cookbooks cram my kitchen bookcase. The titles change
constantly as I replace old volumes with examples that reflect my current
culinary interests. But standing tall between newer, more colorful covers is a
shabby, spineless, stained, and tattered old volume known in the family as “the
old black cookbook.” It is the one thing my oldest daughter, Robin, asked for
when she got married. It is the one thing I had to deny her, although I later
found a copy in an antique store and sent it to her.
It took a while for me to figure out why I couldn’t part
with it. My mother had given me the cookbook when I got married. Officially
titled the Good Housekeeping Cook Book, it had taught me most of what I
knew about cooking. I could flip it open to any topic without referring to the
index. Many of its recipes were old favorites. But my attachment went deeper
than that. Family memories, I realized, were stuck to its pages with fruit
juice and shortening and sugar, more evocative than any album of photographs.
The cookbook was a twenty-five-year chronicle of our lives.
A dozen more years have passed, but the cookbook is still
on the shelf. I slip it into my hands, and it falls open to pages that make me
smile. Did I ever really need a recipe for pot roast or pork chops? In the
earliest days of marriage, of course, we had little money for such luxuries.
The festive recipes then included hamburger or chicken or fish, all terribly
cheap. Daily fare most often featured rice or macaroni or cheese. A quick flip
to the cheese pages, and I am transported to a time before children arrived, to
a place far away: to a time and a place where these recipes for Welsh Rabbit
and Cheese-Onion Pie were in constant use. And here is the old favorite “payday
special” (meaning the day before payday) — Baked Cheese Pudding. I see
my notations that halve the ingredients to make the recipe suitable for two.
I leap ahead a few pages and a decade of time, and I’m in
“eggs” — a section that saw heavy use during the years that my younger
daughter, Erin, raised chickens in 4H. Nearly every recipe on these pages is
familiar, from Deviled Eggs to Eggs Divan, from Eggs Foo Young to omelets. I
flip to the dessert section and find the recipes for eclairs and custards that
saved us from total inundation not only by eggs, but by milk. Those were also
the years that both girls raised dairy goats.
The kitchen aromas
of that period seem to waft from these pages: the sour scent of milk being made
into cheese or yogurt; the sweet fruity smells of peaches, blackberries,
strawberries, raspberries, or plums, bubbling into jams and jellies; pungent
cinnamon and cloves in simmering apple butter; soups and rich stews fragrant
with our home-grown tomatoes, corn, peas, snap beans, potatoes, onions, garlic,
and herbs; the mouth-watering aroma of baking bread; the savory scent of the spicy ketchup I simmered on the stove all
day, half-gone from “sampling” by the time it was done. The old black cookbook
was often open on the counter, its pages dusted with flour or spattered with
fruit. The pages of the pie section are among the most soiled and heavily used, a
testimonial to holidays with memories encrusted in pumpkin and mince meat and
apples. Among the cake recipes I find old birthdays, bake sales, grange
dinners, potlucks, company meals.
Drop it, and the old black cookbook flops open at the
cookie pages. I must have baked these brownies and chocolate chip cookies
hundreds of times. My notes run alongside, doubling the ingredients. The page with
the huge brown splot was Erin’s doing, a spill during her first experiments
with baking.
Freezing, canning, carving, converting — I learned them
all from this book, and passed what I learned to my daughters. And although I
rarely refer to it these days, the old black cookbook has a permanent place on
my shelves.
Baked Cheese Pudding
(from Good Housekeeping Cookbook: Holt, Rhinehart and
Winston, 1955. Some ingredients have been changed - such as cheddar instead of processed (ugh) cheese)
[Note: add
chopped onion, bell pepper, dill, or parsley to taste.]
Heat oven to 325ยบ
6 bread slices, cut into 1 ½” squares
½ lb. cheddar cheese
3 eggs
½ t. salt
½ t. Paprika
1/4 t. dry or prepared mustard
2½ C. milk, or 1-1/4 C. evaporated milk plus 1-1/4 C.
water
Few slices stuffed olives (optional)
In greased 1 ½ quart casserole, arrange alternate layers
of bread and cheese, ending with cheese. Beat eggs till frothy; stir in rest of
ingredients; pour over cheese. Bake, uncovered, 1 hr. Makes 6 servings
