Family Recipes

I'm really bad at this. I'm not sure how deep our "family recipe" bench is; most of it goes to my mom, who was a much more adventurous, ambitious cook than her mom was. My maternal grandmother made all this German, Wisconsin stuff, though, and I'd like to try my hand at some of it. Apparently there's one that's just cuts of pork slow simmered in sauerkraut and beer in the oven all day. They don't even really have a name for it, but I had it once when I was up there a few years back and it was pretty damned tasty.

My Dad's mother was a notoriously terrible cook.
I've gone on here before about my love of all the stock 1970s casseroles my mom used to make: King Ranch, Chicken Divan, Mexican Lasagna, etc. Beef or meatball stroganoff with egg noodles.
The big gap is all the cookies my mom makes. She makes these very simple, soft buttermilk cookies with a thick butter cream frosting topping and they are my favorite things in the world. There's also her gingerbread cookies at Christmas, in fact these may go back to her family.

There is almost no cooking tradition in my family.  My parents were Baby Boomers, raised in the Midwest by mothers who happily embraced mid-century convenience foodstuffs.  My memories of both of my grandmothers' cooking are... not good.  ("Gee, plain baked swordfish steak with Hellman's tartar sauce?  Nana, you shouldn't have.")  My mother hated to cook, and was serviceable in a "supported heavily by Stouffer's frozen stuff" kind of way.  My dad was an eager cook, but he was often too busy to be in the kitchen, and when he did find the time he relied heavily on a "Betty Crocker's Cookbook" from the late '70s.  When I try to tap into nostalgic foods from my childhood (Dad's famous "Chicken Glop" being the one we all requested on our birthdays; think lots of cream of chicken soup), I'm normally trying to figure out how to make heavily processed foods from scratch.  So in that regard, I don't have really any family recipes.

Except for this one:



I have no idea how old that scribbled recipe is (although I distinctly remember the pad the paper came from; we used to have those all over the house for scratch paper and "there are four small children living here, and they want to draw on things.  Quick!  Give that one a pad of paper!", and it's really taking me back thinking about them right now), but it's from Gram, my mother's mother.  Gram died 20 years ago, and was gone to Alzheimer's long before that, so I'm guessing that bit of scrap paper is at least 30 years old.  It's her spice cookie recipe, and believe you me -- it is NOT Christmas until there's been at least three batches of these (the yield is about 7,480 cookies per batch) consumed.  

When made properly, they are unevenly-shaped, homely, dry-looking cookies.  On first bite they seem bland and dull.  But then the flavor settles.  And suddenly you realize they are perfection.  They actually seem to hover somewhere between being a dessert-y cookie and an almost biscuit-y snack, feel-wise.  Not too sweet, not at all salty, just the right kiss of holiday spice flavor, with a cozy crumb and a perfect balance of substantial toothiness and light-as-air quality.  And that's when you go in for more, and more, and more.  There is no such thing as just one, two, or three of these cookies.  They demand being eaten by the handful.  And I've never seen anything like them on any other holiday table.

Because my grandmother was such a notably awful cook, though, I have to assume this recipe came from the back of the oleo container or something at some point in the olde days.  Or maybe it was my great-grandmother's recipe?  Who knows.  My grandparents were not ones to tell us much about their families, so the Dick n Hisses Family Archive is, alas, a sparse one.

::SCRIBBLES DOWN NOTES::

I am totally intrigued by this tomato sauce!  And next time I make a stuffed pasta (shells seems like the most realistic possibility, if we're being honest), I'm trying that filling.  It sounds like such a subtle tweak to the expected!  Thanks, Great-Grandma Shulkie!

For my grandmother's (I think) 90th birthday, my aunt typed up a bunch of old family recipes and had them bound into a cookbook, and had copies made up for a bunch of family members (including me), and this is an absolutely invaluable resource, even if some of the instructions are astonishingly vague.

Ha, this could just about describe the pfefferneusse, which are small, brown and very dry and boring looking. And then people start eating them and can't stop. Which is good, because even my half recipe makes exactly 5,432 cookies. (OK maybe a little less than that.)

Just be very careful with the cloves. You only need three or four - any more than that and you'll regret it. But yes, this would also work with stuffed shells! 

Oh, it's called schweinundbierundsauerkrauten!

Just rolls off the tongue, down the throat, and into the stomach.

You know, I was thinking about the similarities between your pfefferneusse and my spice cookies, and suddenly I'm wondering if this family recipe didn't come from Boomer's dad's side.  Boomer's mother was from a very, very Irish family, but her dad, who died when Boomer was 16, was from a very, very German family.  So perhaps these cookies, which seem to have some pfefferneusse-adjacent qualities, are some bastardization of a cookie also with German origin?

I KNOW EVERYONE ELSE HERE IS VERY INTERESTED IN THIS.  

You can find recipes for it online, but like I said, those tend to be on the cheesier side.  I liked the slightly sweeter, more desert-y type. I'll find my recipe for it and post it here. I'll try to do that tomorrow. 

I've eaten a lot of "boiled dinners" in my life, a meal so minimal and so ancient it would hardly count as a "recipe". Basically, you take a piece of salt pork (or salt beef if you're fancy) and throw it in a pot with turnip, potatoes and carrots cut into large pieces (sometimes cabbage too), then boil the fuck out of it. Sometimes smoked pork "picnic" shoulder is used for the protein, if it was on sale. Serve with mustard. I have not actually made this dish since I moved out of my parent's home because life is too short to eat terrible food.

What I *do* like to make is fishcakes. Rinse and soak salt cod overnight changing the water as often as you can, add to leftover mashed potatoes, stir in an egg as a binder, season with pepper and form into patties. Put a frying pan on medium low heat and throw in a large knob of butter. When melted, add the patties and fry until the side has become golden brown, about too many fucking minutes (really, it takes for-fucking-ever). Add more butter if necessary and flip the patties, cooking the other side the same way. Serve with green tomato green tomato chow or ketchup. These fishcakes are delicious but making it stinks so I can never make it at home - I did make it on the boat last week.

When I was a baby, there wasn't such a thing as "formula". My bottles were filled with watered down Carnation Evaporated Milk. This wasn't a tradition I carried on for my daughter.

I made my Mom's Chicken Divan recipe the other night. This is one of those good old 1970s recipes that uses some sort of cream of something (in this case chicken) soup as a binder, then lots of breadcrumbs and cheese over it. To give it a twang, a little bit of mayo goes into the sauce. I know it sounds disgusting, but it works, and you'd never guess it was in there. Also curry powder to give it an accent. Serve over rice. The whole house smelled amazing and even my broccoli-averse daughter licked her plate clean. No comment on my son, though.

After dinner I looked up the original chicken divan, which is chicken, broccoli, and mornay sauce (bechamel with cheese folded in). Honestly, the rip-off version I made sounds much better.

The bulk of the food I ate as a child either came out of a can or box (if my mom cooked) or gotten from Julia Roberts or Yan Can Cook or that drunk French guy who'd be like "A little wine for ze chicken...and a little wine for me," or some other TV cooking person (if my dad cooked) so we didn't have much in the way "old family recipes," save for Šišky (Slovak doughnut/fried dough things) that my great-great-grandmother brought over from the old country and we cook around Christmas time to this day. I don't recall ever leaving cookies for Santa Claus in my youth, but we would leave out a couple of these bad boys for Ol' Saint Nick every Christmas Eve.



I honestly never knew the real name of them until ten minutes ago since we called them G.G. donuts. G.G. was apparently what I called my great-grandmother as an infant and the name stuck, and since she was the one making the donuts they became G.G. donuts. We still have a copy of the handwritten (in some random Slavic language none of us can read) recipe that my great-great-grandmother (G.G.G. under standard naming conventions) among our meager collection of family heirlooms.

I won't give you our recipe, but some lady on the internet posted a recipe which is more or less exactly the same as what we'd do (though we'd usually forgo the dollop of jam on the top of the donut and just dust them with sugar).

We ate what my mom called "hamburger gravy" and rice a lot when I was a kid - it was basically ghetto stroganoff. Totally brown mush. But salty, delicious brown mush. And yeah, it was basically minced onion, hamburger, and cream of something soup.

Sadly I'd count myself in the "don't really have any" camp.

My paternal grandmother/father were poor First Nations/Metis and didn't really have any family heritage of cooking. Somewhere along the line grandma picked up a knack for making amazing shortbread, that's not so much a recipe as a technique though.

My maternal grandfather was prairie farmboy of cornish descent (i.e. did not cook) and my grandmother was his brit war bride who grew up in the depression/wartime and pretty much embodied the English rep for blandness. She could make a really nice sunday roast dinner but that's about all I can really point at as a standout of her cooking. Once she got over here she fell into the 50/60s terrible cooking that pretty much everyone had.

My dad worked in a pizza place for a while and still makes a pretty good pizza dough and caesar salad but that's about it cooking wise, my mom is a decent cook when she puts in the effort but tends to go pretty lazy a lot of the time.

-

At this point a lot of the "family recipes" are actually things I started making and have spread amongst my extended family. Actually if we include my extended family my aunt married a guy of icelandic descent and learned how to make vinarterta. I have yet to make it myself but I do have the recipe somewhere for the distant future. It's become such a christmas tradition that I can't imagine not having it every year...