Life

The Favorite Foods of Dead Relatives and Long-Lost Friends

Cooking was different before Google

If you want to cook something special now, you just google the name of the dish you have in mind.

Dozens of recipes for whatever you want pop up, and you prop your phone on the kitchen counter so you can follow the recipe.

It’s not as easy as it should be, because before you can read the ingredients and instructions, you have to read an endless essay by the would-be influencer who wants to tell you all her deepest feelings about onions and why she recommends a certain brand of olive oil. (Spoiler: It’s because she makes a few cents when you click her affiliate links.)

Also, of course, there are pop-up ads galore just to irritate the living crap out of you.

It didn’t used to be this way.

Pre-internet, there were two ways to find a recipe. One, you looked through your cookbooks. Two, you looked through your recipe file. You’d have actual recipes, hand-written by your aunt or your neighbor, with instructions on how to make that one dish you had at her house that one time.

I love my recipe file. I seldom actually use any of the recipes, but it’s a time capsule.

In it are recipes from many relatives who died long ago as well as recipes from the friends I had in my young-mom years. Most of them moved away years ago — this was pre-Facebook, so we’ve lost touch.

A lot of these cards came from my wedding shower in 1987. All the ladies in the church basement were given an index card and invited to contribute a recipe to me. They all wrote something out by hand. I still have every single one of these recipes.

I don’t think I ever made a single dish from those recipes. It doesn’t matter, though. I have hung onto them for 35 years anyway. Most of those ladies have since died, and I’m glad to have a card they wrote for me.

My mom’s fried potatoes

My mom thought I was a little too big for my culinary britches and during that shower, she contributed a recipe for something she made all the time but which she knew I thought was too unhealthy: fried potatoes. I treasure it because she died in 1997 and I only have a few things in her handwriting.

I still don’t cook them because yes, they are too unhealthy.

Carrie’s Rolls

When I went to college, my first campus job was working at food service. There was a lady named Carrie who made all the desserts and pastries, and I quite often worked with her in her little nook. Every Sunday, she made these rolls.

I have never made this recipe, because who needs 60 rolls? If you do, have at it. I remember that they were delicious.

Oatmeal Sausage

Grandma Mueller, my dad’s mother, used to make something called oatmeal sausage. She’d press it into a baking dish, but back on the day when she lived on the farm, I believed she stuffed it into sausage casings.

I have no idea what kind of meat she used, so I have never made this. I truly meant to give it a whirl as a teen, but here I am in my 50s and haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I remember it as tasting good.

Whiskey Sour

I can’t remember the name of the friend who wrote this out for me during a mom’s group playdate, but I do remember her husband was a medical student.

I never actually look up the recipe. I always just free-hand it.

Just what the doctor ordered.

Pig Lickin’ Cake

I have seen this exact same recipe called Hawaiian Wedding Cake in a recipe book put out by a local fancy-schmancy boutique.

My grandfather’s second wife, Dot, made this cake and it is sublime. I am usually too much of a food snob to use ingredients like instant pudding, but I have to admit this cake is wonderful no matter what you call it.

Would you serve this to your guests as Hawaiian Wedding Cake or Pig Lickin’ Cake?

Spinach Balls

A friend of mine ate a lot of this during one of her pregnancies. It was how she got her greens down despite morning sickness that lasted all day.

These are actually delicious and I need to make them.

Oatmeal Cookies

On the flip side of the Spinach Balls recipe I have her Oatmeal Cookies recipe.

This is my go-to oatmeal cookie recipe. It makes a huge batch, so you can easily divide the dough and make some plain and some with add-ins.

The next time you need to make a bunch of cookies, make these.

There are so many other recipes I wish I had.

I wish I could ask my mom to explain exactly how she made such good sage dressing for Thanksgiving. I’ve never had any as delicious as hers. Nor are my egg noodles as good as hers. She didn’t have recipes for these things. She just made them.

Yes, there are amazing cooking sites, and there are several I keep going back to — the New York Times has very good recipes. For desserts, you can’t beat Sally’s Baking Addiction. You will never eat a better chocolate cake than this one.

(Pig Lickin’ Cake might even be better.)

There’s something to be said for family recipes that are handed down.

The reason my paternal grandma made oatmeal sausage, I am sure, is as a way to make use of scrappy bits of a pig after butchering one on the farm. All that oatmeal must have made the meat go a lot further. She had a big family to feed.

The reason my mother and her mother cooked fried potatoes so often was because they were cheap. My great-grandfather — my mother’s father’s father — took fried potatoes for his lunch every single day.

He worked on the railroad, and my great-grandmother would get up very early to fry potatoes before sending him off to work. In winter, they’d be cold, with congealed fat. Sometimes they were frozen and he had to chip them apart. He ate them anyway.

So don’t be so picky about your lunch. It could be worse.

I can remember my mother’s mother, Alberta Berry, making my grandfather’s breakfast. He was a big, strong logger, and he could put down a lot of food. He’d eat a huge mound of fried potatoes, a couple of fried eggs, one or two fried pork chops and a can of pinto beans. Plus coffee.

He ate that big breakfast every morning.

Grandma Berry could cut up potatoes faster than you can imagine. She did it every morning and often at night as well, so she certainly got plenty of practice.

I don’t know what dish my kids and grandkids will associate with me, but I suspect whatever it is, they’ll probably consider it too old-fashioned to eat.

About Michelle Teheux:

I’m a writer and editor in central Illinois. Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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