Endangered Receipts

There was a time when salads almost always started with gelatin. Lime, orange, strawberry, or just plain.

You could top with whipped cream and nuts if you were really extravagant. If you didn't use gelatin, the next choice usually had something to do with fruit cocktail and mayonnaise.

We've come a long way to arugula.

This is on my mind today because I've been cooking all weekend, and because I've just stumbled on an old cookbook hiding amongst the Cooking Lights.

The pages are brown, and the edges flake when I turn it. In its fragile pages are handwritten recipes my mom wanted to keep: a white cake recipe with three tablespoons of B.P. I take that to mean baking powder, something we rarely use today if we can get a self-rising mix. There's a congealed salad recipe that starts with orange jello, also written in her hand. And in the hand of Aunt Lou, long dead, a recipe for Mama Finch's chocolate pie.

My mother was a wonderful cook, and I've inherited her love of food, if not her talent and time. This well-used paperback cookbook, now without its covers, reminds me of the smells and industry of her busy kitchen as she cleverly--and economically--whipped up meals for five hungry kids.

For the young who read this post, who vaguely remember a time before Iron Chef and Hell's Kitchen, here's an ironic reminder of the past. I leave you with a recipe from this venerable book:

To serve 100 guests (by special request)

Three and a half pounds of coffee

Six gallons cocoa made from three gallons each of milk and water and one pound cocoa

Four pounds of loaf sugar

Five gallons of oysters

260 sandwiches made from 16 loaves bread and four pounds butter

30 pounds ham to boil and slice

10 medium-sized cabbages for cold slaw

20 pies

18 quarts ice cream

10 four-pound chickens and 30 heads of celery for salad

Five quarts of dressing for salad

Bon appetit!