Posted on 05/28/2011 6:28:45 AM PDT by libertarian27
Welcome to the 25th installment of the FR Weekly Cooking (Recipes) Thread.
Looking for something new to make or made something new that came out great? Please share a 'tried-and-true' recipe or two - or all of them:)! for fellow FReepers to add to their 'go-to' Recipe Stack of Family Favorites!
Here's the place to share and explore your next favorite recipe.
Beat me to it. Everyone should have an old Betty Crocker cookbook.
Key word being OLD. I have a new one and an old one and the old one is great. The new one is not nearly as good as the old one.
Three other great old cookbooks to pick up are “The Joy of Cooking”, “Better Homes and Gardens” and “Fannie Farmer Cookbook”. Look for copyright dates from the 1940’s or earlier on old cookbooks. They are far better than the everyday cookbooks out there today for simple everyday meals made from scratch.
My Better Homes and Garden’s cookbook is from 1949 and is a 3 ring binder style book. This style of cookbook made it easy for home cooks to add their own receipes to the cookbook, so often these cookbooks will have lots of extra recipes in them as well.
Garage sales, especially in retirement communities, are great places to pick up old cookbooks. They are usually really cheap too.
May 28 - National Brisket Day
Salute! :-]
all I have is sirloin and rib-eye for this week-end..
it’ll have to do.
After my last post I got the idea to go look through the box of my mother’s old cookbooks, that I had saved after she died. I plan on passing them on to my daughters when they get married or move out on their own.
I looked to see if my mother had any extra recipes in her Better Homes and Garden’s cook book and found some beautifully typed up pages added in to many of the sections. The pages were all cut to mimic the actual pages in the cookbook,and were so perfectly matched to the original pages in the cookbook, that you never would have known they were there until you actually looked through each section of recipes. The dividers for each section are thick and stiff like a pressboard file, and larger than the recipe pages in the cookbook, so you can’t just flip through this cookbook, by fanning the pages.
My mother had many of her recipes in her head, by the time I was old enough to help cook, so she rarely consulted a cook book. In her senior years my sisters and I had asked her to write down some of her cake recipes that we remembered from our youth, but she couldn’t remember them and didn’t remember where she had gotten them, or if they were written down anywhere.
Needless to say, once I realized that there were her typed up pages hidden in the cook book, I immediately turned to the cake section and lo and behold, there were the cake recipes I remembered from my child hood. I will get them all typed up on my computer and share them on this thread as I get them completed.
Good old general purpose flour works just fine.
PUERCO PIBIL (My today’s version - varies everytime I make it.)
Grind together until very fine:
2.5 tbs annatto seeds (should be 5 tbs but I ran out - for color, really.)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tbs allspice
1 tbs whole cloves
1 tbs peppercorns
1 tsp oregano
8 pounds pork butt cut up into cubes (throw the bones in, too, and remove them when cooking is complete)
3/4 c orange juice
3/4 c lime juice
3/4 c white vinegar
8 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbs salt
2 bay leaves
1 (ONLY!) habanero pepper, diced (remove the veins and seeds!)
1 onion chopped
BIG splash of Tequila
Throw together in a roasting pan and bake for 4-5 hours at 350 degrees until the meat shreds.
Transfer to dutch oven and keep warm next to campfire at family boatlanding campsite with plenty of buns, beer, and other good foods.
Not sure how mamy it’ll feed but expecting at least ten people will be able to pork out on it.
Remembering America’s best this Memorial Day!
A very big thanks to the person that posted the Upside Down Pizza recipe. It’s become a family favorite. I’ve made it 4 times already!
I wanted to do an artichoke chicken pizza. I didn’t like any of the recipes I was finding so I came up with my own. My daughter absolutely loved it and so did I.
Upside down Artichoke Chicken pizza
1 lb Chicken breasts, chopped
2 jars marinated artichoke hearts, chopped, reserve liquid
butter
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 small can sliced mushrooms, reserve liquid
1 C mayonaise
8 oz cream cheese, very softened (tip: place by hot pan while sauteing)
3/4 C parmesean
Mozzerella, shredded (1 small package- 2C or more as desired)
dash Worchester Sauce
dash lemon juice
dough:
1 1/8 C flour (eyeball 1/2 of a 1/4 C)*
1 1/4 C milk*
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp oil
parsley
Saute onions in butter until translucent. Add garlic and briefly saute (don’t burn it), add chicken, and artichoke hearts and mushrooms, both with their liquid, and Worchester sauce. Cover and cook till chicken is done and tender.
In the meantime, mix dough and add a few dashes of parsley (if desired). Stir 20 times and let rest. Mix mayo, cream cheese, Parmesan and lemon.
Drain chicken mixture very well. Place in 13x9 pan, cover with cheese mixture. Top with mozzerella, then spread dough on top. Cook at 425* for 20-30 min.
*Original recipe called for 1 C of flour and milk. I tweaked the dough to make it a little easier to spread and cover all the top.
After typing up the first of the recipes I realized that my mother had no cooking temperatures or cooking times on most of her typed up cake recipes. They also don’t say what size pan to use, and many other things we take for granted in recipes today. Some are nothing more than a list of ingredients with no instructions whatsoever.
I am going to have to actually cook them a time or two to make sure they turn out correctly before I actually share them with all of you, so it may be several weeks before I get them all posted to the list. Fortunately, I helped my mother make these cakes when I was little, so now that I have the ingredient lists, I should be able to figure out the cooking times and the appropriate size pan.
Of course my mother often doubled the recipes so that a square 8x8 pan recipe could fill a 9x13 size cake pan, so I really need to mix up the batter to be able to judge what size pan is best for the recipe and bake them first to make sure I am doing it correctly.
I took out some butter to soften and I am going to try to make her applesauce cake this weekend, since this was one of my favorite cakes as a child. I made this one a lot of times with my mother as a child, since it was my father’s favorite cake as well, so it should be the easiest one for me to figure out.
In reading through all the cake recipes I found that one recipe calls for speck salt and salt. Does any one know what speck salt is? My guess is that speck salt might be coarse Kosher salt, since I remember having a coarse Kosher salt in the house that we used when we were making pickles or curing fish, and I know it could be used for curing meats as well. The only definitions I could find for speck all refer to cured meat.
Thanks!
I have my mom’s old Betty Crocker cookbook from the 50s (I believe...I don’t have it here at work)
Some great old time recipes. Next time I’m down in California (working in Alaska) I’ll have to bring it back with me.
Very cool. Look forward to the recipes.
Searching google “Speck salt” is salt used to cure ham (or speck in German)
I think we must have found the same link on Google. I am assuming at this point that it is the coarse Kosher salt my mother used for making pickles, curing meats, etc. My mother was 3/4 German and 1/4 Swiss, although she and her parents were all born here in the United States.
Her grandmother had been raised on a pig farm in Germany and emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1884. My mother learned a lot of her cooking skills from her mother and her German born grandmother, so it would make sense that my mother would refer to the coarse Kosher salt as speck salt.
I have had this winter fruit salad mad with vanilla pudding, and it’s great, too.
MADE not mad. Oops.
Someone was looking for pickle recipes a few weeks ago, but I don’t remember who it was. I already posted “Sue’s Dill Pickles” which was the dill pickle recipe we used when we made them when I was growing up. I just found the bread and Butter pickle recipe we used on one of my mother’s typed sheets and it is complete. Here it is:
Bread and Butter Pickles
6 quarts sliced cucumbers
1 1/2 quarts sliced onions
1 ½ quarts white vinegar
3 ½ cups white sugar
½ cup Mustard Seed
¼ cup Celery Seed
½ cup Pickling Spice
¼ cups olive oil or good salad oil
Slice the cucumbers and onions and let stand overnight in a weak brine (1/4 c salt to each quart of water). Drain. Mix all other ingredients and bring to a boil in a large pot. Add the cucumbers and onions and bring again just to the boiling point, but do not actually boil. Seal in jars. These keep well in sealed jars, but need to be eaten quickly once opened.
You’re added to the ping list!
My mother used to make the best coleslaw, and a pickled cabbage salad (this is not sauerkraut). I have never been able to duplicate them to my satisfaction. Now I see why, this must be the dressing she always made. This recipe also appears to be complete.
Dressing for Pickled Cabbage Salad
2 eggs, beaten
2 TBS. Sugar
Butter the size of an egg
1 tsp. mustard
Pepper
1 cup vinegar
Cook in a double boiler or on very low heat like custard until thickened.
Variation: For a creamy Cole slaw dressing, substitute ½ cup cream and ½ cup vinegar for the 1 cup of vinegar.
This Coffee Cake recipe of my mother’s also appears to be complete:
Quick Coffee Cake
2 cups Sifted Flour
2 Tsp. Baking Powder
¾ Tsp. Salt
½ cup Sugar
6 Tbs. Butter or other shortening
1 Egg, well beaten
½ cup Milk
1 ½ Tbs.Melted Butter
4 Tbs. Sugar
1 Tbs. Flour
½ Tsp. Cinnamon
Sift flour once. Measure out your 2 cups of flour. Sift again with baking powder, salt, and sugar. Mix well and then cut in butter or shortening. Combine egg and milk and add to the flour mixture until blended. Turn dough into a greased 9 in layer pan (she used a 9 inch round cake pan for this), spreading dough out evenly. Brush with melted butter. Sprinkle the dough with a mixture of the sugar flour and cinnamon. Bake in a hot, 400 degree oven for 25 – 30 minutes. Cut into wedges while still in the pan.
Thx, those will be neat to see!
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