Cabbage Salad.

Well, life flies by, things come up, and one's attention gets dragged away from blogs. Fortunately, the blogs stay and wait for our renewed attention. As long as we can remember the appropriate password for the account. Which I did, eventually.

Today, a warm day, I have a recipe for a cabbage salad from Aunt Carrie's recipe box. . It's a German type of salad, with a vinegar-sugar-oil boiled dressing. The card looks well-used; it must have been a favorite. Cabbage salads and coleslaws with non-mayo dressings are great for picnics or church potlucks where they can sit out longer than mayo-based salads, which go scary and bad quickly without refrigeration.

Aunt Carrie copied this recipe from the Mennonite Weekly Review, now called Mennonite World Review, a paper for Mennonites and Anabaptists in North America. Her note at the bottom, "She adds..." is, I think, a note from the submitter of the recipe. The recipe doesn't specify how much celery seed, salt and pepper to sprinkle on the vegetable layers...off the top of my head, I'd think maybe 1/2 tsp of celery seed and salt on each layer and 1/4 tsp pepper.

This recipe also has a whopping amount of sugar and I'm wondering if it would work to cut it by 1/3 or even 1/2. Todd and I love vinegary salads, so I'll have to try this with less sugar and see how it works.

Cabbage Salad  (Menn. Weekly Review)

1 sm head cabbage, shredded

1 sm onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped

1/2 cup salad oil
1/2 cup vinegar
1 cup sugar

Arrange cabbage, onion and pepper in bowl in layers, seasoning each layer with celery seed, salt and pepper.

Combine oil, vinegar and sugar and bring to a boil. Pour hot syrup over the cabbage mixture and let stand in refrigerator over night. Do not stir until the next morning.

She adds, This is the best cabbage salad I have ever eaten, it keeps well for several days.

Tomato Soup to Can.

It's been a fast-moving summer. Lots of company and traveling and other things. Though it's technically fall now that the autumnal equinox has come and gone, here in southeastern Virginia, it still feels pretty much like summer, and will for the foreseeable future, according to my weather app.

Regardless of the temperature outside, I have been craving tomato soup, and have indulged in it a few times the past couple of weeks. Just turn your thermostat down a degree or two, and light a spicy candle, and it's easy to pretend fall is nigh.

The cusp of fall is also a time when gardens are finishing up their tomato boom, and gardeners are frantically canning and freezing their bumper crops of various vegetables. I remember many steamy August days in our non-air-conditioned house with the pressure cooker running full blast on the stove as my dad and mom worked to preserve as much as they could for the colder months. (I helped with blanching and freezing things...I was less interested in learning the intricacies of the pressure cooker. I'm still so dubious about pressure cooking, I don't even use the Instant Pot I own.)

Aunt Carrie came from a long line of gardeners and knew well how to can her garden produce. Here we have three recipes for tomato soup made for canning. If you're afraid of pressure cookers like I am, these recipes all look like they could be frozen instead--after allowing the mixtures to cool, you could ladle them into freezer bags or boxes and pop them in the freezer.

All of these recipes are fairly similar. The first two call for a peck of tomatoes, which is a measurement of volume, not weight, and which is not used much any more except at farmer's markets. (I bought a half-peck of Autumn Crisp apples when I was in Ohio two weeks ago.) A Google search will send you down a rabbit hole of peck measurements of various types of produce...for our purposes, we will go with Yahoo Answers and say that a peck of tomatoes is roughly 13 pounds.

This first recipe also refers to cold pack canning...I did a cursory search on hot pack vs. cold pack canning and frankly, my eyes glazed over, so I won't attempt to address it here. If you're interested enough to read three recipes on tomato soup to can, I'm assuming you know the difference or can figure it out for yourself!

Tomato Soup to Can

1 peck tomatoes
2 stalks celery
6 onions
1 handful parsley

Cook--put through sieve. Put on stove, heat, add 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup salt. Add 1 cup flour mixed with cold tomato sauce. Stir in till thickened. Put in jars and cold pack 20 minutes

-Shirley McDaniels

The next recipe looks like something Aunt Carrie clipped from her local newspaper when she lived in northwestern Pennsylvania. It specifies adding milk to the soup when serving to make more of a creamy soup. Yum!

Tomato Soup

1 peck tomatoes

3 large stalks celery

3 onions

1/8 cup salt

1/4 pound butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup flour

water

Cook tomatoes, celery, onions and salt. Put through sieve. Mix butter, sugar and flour, add enough water to make paste, add to tomato juice. Boil (careful not to let stick.) Pour into canning jars, put into a boiling bath. Process quarts for 20 minutes. To serve add 2 cups milk per quart.

This next recipe has the word "Budget" written next to the title--this does not mean it's a budget or economical recipe, but rather that Aunt Carrie found it in The Budget, an old and venerated newspaper that serves the Amish and conservative Mennonite communities of northeastern Ohio and beyond. You can subscribe to a national edition of The Budget for $48/year.

Of the three recipes, this one sounds the most appealing to me, probably because it has more flavor enhancers with the cloves, bay leaf, and celery salt. It also has much less sugar than the first two. You do need at least a little sugar with most tomato recipes, to cut the acidity and bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes, but 1 cup of sugar in the previous recipes sounded like a lot. On the flip side, this recipe calls for more fat, a full cup. I'm sure every cook had her own personal recipe back in the day.

I also enjoyed the direction "Cook until done." It always makes me panic a little when I see those words in an old recipe. Not helpful, lady cooks of the past! Not helpful at all!

Did you know that the # sign used to mean "pounds," not "hashtag"?? If you're over 40, you do! #tomatosoup #oldAF #loveyoumillenials

Homemade Tomato Soup 

14 pounds tomatoes
1/2 t. whole cloves
1 chopped green pepper
1 chopped onion
1 bay leaf
1/3 cup sugar
2 sticks margarine
2/3 cup flour
4 t. salt
2 t. celery salt

Combine tomatoes, onion, cloves, bay leaf and green pepper and cook until done. Place in colander. Combine sugar, margarine, flour and a small amount of water and add to tomato mixture. Add salt and celery salt and cook twenty minutes. Place into jars and seal.

Martha Unruh
Halstead, Kansas

Oatmeal cookies.

 My great-aunt Carrie's recipe box has a ton of recipes for oatmeal cookies and their various variations. And why not? Oatmeal cookies are delicious, and because oatmeal is good for you, you can kid yourself that eating a stack of them is a good dietary choice. I'm a big fan of the oatmeal cookie, with or without raisins, nuts, or chocolate chips or any combination thereof.

This first recipe is written in a different handwriting and labeled "Ruth," which leads me to believe it's from Carrie's sister-in-law, my great-aunt Ruth Shoup Weaver, who was married to Carrie's brother John. I knew Ruth slightly--she and my great-uncle John lived in the house where my Weaver great-grandparents had raised their family on Renkenberger Road outside Columbiana, Ohio. I distinctly remember going to the estate sale there when she and John moved out, because it sparked my lifelong love of estate sales and digging through other people's junk.Also, Mennonite estate sales used to be a great place to get pie by the slice, baked by all the church ladies to serve at the refreshment table. That sale may have been here I had my first taste of peach pie. A memory to savor!

Here are John and Ruth as I remember them.

And here's my great-grandparents' little farm--the house has been white for as long as I've ever known it, but apparently long ago it was a different color. Looks red to me, but I can't quite imagine my reserved Mennonite Weaver family painting a house red.

ANYWAY, oatmeal cookies. We've had a break in our hot humid July weather the past few days, and the thought of turning on the oven is almost not unbearable. So perhaps an oatmeal cookie and a glass of iced tea would be appealing today...care to join me?

Aunt Ruth's Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup raisins
2 cups oatmeal
2 eggs
2 cups flour
1 cup sour milk
salt, soda, cinnamon- 1 tsp. each

Bake at 350 degrees; makes about 5 dozen. Note: could add 1 cup chocolate chips.

The method of mixing is not included here, but with these kinds of cookies, you want to cream together the fat and sugar, and then mix in the eggs, raisins and oatmeal. Then I'd mix the dry ingredients together and add them alternately with the sour milk, which you can make by adding a splash of white vinegar to a scant cup of milk, if you don't have any milk that has soured on its own. No baking time is indicated here, but I find 10-12 minutes is a good guideline for cookies of this type, depending on how big you scoop them.

If you're like me, you buy bananas and you throw away bananas. Occasionally, you may eat one, but mostly it's just buy them and throw them away. It's frustrating! Sometimes I toss the over-ripe ones in the freezer, thus adding another step to the buying and throwing away process.

But every so often I get the energy to use up some bananas, so if you have a few on the counter and some spare energy, consider a banana oatmeal cookie.

Banana Oatmeal Cookies

1 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 t. baking soda
1/4 t. ground nutmeg
1 t. salt
3/4 t. ground cinnamon
3/4 c. shortening
1 egg well beaten
1 cup mashed ripe bananas (2 or 3 bananas.) Use fully ripe ones.
1 3/4 cups rolled quick-cooking oats
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Sift together the flour, sugar, soda, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon into mixing bowl. Cut in shortening.

Add egg, bananas, rolled oats and nuts. Beat until thoroughly blended. Drop by teaspoonfuls, about 1 1/2 inch apart, into greased cookie pans. Bake in a moderately hot oven (400 degrees) for about 15 minutes or until cookies are done. Remove from pan immediately.

This recipe was clipped from a newspaper, one from the area where Aunt Carrie grew up (and I did, too) in northeast Ohio. Leetonia is the small town where my husband grew up and where he and I both attended high school. I think the submitter, Mrs. Ervin Miller, may have been a conservative Mennonite wife from one of the farms around Leetonia.

Red Raspberry Salad.

I've been wanting to recreate one of Aunt Carrie's recipes and finally got some time after dinner this evening. This is one of the tastier-sounding ones, a raspberry Jello "salad" clipped from the newspaper and pasted to a 3x5" card.









Red Raspberry Salad

1 package raspberry or strawberry gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1 cup applesauce
1 package frozen raspberries or strawberries
1 cup sour cream
1 cup miniature marshmallows

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add applesauce and frozen fruit. When softened, let set until firm.

Combine sour cream and marshmallows, and let set for one hour. Whip with electric mixer, then spread over chilled gelatin. Let set overnight.

As is the case with many older recipes, there's a frustrating vagueness here. What size Jello package? What size frozen fruit package? What size pan to put it all in, for that matter?

Looking at the other ingredient amounts given, I figured that the package of Jello called for was the standard 3-ounce size, and that the pan would probably be an 8x8" dish. I don't know what the size of the frozen fruit package would have been...I seem to recall seeing fruit sold in 10-ounce packages years ago, but the small sizes seem to have gone away.

I am notorious for being a recipe tweaker, meaning I can never make a recipe exactly the way it's written. I usually think I know better--and in all modesty, I am usually right! But I decided to make this exactly as written....with one change. Not a big one! I just doubled it. So: a 6-ounce package of Jello (with Ironman on the front because apparently the Avengers are selling Jello now), a 16-ounce package of fruit because that seems to be the standard size now, and I poured it into an attractive white oval dish I have that is roughly equivalent to a 9x13" pan. Doubled, the ingredients are:

1 6-ounce package of raspberry or strawberry Jello
2 cups boiling water.
2 cups applesauce (I used unsweetened)
1 16-ounce package frozen raspberries or strawberries
2 cups (16-oz container) sour cream (I used reduced-fat)
2 cups miniature marshmallows

I chose raspberries (and raspberry Jello) because I love them just a little more than I love strawberries (but not by much.) My grocery store also had a mixed bag of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries that would make an amazing dessert, but I was trying to stick to the recipe (for once.)

The topping for this dish is a little weird. I've looked at many vintage Jello "salad" recipes, and I truly have never seen a topping of marshmallows dissolved and whipped in sour cream. I thought it sounded intriguing. You need to let the mixture sit for at least an hour before whipping it with the mixer, so the marshmallows can break down. I was impatient and so there are some small lumps of marshmallow in my topping, but they may dissolve completely as it sits in the fridge overnight. We'll try this for our Fourth of July lunch tomorrow and I'll update the taste test then.

I think some finely chopped pecans or pistachios would look lovely scattered across the topping. I might add those later.

UPDATE: We enjoyed some raspberry salad after a hot day outside on the Fourth of July. I kept expecting the sour cream/marshmallow mixture to taste like Cool Whip for some reason, but after my taste buds adjusted, I found it enjoyable. The marshmallows sweetened the sour cream slightly, but it remained tangy, and was a nice contrast to the sweet Jello. My husband said it was "delicious and refreshing," and also "a little seedy." Which was true--we don't eat seeded fruits like raspberries too often even though I do love them. (I have a little diverticulitis problem.) I didn't find the raspberry seeds too obtrusive, though. We would recommend it for a hot summer day!

American Cookery, December 1942.

.

Part of me is disturbed at posting these American Cookery magazines out of chronological order, but since I'm just grabbing and scanning, that's how it goes! For those who are new to my blog, I picked up a small stack of American Cookery magazines at an antique store about twenty years ago. They're all from the World War II years, and seem to be a real rarity. I've only ever seen one from this era on Ebay, and I bought it. I am slowly scanning each issue, since they are literally falling apart and crumbling away and certainly won't last another twenty years

In December 1942, America had been at war for one year. The angel cookies on the front cover certainly look a little dispirited, with their bowed heads. Their recipe is on page 173: a basic roll-out molasses and spice cookie. Wartime food issues come up here and there--we learn how to "Save with Margarine" on page 189 and we hear about "America's Problem Child, Coffee" on page 192. Margarine is plugged as a nutritious alternative to butter, as it is made from skim milk and has added vitamins, and dark roast coffee is recommended as a way to get more flavor bang for your buck with this wartime luxury drink.

On page 172, we are asked, "Are YOU a GOOD COOK?" with a ten-question quiz. I've never mastered an apple pie, and I don't know 25 ways to use biscuit dough, but I feel I'm a pretty good cook regardless. How about YOU??

This issue is full of interesting tidbits: packing school lunches for the "Five Little Rolands" (page 180), a tribute to the 1943 Grandma model (page 166), pictures of "An Old-Fashioned Taffy Pull (page 190), and "Christmas at Cross Creek" by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a prominent writer of the time, describing a Florida Christmas at her home (page 168.) Be sure to look at all the little ads and sidebars, they provide a lot of chuckles and information. Click any page to enlarge the image; you can then click through the magazine.