For hungry babies...and hungry baby pigs.

This is my great-aunt Carrie's recipe box. It's a carved wooden box that she bought from Ten Thousand Villages, a group of shops begun by a Mennonite woman to sell the works of artisans in poor countries here in the United States. This particular box was made in India.

Carrie Elizabeth Weaver Morris was born in 1916 and died in 2011. She was my grandma's older sister. I didn't know her well, but saw her every couple of years when she and her husband would come to visit my grandparents or at family reunions. When Carrie went into a nursing home a number of years before she died, she gave a few of her belongings to my grandma, who spread them out on her kitchen table and invited some of us assorted family members to take what we wanted. I picked up the box.

The recipes in the box cover a wide span of years, I think. The most recent date on a card is 1993. The oldest look to be at least 30 years older than that. Some of them are very well-used, others look cleaner though yellowed with time.

I suspect that this wasn't Carrie's only recipe repository. If she was at all like me, she had cards and papers and cookbooks and maybe even a folder or binder or two, scattered in various spots in and near the kitchen. The recipes are heavy on cookies and desserts, lighter on meats and salads, and full of interesting oddities. I thought I'd kick things off with two of the more amusing ones.

For Hungry Babies:



1 oz. Pet or Carnation milk
2 oz. boiled water
1/2 teaspoon Karo

-Dr. Moorehead

I think Carrie may have longed for children much of her life. She married at age 38, and for whatever reason, the babies did not come. In middle age, she and her husband Paul adopted a little boy named John, but he was early toddler age when they adopted him, so probably would not have needed formula. Carrie may have written down this recipe to use for her many nieces and nephews when she went to help their mothers after the latest baby arrived.

This looks like a fairly common baby formula recipe from the post-war era...Pet and Carnation are brands of evaporated milk, and Karo is a corn syrup brand. I think most of us would hesitate to give a baby corn syrup nowadays!

Feeding Baby Pigs by Dr. Barber



1 part cow's milk
3 parts boiled water
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon lime water, to make a pint.

Feed every 2 or 3 hours for several days.

Carrie and Grandma grew up on a small farm in Ohio, and most family farms had at least a pig or two for meat. Carrie lived at home most of the time until she married, so she may have fed any number of squirming baby pigs. I've never fed a pig, but it seems like it would be difficult!

Here's Aunt Carrie with her siblings in 1966. From left to right, Martha Weaver Martin (my grandma), Carrie Weaver Morris, Edna Weaver Zook, and John Weaver.