Maybe Liver Casserole Is The Way To Go

One of the truly great joys of being an armchair cook is that it brings us into the kitchens and lives of cooks we don't even know. We sit at their kitchen tables for suppers, and come into their dining rooms for celebratory dinners. They take us to their potlucks, and we come along when they deliver a covered dish to new or ailing neighbors.

We may never make any of their recipes, but reading them and the personal notes that accompany them allows us to peek into their cooking pots and imagine the lives that surround them. For the writer in me, community cookbooks shout character and setting. For the historian in me, the recipes chronicle decades and trends. For the cook in me, it's an endless curiousity about the role food plays in our lives and shapes our collective and individual histories. It's also about what I would and would not cook, and the reactions of my husband and family if I were to actually serve Liver Casserole or Dutch Mess.

Who's Cooking What In Illinois is my first, true armchair book in that it has all those elements. I no longer remember where I got this gem, but it's truly in a class by itself when it comes to armchair cookery. The book bears the character and identity of all those homegrown community spiral cookbooks that armchair cooks love, but is actually a hard cover edition from a New York publisher.


My friend Patty also had this cookbook, and between the two of us, we cooked a lot its recipes. It is her I think of each time I see this book. Patty and I met when we were new teachers in a middle school. Jack, her husband, was a fulltime student and commuted each day into the city to his law school. My husband, also a fulltime student, was taking classes for his education degree and drove an hour each day to his university. So, new teachers, husbands in school, commuting expenses ... it all added up to no money. We spent a lot of time with each other, sometimes going out to dinner on those long-awaited pay days, but also at our apartments. Cheap beer, wine and chips and dip were part of the socializing, but it often included another recipe that Patty or I had made as well.

Patty was of Norwegian heritage and from Minnesota. It was from her that I first heard the term 'hot dish,' as in 'tuna hot dish.' She was a much more accomplished cook than me; her movements in the kitchen, so quick and efficient, contrasted with my more deliberate approach. For potato salad, she boiled reds with their skins on and then just slipped them off. I laboriously peeled each one, ridding it of every speck of eye and skin. And she made lefse, something I had never heard of, or eaten, until I sampled hers. Even then, my preferred baking recipes were of the throw-everything-in-one-bowl genre. Once she told me how much she loved Circus Peanuts, something else unknown to me. When I saw a recipe for Circus Peanut Salad in Who's Cooking What in Illinois, I had to make it for her. Once I got past the amount of sugar in that recipe, and the fact that it had absolutely nothing in common with any "salad" I hate ever eaten or made, I was able to marvel at the palest orange hue I'd ever seen and appreciate the ingenuity and creativity behind it. I saw the cook who saw the open bag of Circus Peanuts her kids had been eating and decided that rather than having them go to waste, she'd make a "salad" with it.

Recipes for traditional Midwestern fare which I had never eaten filled the book. While a separate chapter features "Casseroles," it could be argued that the entire book is nothing more than a repository of Casserole Recipes Served In Illinois. Here's where I first encountered that potluck favorite, Broccoli Rice Casserole, a creamy concoction held together by processed cheese product. I also found Taco Salad, another backyard barbecue and potluck favorite that I still love today. I tried Char's Coleslaw. Sherbet-Gelatin Salad. Pineapple Timbale. Lots of cakes, bars and puddings. Peanut Butter Granola. And of course prepared many dinners : Applesauce Meatballs (still one of my favorites). Fried Fish in Batter. Meal in a Dish. Dutch Meat Loaf. Beef and Potato Loaf. I attempted yeast again with Easy Whole Wheat Rolls.

While I found plenty to choose from in this cookbook, plenty annoyed me as well. I was used to the orderly and thoroughly edited pages of Betty Crocker and Good Housekeeping as well as Soupcon from the Chicago Junior League. True, It's A Daisy needed an edit, but it was such a slim, charming work that I could deal with it. But this. This 456-pager challenged every bit of the English major and writer in me. Haphazard categorization of the recipes still grates on me, making it difficult to find recipes, as there appears to be no reason or logic for its many categories and subcategories.

This means that the only workable approach to this book is a serendipitious one ... which is what being an Armchair Cook is all about. All of the recipes in this book come from real people, with real kitchens and real families for whom they cook. Recipes bear the stamp of a cook's creativity and frugality in making do with what she had while still feeding her family nourishing meals.

One charming feature is that each recipe includes the cook's hometown. Illinois is a big state, and those of us in the Metro area are blithely ignorant of the geography that extends beyond the rings of suburbia. Dozens of towns dot the Downstate lanscape, places I'd never heard of. Chenoa. Ipava. Brimfield. Anna. Bement. Mechanicsburg. Franklin Grove. At one time the town I grew up in was an unheard of. My parents built a house in the tiny town of Bartlett, about 35 miles west of Chicago, and left the city when I was six months old. The population numbered in the hundreds and had a four-room school with a basement that housed two more grades. We walked to and from school, even though it was on the other side of town, and came home for lunch each day. My mother drove into a nearby city for groceries.

Bartlett eventually grew and achieved suburban status. When I return, trying to discern the original town is like looking at one of those pictures where images are hidden in the bigger scene. I become Waldo, lost in the homogenous suburbian stamp which hides all the familiar places. Where's Earl's, the sundry and candy shop with the marbled-counter fountain in the back, and the single table with the bright red vinyl padded chairs? Or The Eck? On rare Friday nights, my father brought dinner home for us (fish fries for him and my mother, cheeseburgers for us), carried out on thick white paper plates, two dinners stacked per brown paper bag. I can't help but wonder at the fate of the dozens of towns listed in my book. Did Depue and Hutsonville and Moro fade away? Is someone still serving Pickled Carrots in Beardstown, or Royal Round Steak in Fults? Or did they go the way of Bartlett where the old retreated so it could be pumped up with new houses, new streets and new strip malls? Such are questions which armchair cooks ponder.

Recipe titles in this book meet the highest standards of armchair cookery, as they must rise above label status. Colorful and whimsical names top some, like Shipwreck. Sailboats. Kram. Mud Hen Bars. And, one of my favorites, It's A Mess (the cook's note says "Don't expect leftovers from this dish!").

Others preserve a bit of history and provide a window into another time and place. Hard Times Pudding. Icebox Potato Rolls. Scrapple. Red Beet Jelly. Honey Tripe. Butter Bean Gravy. Molded Chef's Gelatin.

Heritage speaks loudly on the pages of this book. Croatian Sauerkraut. Bohemian Houska. Sjomansbiff. Orehava Potica. Kaputsa.

I found a recipe for Russian Fluff, a dish a newly-married friend from high school proudly prepared for me when I was on a visit home from college. Ground chuck mingled with green pepper, onions, canned peas and rice, all bound together with cream of tomato soup. She gave me the recipe, and I'm absolutely positive this was the first time someone shared a recipe with me. It really didn't require cooking, just mixing, so it was among the first dishes I prepared when I started cooking after college. (It didn't last long in the rotation, however.)

Many of the recipes in Who's Cooking What could be considered heirloom recipes whose titles bear no resemblance to what we would expect from such a recipe today. Consider Stuffed Mangos. Today, that could be quite trendy, one we might encounter on the pages of Bon Appetit or on the plate at an upscale restaurant. But for a cook in Altamount, it's a recipe brought to America by his ancestors and taught to each succeeding generation, a family favorite that takes days to prepare. The recipe involves heaping cabbage cut like sauerkraut into a dishpan, later packing it all into a stone jar, weighing mangos down with an upside down plate and heavy stone, preparing a pickling solution, and eventually processing in sterilized jars. The cook promises that they're an attractive addition to a relish tray.

Who makes any of these recipes now? No one I know, yet I'm comforted to know the recipes exist, that real people prepared them, and that there are probably still cooks who do.

Grandma recipes could be a separate category in this cookbook, for they fill its pages. It's silly, I know, but I've always had a curious fascination for Grandma recipes, probably because none exist in my family. My father spoke little about his German-born parents, but he once told me his mother had been an excellent cook. She immigrated from Germany and spent time in England where she supervised the staff at a castle. After coming to America, she and my grandfather ran a small corner grocery store in Chicago. She died before my parents married.

My maternal grandmother wasn't really a part of our lives. I have one memory of briefly visiting her at her apartment on Sheffield, near Wrigley Field, but no cooking was going on. In another memory, she stands in our kitchen, wearing a hat and one of those fur stoles adorned with a dead animal head and tiny claws. She had taken the train out to see us on a Thanksgiving. I see her smiling, drinking a Tom and Jerry from a white, to-go cup she picked up at the bar across the street from the train station before coming to our house. I thought it was hot chocolate, but she wouldn't let me have a sip. So no cooking on that occasion, either.

In Who's Cooking What In Illinois, I find Grandma's Cornmeal Salmon Croquettes. Grandma's Eggnog. Grandma Porter's Butterscotch Pie. Grandma's Surprise. Grandma's Polish Nut Roll. Grandma Belin's Fudge. Grandma Warren's Cream Pie. Mother Dunne's Irish Soda Bread (I'm sure she was the Grandma). I decided early on that I want to be a grandmother who cooks and bakes and spends time with her grandchildren, just because. As I've gotten older, I no longer see that as something I can decide. If it happens, it will truly be a gift, because it will mean that one, I have been blessed with grandchildren; two, my children and grandchildren have a strong enough bond with me that they will want to spend time with me; and three, that I will have my wits about me and the ability to actually still cook. With them and for them.

One recipe in particular remains a favorite: Oven-Barbecue-Round Steak. I tried all sorts of the barbecue beef recipes in the book, but this one was the best. I remember inviting Patty and Jack over and preparing this dinner. It was my husband's last year of school, and we could no longer afford our apartment, so we moved into the Bartlett house with my dad. When we were growing up, the basement had been finished with cedar paneling, a tiled floor, and a drop ceiling. The fire place was almost always going and for sure cancelled out any dampness. A state-of-the-art stereo system housed in an upstairs room piped in music from two speakers placed at either end of the basement. With a built-in bar and pool table, it became the hub of hanging out and entertaining. Here is where we had our dinner with Jack and Patty. With it, I served thick slices of rye bread, which my father bought at the Augustana Bakery in the city and brought home for freezing. I loved that rye bread. He would slice off a hunk and dip it in his black coffee and eat it while he read the Chicago Tribune at the dining room table. For my dinner that night, it would be the perfect foil to the fall-apart, tender meat and its sweet, mild sauce.

We had a leisurely dinner that night, the four of us sitting long after we had finished eating, talking against the soundtracks of music and the crackling of the fire. Looking back, I see four young people in their 20s, married, no children, and so much ahead of them.

What none of us knew then was that Jack, a Vietnam vet who had been exposed to Agent Orange, would not make it very far into that future. He earned his law degree, joined a practice, and he and Patty bought their first house. It was a ridiculous time to buy a house, that being the Carter era where interest rates hovered near 17 percent. But everyone hungered for home ownership then, so that's what people did. Then they had two babies.

We, too, had bought our first house, the childhood home of an older woman who lived down the street and who likely wondered at the way a neighborhood had grown up around their old farmhouse. We brought three daughters home to that house. Our youngest was barely six weeks old when we went to Jack's funeral. He fought hard, even undertaking an experimental treatment, but it was not to be. Our lives had been moving in different directions at the time of his death, and continued to do so over the years. Patty raised her two children and is now principal of a large suburban high school.

Serendipity touched me again on a day not too long ago when one of my high school students came up to me after class and told me that his aunt was my friend Patty. It gave me pause, and took me back to a time I hadn't thought about in a long while.

I saw those four twentysomethings again, eating Patty's Chicken Quiche at one of those brunches we all loved and planned from time to time, and just sitting on a summer night on the back porch that hung over the alley in their second floor apartment. The street lamp illuminated the four of us, probably quite harshly, but if I didn't look directly at it, it felt just like moonlight. In the next second, I thought, Yes, it is a small world, after all. We never really lose the people who touch us; they come back to us again and again, in ways we noticed and probably ways we don't.

Here is the recipe for Oven-Barbecue-Round Steak that I made that long ago night for the four of us. Bake and serve this in your oldest Corningware casserole dish. The Augustana Bakery is no longer around, but I suggest you find a good German bakery and get some sturdy rye bread to go with this. The leftovers will be great to eat tomorow, either with some butter or dunked in coffee, if that is to your liking.

Oven-Barbecue-Round Steak

1-1/2 lbs. round steak

2 T. salad oil

1/2 c. chopped onions

3/4 c. catsup

1/2 c. vinegar

3/4 c. water

1 T. mustard

1 T. brown sugar

1 t. Worcestershire sauce

1 t. salt

1/2 t. pepper

Brown steak in 1 t. oil. In a saucepan, simmer for 5 minutes--1 tablespoon oil, onions, catsup, vinegar, water, mustard, brown sugar, and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over steak. Bake in a covered dish at 350 degrees for 1-1/2 hours. Serve with baked potatoes and salad.

Betty Crocker, circa 1973

Betty Crocker has been one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history, and I am one of the cooks who made that so. I received the Betty Crocker Cookbook as a shower gift. Its vanilla-spattered, sauce-splashed pages prove that anyone who can read can learn to cook. Although I loved my very first cookbook, Good Housekeeping, Betty's slick white pages, color photos and easy language drew me in and became the book that taught me how to cook.

For the novice cook, it's hard to imagine who could be a better teacher than someone named 'Betty.' 'Betty' is the older next-door-neighbor who sits you down in her kitchen, pours you a cup of coffee, then puts a thick square of yellow cake topped with chocolate frosting in front of you. She grocery shops on Thursdays and cooks dinner every night, with a roast on Sundays. Betty is comfort. She's steady and familiar, like a pot of vegetable soup simmering on the back burner.

Every section has check-marked recipes I tried. Paging through Appetizers, I am reminded of early parties where we would get together at each other's apartments bringing beer and wine, and sometimes appetizers. When we hosted, I felt I always needed to make two, and Betty frequently answered that call. Stuffed Mushrooms. Guacamole. Frosted Pate. Okay, so it was really braunschweiger topped with a blanket of cream cheese. I surrounded the crock with tiny pumpernickel squares and those sweet midget pickles, and the men all loved it. I tried something called Gouda Burst, where I carefully cut a cross in the red cheese shell, refilled it with the cheese mixture, then pushed it out for the "burst" effect. But my favorite had to be the Cheese Balls. Truly works of art.

The recipes for the first brunch we hosted as newlyweds came from her pages. We had received a tabletop griddle as a wedding gift, so we used that and made Favorite Pancakes, with an assortment of fruit toppings, butters and syrup. Pineapple Sourcream Topping with Pineapple Syrup. Woodman's Special, spread with Orange Butter and Blueberry Syrup. My own addition was strawberries with freshly-whipped cream. Our families, quite impressed with our efforts, left satisfied and full.

I tried yeast. White Bread. Swedish Limpa Rye Bread. But I didn't get the satisfaction that so many do out of baking bread, so I didn't dwell in that section. But Betty kept the dinners coming. I found all manner of good things in her pages that I never had at home.



My mother had been a plain cook, and I doubt she ever looked at a recipe. She relied on roasting beef and pork and broiling chicken halves. Frugal casseroles followed those up in the menu rotation where she chopped the leftover meat into tiny pieces and added them to elbow macaroni and whatever vegetables needed to be used up. Canned green beans and peas filled the green vegetable slot on the plate, but our favorite vegetable was corn. Next to the canned beets, the dreaded wax beans were the worst, a vegetable I've never understood.


On nights when my father wasn't home for dinner, I recall the occasional breakfast-for-dinner meal, and one memorable combination of canned spaghetti with canned beets. So with that culinary family history, cooking truly became an adventure for me, and for years, I never made the same recipe twice. How could I, with so many untried recipes out there? And so I cooked my way through the Big Red Cookbook. Stuffed Green Peppers. Hamburger Stroganoff. Breast of Chicken on Rice. Minute Steaks. Swiss Steak. New England Pot Roast. Chicken Cacciatore. Classic Turkey Divan.


For company occasions, there was Veal Cordon Bleu. Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding. Company Cheesecake with Strawberry Glaze. Williamsburg Orange Cake. And, being the 1970s, fondue. We had received three fondue pots as wedding gifts, and fondue parties were in.


At one time or another, everyone made the trip into the city for dinner at Gejas, an all-fondue restaurant where dinner would take hours to get through all the fondu-ing and wine drinking. Our at-home fondue evenings were no different.


On some occasions I would make a cheese fondue to serve our guests. I shopped for Gruyere, a cheese I had never heard of, and white wine, and rubbed the fondue pot with a fresh clove of garlic. I bought kirsch, because that is what made it so authentic. And fresh baguettes, which were carefully torn into pieces, then left to dry out a bit, so they could be later speared with fondue forks and bathed in the rich cheese mixture.


For a fondue dinner party, I liked to serve Betty's Fondue Bourguignonne, which really just detailed the method of cooking the beef in the oil in the fondue pot. With it, I served dipping sauces, including Betty's Blue Cheese Sauce. But the real star of the beef fondue was the Bordelaise sauce, a truly magical recipe where a rich and fragrant sauce sprung from mixing flour and butter (I later learned it was a 'roux), beef broth, red wine and thyme. I used that recipe for years, sometimes adding mushrooms, sometimes varying the herbs.


Three fondue pots meant we could also do a dessert fondue, and of course that meant Chocolate Fondue, served with dippers of angel food cake and strawberries. A dinner such as this became the entire event of the evening. No other dishes had to be prepared, and the music, conversation and wine flowed all night.

My first forays into baking came from this cookbook. Growing up, my German father had a sweet tooth, which my mother satisfied with storebought cookies and packaged coffee cakes from the grocery store. Occasionally she would bring real treats home from a bakery. One of my early memories is peering into endless display cases in the sugary-sweet warmth of a bakery, amazed at the rows of jewel-toned pastries, pies and strudels thick with fruit, and rows and rows of cookies I couldn't identify.


It didn't take long to realize how well-appreciated homebaked treats were. With the exception of the Williamsburg Orange Cake, a regal, three-layer affair that bore no resemblance to the photo of the recipe, my efforts were simple. Lemon Bars. Old-Fashioned Pumpkin Pie. Lemon Pudding Cake. Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Muffins. Apple Crisp. Apple Pie. Applesauce Cake. And a Lemon Meringue Pie which taught me that pies do, indeed, weep.


The slimmer Betty spiral cookbooks, reasonably priced, also found their way into my fledgling cookbook collection. Sadly, my favorite, the blue Dinner For Two, has disappeared from my shelves. But I still have others, including the yellow Dinner In A Dish (still my preferred method of cooking), and the red Outdoor Cookbook (one of our first purchases as newlyweds was a Weber Smoky Joe grill, which we parked on a cement patch off the driveway of our first apartment and used all the time).


Today, Betty doesn't often come off the shelf, but like an old friend, she comforts me. Her five binder rings, once a snug and tight fit, have loosened and spread with age and repeated use, making it somewhat difficult to thumb through her pages. Many of the recipe pages have torn through the hole punches and strayed from their original sections. Occasionally I find a lone page settled in with recipe clippings from newspapers and magazines and immediately recognize it as one I pulled out to try--a practice that even back then, I knew it was not a good idea but did anyway.


I return those pages to Betty as I find them, but not to their specific places. I have ideas of buying those little white circles to redo the torn hole punches, but so far she remains unkempt ... and still very much loved, despite her somewhat disheveled appearance.

I still think Betty is the perfect teacher, and as my daughters moved into phases of their lives where they needed to cook for themselves, I gave them Betty Crocker cookbooks to start their own collections.

When a new Big Red Cookbook came on the market in 2000, I bought copies for my older daughters, and couldn't resist buying one for myself, too ... just because. Much heftier than my old one, Betty still has a lot to offer. Every cook needs to know that Vanilla Pudding and Au Gratin Potatoes don't have to come out of a box, and that Cream of Mushroom Soup is a legitimate soup choice in and of itself and bears absolutely no resemblance to the canned gelatinous substance that needlessly finds its way into so many recipes.

Here is a recipe from my old Betty Crocker Cookbook. Use it to accompany a rare beef roast or perfectly-grilled steaks. Or offer it as a dipping sauce at to your next fondue party. It begins with making Brown Sauce. Check with Betty for all its variations.

Brown Sauce

2 T. butter

1 thin slice onions

2 T. flour

1 c. beef broth

1/4 t. salt

1/8 t. pepper

Heat butter in a skillet over low heat until golden brown. Add onion; cook and stir until onion is tender. Discard onion. Blend in flour. Cook over low heat, stirring until flour is deep brown. Remove from heat. Stir in broth. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly. Boil and stir 1 minute. Stir in salt and pepper.

Bordelaise Sauce: Substitute 1/2 c. red white for1/2 c. of the broth; stir in 1/2 t. snipped parsley, minced onion and crushed bayleafs and 1/4 t. thyme leaves with the broth and wine.

Soupcon, a Chicago classic

When I bought Soupcon in 1974, also from a trendy cooking store, I didn't know about the Junior League and their tradition of publishing cookbooks. In fact, I used this one for a long time before I tuned in to all the other Junior League titles available.

By this time I had left my job at the magazine and traded in the cool, calm quiet of my research library for a noisy classroom full of middle school students. The editors at the publishing house all loved their jobs so much that no one ever left. Truly, one of them would have to pass on before I would have been able to move up, so I decided to move into education.

I struggled that first year, and another teacher, far more experienced than I, became not just a source of professional support and guidance, but a good friend as well. And she, too, loved cookbooks and cooking. We both bought Soupcon, and between the two of us, cooked our way through it.

I came to recognize the spiral as a category of cookbooks all its own. The book presented the recipes on bold, cardstock pages by the season. I later bought Soupcon II, but it never measured up to the experience of cooking from the first one.

In the Spring Kitchen section, I passed on Sloe Gin Cooler With Pineapple (one of those bad college experiences, and besides, does anyone even know anymore what slow gin is?) but did find a variation on our favorite limeade daiquiries. Products had progressed to the point where we could buy cans of frozen daiquiri mix. Now our blenders hummed with that as the base, along with fresh and frozen strawberries, rum and ice.

I tried what was probably my first quiche, Salmon Mushroom Quiche. Here, too, was my first French Toast Casserole, a sublime concoction of eggs, milk, Grand Marnier and cream, all of which appealed to my essentially lazy nature as a cook because it had to sit overnight and be made the next day. I found Sour Cream Coffee Cake and later learned how ubiquitious this recipe is but how very essential to have a superb version of it. I didn't make the Broiled Tournedos with Sauce Bernaise, but I felt so sophisticated when I ordered that for the first time in a restaurant after having read about it here.

We entertained a lot back then, so among the check-marked recipes are Alex's Banana Daiquiri, Frozen Peach Dairquiri, Sour Cream Clam Dip and Crab Dip. Blueberry Buckle Brunch Bread. The first of many variations of Teriyaki Steak. Garden Fresh Tomato Marinade. From the Fall Kitchen, Hot Cider Punch and lots of quick breads. One year, I attempted Dresden Christmas Stollen, from the Winter Kitchen, made for my father. But its dry texture didn't appeal to me, and I decided it was not worth the effort and never made one again.

Then there was that Chocolate Cheesecake. I felt ready to tackle that one, which called for more than 12 ounces of chocolate and three packages of cream cheese. I optimistically brought it to a dinner party, expecting it to be terrific, because I had learned that anyone who could read (me), could cook. It was a dismal failure, and serving it amounted to chipping away at a solid block of chocolate, with absolutely no texture or character or taste.

Here is a recipe that did work (p. 16), and offers a novel presentation as well. Think about this for the featured drink at a Spring Brunch.

Strawberry Daiquiri
1 can (6 oz.) frozen daiquiri mix
1-1/4 c. light rum
2 pkg. (10 oz. each) frozen strawberries
Finely crushed ice (about 30 cubes)
6 whole strawberries

Place first 3 ingredients in blender. Cover and blend until smooth.
Place crushed ice in an ice bucket; stir in daiquiri mixture.
When ready to serve ladle into large stemmed goblets.
Garnish each with a whole strawberry.
May be prepared in advance and kept in freezer until 20 minutes before serving.

It's A Daisy Cookbook Sends Me Down A New Cookbook Path

I wish I could have met Boo Leet. Her cookbook is the first one I bought that wasn't written and published by a major publishing house. It flung the door wide open to the kind of cookbook I still love: those independent ones that stand alone. I'm pretty sure she did all the writing and editing herself, and then found a place to print it for her.

It took me awhile to get past wanting to give the book a good copyedit in order to get each recipe in a more standard format. But that's part of its charm. I can look past the title of Potato-Leak Soup because there's so much to enjoy in this little gem.

I found it sometime in the 1970s in a cooking shop which were so new and becoming so popular. It's bright green spiral and yellow plastic cover with the featured daisy called me immediately. The tagline on the front made it impossible to put down: "cooking with T.L.C.* for family & friends", and below that, the * explained: "tender loving care". And at only $5, it fit my budget, which was pretty nonexistent to begin with, which is why I could afford it.

Boo Leet's voice carries me through the pages. From her comments and the fact that it was published in Northbrook, Illinois, I immediately pictured her to be a North Shore Wife Who Entertained. Yet her recipes were simple enough, and inexpensive, that I could do them, too.

And I did. Here's where I first made a cheese ball with something other than yellow cheese (bleu cheese, and bourbon, too!). How very elegant! I also learned that adding sherry to chicken for -- what else -- Sherry Chicken --made everyone think they were eating restaurant food and sealed your reputation as someone who could actually cook.

I made her Cold Spiced Fruit for a brunch my husband and I hosted for our families, and it made many more appearances at Christmas morning breakfasts at my parents' house. Sour Cream Cucumber Salad showed me that not all jello recipes had to be sweet (lime Jello, sour cream and cucumbers). Five-In-One-Fruit Salad brought back memories of my childhood encounter with Heavenly Hash, and is probably closer to the recipe I had back then.

I found all sorts of salad dressing recipes, ever-so-much tasty, and cheaper, than store bought. There was Boo's Chili. Porcupines. How could I had never had that before?

Chicken with Peaches. Again, who knew that fruit and chicken could go together? Growing up, chicken had been done either inside on the top broiler, or outside, grilled by my dad.

Did I mention the drinks? Another revelation, that drinks could be a viable category in a cookbook. Alexanders (crushed ice in a blender, ice cream, cream de cacao and brandy ... a combination my husband and I have continued to refine over the years). Frozen Daiquiri. This became a staple among my circle of women friends at the time. We rarely got together for a girls night when someone didn't fill the blender with frozen limeade, rum and ice.

But the recipe by which I still judge all others is her Grasshopper Pie. I love mint and chocolate. Her recipe may seem a bit fussy, and I am essentially a lazy cook. But I've tried other variations to get around the bowl of ice step in this and double boiler and use marshmallow cream or whipped topping instead. The resulting pie is just never as good. I eventually even bought a Farberware double boiler, just for this recipe.

Here is Boo Leet's Grasshopper Pie, found on page 95.

12 cream filled chocolate cooked, crushed (about 1-1/2 cups)
2 T. butter
24 large marshmallows
2/3 c. milk
1/4 c. creme de menthe
2 T. creme de cacao
1 c. heavy cream, whipped

Mix cookies and butter and press into bottom and sides of a 9-inch pie pan. Place marshmallows and milk in top of double boiler. Heat until melted. Cool. Stir in creme de menthe and creme de cacao.
Chill over ice water until partially thickened. Fold in whipped cream.
Turn mixture into pie shell and chill several hours or overnight.
Before serving, cover with a thin layer of whipped cream and sprinkle shaved milk chocolate over top.

Now I'm with Boo on the whole pie, until the end. To me, part of the joy of Grasshopper Pie is its wonderful, delicate mint color. So I leave the top unadorned with whipped cream but shake more cookie crumbs over the top. I always use Oreo, because it's so dark and makes a nice contrast with the pale green. And no milk chocolate for me. If I weren't such a lazy cook, I might try this with shaved dark or bittersweet chocolate on top, instead of the cookie crumbs.

Mary Meade and Me

My first college-degree job was as a research assistant for a magazine, now defunct. Twelve editors each had his or her own office, all down a long corridor, and I had the research library to myself, where I read incoming manuscripts and routed those onto the editors that I thought might fit the magazine. I also assisted editors with their articles by doing research for them.

Newspapers were delivered to the research library each day, and so it was that I experienced my first job where it was okay to sit and read for awhile. My favorite day was Thursdays when the Chicago Tribune food section appeared. Those were the grand days of food sections. Pages and pages of articles and recipes, truly content-rich. Nothing like the lean pages of today's newspaper food sections.

As a newly married, I couldn't really afford to buy cookbooks, but with the Tribune's Food Guide, I didn't need to. I had Mary Meade instead.

Tribune Food Editor Ruth Ellen Church was "Mary Meade" for over twenty years. Julia Child was on the rise then, and the women editors at my magazine often talked about all the fancy dinner parties they had given, particularly in the early 1960s, before they became working women in the early 1970s.

But I loved Mary Meade more. I couldn't tear recipes out of the newspaper, but I did have a typewriter and an unlimited supply of 4x6 index cards. So every Thursday I typed away, until I had an impressive collection neatly filed away, not in a cute recipe box, but in a somber taupe box, suitable for the office. Some of the recipes I actually made, but my roots had already taken hold as an Armchair Cook, so I typed many more than I cooked.

Sadly, that recipe box is lost to me now. But one day I came across a book of her recipes: Mary Meade's Country Cookbook: Traditional American Cooking. I bought it on the spot. The original copyright is 1968, with a renewed copyright by Church in 1977. I had found a reissue of that book. I loved her recipes so much that I unwittingly bought this book twice. The first one was a paperback, and years later in hardback. I didn't discover I had two copies until I had done some organizing of all my cookbooks. Considering all the cookbooks I have and that it's only been recently that I've been able to shelve them all in one room, I think it's pretty amazing that I haven't done this more.

Here is a recipe I never made, but I do recall the miraculous day I sampled it at a friend's house, back in the early 1960s. She lived in Apple Orchard, a subdivision that was a recent and novel addition to my small town where every house was different and with some dating as far back into the previous century, and ours, built in 1950, was considered "new." Houses that looked virtually the same, and packed close together, lined the curving street. Inside my friend's home, everything seemed so modern and compact. Eight-packs of pop in a rainbow of colors filled one corner of the kitchen, which actually had a table in it where the family could eat. I'm not sure if they did, though, because she had more brothers and sisters than I could count. She had taken me into her house for a break from our playing and from the refrigerator she pulled a green plastic bowl about as round and big as a hubcap, popped off the lid, and shoved it toward me: "Want some?" she asked.

I couldn't tell what it was, as everything was mixed together, but she gave it a name. "Heavenly Hash." I admit, I am still not a very adventurous eater, but I was even less so then. "My mom makes it all the time."

She grabbed a serving-sized spoon, dug in deep, and pulled it out, mounded with a pale orange, creamy cloud. "Here. Try it."

I didn't want to be impolite, so I accepted it and took a small bite. Creamy sweetness and puffy little pillows and little bits of something all swirled around my mouth; there was nothing to chew, so I just swallowed and was left with an overwhelmingly sweet sensation.

I had never had anything like it. Plus, I couldn't wrap my mind around the fact that her mom had actually made it. And I'm thinking it was the first time I had experienced coconut outside an Almond Joy.

Mary Meade has the recipe (page 166) of what I'm sure I had that day.

Heavenly Hash
1 cup cooked rice
1 cup canned or sweetened fresh fruit, diced or sliced
1 cup heavy cream, whipped and sweetened.

Combine and pile into sherbet glasses. Baby marshmallows or chopped nuts may be added.

My friend's mom made copious quanities of this for her big family. No nuts, but definitly the marshmallows, and coconut, too. I'm quite certain it was all canned fruit, as everything had the same, soft texture, with the only resistance in the dish being the tiny grains of rice and slivers of coconut. I've had versions of this over the years, but this Heavenly Hash is the one I will always remember.

How Four Free Books Turned A College Student Into An Armchair Cook

I grew up in a household where my mother never consulted a recipe, let alone read a cookbook. She kept a well-stocked pantry and chest freezer, and the only convenience products I recall were Campbell's soup and the occasional box of jello.

Her cooking was very basic, and if there was any baking done in the house, it was left to one of my sisters. She satisfied my father's German sweet tooth with storebought coffee cakes and packaged cookies, usually Archway. Her habits and cooking style didn't leave me with many memories of childhood favorite dishes, but it did instill in me an appreciation of how important the basics are to cooking, and that the less packaging surrounding a food, the better. My culinary expertise by the time I left for college included scrambled and fried eggs accompanied by perfect toast, and making boxed pudding and jello.

Eating in college was a markedly different experience in the 1960s and 1970s than it is today. The college cafeteria for the most part had a captive clientele, and cooking was forbidden in the dorms. Most of us couldn't afford to eat outside our cafeteria food plans, but when we did, our choices were limited to Otts, a local drive-in with broasted chicken and potatoes and pizza that needed almost an entire dispenser of napkins for blotting off the grease; and Lucy's Garden of Eatin', most notably frequented by the town's after-church crowd on Sundays and a menu similar to how our mothers cooked at home. Neither delivered.

One of my most distinctive college memories is that we were usually hungry. Maybe that's why an ad in a magazine for a cookbook club caught my fancy. With a weekly allowance of $8 a week, what was I thinking when I dropped that card in the mail and committed myself to buying more books for two years?

The answer: Four free books. I was a psychology and English major who loved to read and write and wrote for the college newspaper and started a campus literary magazine with two other students. That the four free books were cookbooks was beside the point. It was still four free books.

I eagerly awaited their delivery and was not disappointed when they came. One was a book of "recipes" where everthing came from a can. As one who often had to make the long trek down the stairs into the basement, out to its nether regions, and up two more steps into a cement-block cold cellar, to retrieve that can of corn or peas or fruit cocktail, this should have been a natural for me.

But instead I was drawn to the fat one: The Good Housekeeping Cookbook. Oh my. So this is what a cookbook is. Eight hundred and five pages of recipes. And menus. And tips. And all these wonderful little notes about the recipes. So much more reading than just the recipes, but even those had voice and style.

There was such a thing as Equivalent Measures (who knew?). Pages-long charts on vegetables and cheeses. And wines (no Boone's Farm, my only experience with wine at that point). And those photos ... those lovely, splendid photos. When I wasn't immersed in my Norton Anthology or yet another psychology theory, there was my Good Housekeeping to turn to for some escapism.

Although cooking wasn't allowed, we did have some dorm specials. Some of us had "hot pots," short, stubby cousins the coffee pot, which could heat the contents of a can in a flash. Or we would buy a small jar of mayonnaise, tuna and spongy white bread and feast on freshly-made tuna sandwiches. Over in the male dorm, the more adventurous cooked slices of Spam on hot irons.

My friend Bunny decided one day that she and I would cook dinner for the two guys we were seeing. Her friends, Snap and Deb, one of the few student married couples , lived in a tiny white house off campus. She had even less cooking experience than me. She decided the menu, spaghetti and sauce (made out of what, I don't remember), salad and bread. But what I do remember is that she did the most amazing thing--she made salad dressing from scratch. All it took was Miracle Whip, ketchup and some pickle relish. It was somewhat of a culinary awakening.

Somehow I managed to pay for those books and accumulated more, but that I read cookbooks then seems to be incongruous with the times. We were surrounded with issues then. Vietnam. The draft. Women's rights. The Lottery. Civil rights. My Stanford-educated journalism professor worked hard to raise our awareness of them all, which wasn't easy to do in this tiny corner of northeastern Iowa where keggers in cornfields were the primary social events. His passion for the power of writing was evidenced in all that he did, and he and his wife later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for their expose of the Synanon cult in California.

We successfully protested forced attendance at weekly convocation, and I wrote columns on why curfew for women should be abolished. (The men didn't have what was called "hours", and in that emerging climate of gender equality, the college was forced to withdraw them for us, too.) Later we rode in a VW bus to Des Moines to protest Nixon. And the night the numbers were drawn for the Lottery to replace the draft remains one of my most vivid college memories.

"Are you a woman's libber?" became an oft-heard and debated question as everyone weighed and measured the possibilities against the gender models of our parents. Our feet straddled two worlds, but standing inside the insularity of our small college campus, everything was still theoretical. And anything would be possible.

The day finally came when I packed up my psych books, four years of issues where I wrote for The Collegian, notebooks thick with insights on Shakespeare and Adler, and all the cookbooks I had accumulated. The only thing that has survived all those years is my Good Housekeeping Cookbook, which still sits on my bookshelves today. It's what inspired me to eventually learn to cook.

Here's the first recipe I made from that book, exactly as written. I have to say it was this recipe note at the end that got me: "Marvelous! Serve hot, passing grated cheese. Also serve garlic-buttered toast, tossed salad with your favorite dressing, marshmallow-topped baked apples, and tea or coffee. Makes about six man-sized servings."

I recommend making Bunny's special salad dressing for your salad. I've never done the baked apples, but I could if I wanted to. So far, the Armchair Cook in me is satisfied to just read that part of the recipe.

Chili Spaghetti
1 8-oz. pkg spaghetti
1/2 c. margarine or shortening
1 lb. beef chuck, ground
3 medium onion, chopped
1/2 c. canned or whole kernel corn
1 10-1/2-oz. can condensed tomato soup, undiluted
1 17-oz. can tomatoes
1 3-4-oz. can sliced or button mushrooms, undrained
1 4-oz. can pimentos, slivered
1-2 T. chili powder
1 T. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1 t. sugar
Grated cheese (optional)

1. About 2 hr. before serving: Cook spaghetti as label directs, but reduce cooking time to 3 min. Drain, set aside.
2. In Dutch oven, over medium heat, melt margarine or shortening. In it, saute chuck and onions until chuck loses its red color. Add spaghetti, corn, tomato soup, tomatoes,mushrooms, pimentos, chili powder, salt, pepper and sugar, mixing thoroughly.
3. Cook over very low heat, covered, stirring occasionally, 1 hr. Turn off heat and let stand 30 min. to develop flavors. Reheat if necessary.
(okay, here comes my favoroite part ...)
4. Marvelous! Serve hot, passing grated cheese. Also serve garlic-buttered toast, tossed salad with your special dressing, marshmallow-topped baked apples, and tea or coffee. Makes about 6 man-sized servings.

As for the recipe, I started modifying them from the very beginning. For instance: No browning the meat in extra fat. And I'm sorry, I have nothing against canned corn (I grew up on the stuff), but it just doesn't belong in this recipe, so I left that out. Mushroom from a can? Uh, no. And pimiento .... no pimiento. I'm not sure if anyone knows exactly what a pimento is, and I don't think I want to find out, either. As for the salt ... another legacy of my mother's cooking. I think there's enough salt already from the other ingredients, and if anyone wants more, they can add it.