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.
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