Cooking up a feast of nostalgia

PUBLISHED JUNE 29, 2005 • UPDATED APRIL 22, 2018

I like to cook. I have cookbooks that I rely on: The Joy of Cooking, the 1978 Better Homes and Gardens Book of Pies and Cakes, The Good Cooks Cookbook, and The Encyclopedia of Creative Cooking. As useful as they are for cooking, however, they have the personality of a slab of concrete. I look up the recipe, follow the instructions, and put the book away.

But there is a category of cookbooks that I love to actually read. These ones attract me more for their sincerity and insight than the mere listing of ingredients and directions.

You get them from churches, daycare centres or schools that want to raise money or mark an anniversary. Their most professional quality is the spiral binding. Otherwise, they are as homemade as their recipes.

The problem is finding them. To get one, you have to be a member of the organization producing the book or you have to hunt for them at garage sales. So, this past winter, I was delighted to come upon, quite by surprise, a treasure trove of these books.

For years, we have taken care of our neighbours' (Margaret's and Bert's) house while these snowbirds spend the winter in Arizona.

Keeping an eye on their house is no trouble. It only takes a few minutes every day. But this year, the job really paid off.

I've often heard Margaret's daughter Melissa extol the virtues of her mother's vast collection of cookbooks. But since they were never displayed prominently, I had never seen them.

Last fall, however, before Margaret and Bert left, they started packing for the new condo they were moving into when they returned. Margaret unearthed her cookbooks and left them on a table in the rec room.

One day, while checking the house, I happened upon these books. I picked one up -- a yellowing publication called The Curling Gourmet, from the St. Catharines, Ont., Curling Club. It was old, from the 1950s I guessed, and was filled with typical Fifties fare -- Potato Chip Casserole, Jellied Lemon Salad, Cherry Breakfast Ring, and Nutty Cheese Ball. There was even a recipe for a homemade oven-cleaning concoction (it used lye as the main ingredient -- a substance you don't hear much about any more).

Best of all, each recipe had been copied out by hand by the cooks who contributed. As I read, I could envision the cooks sitting in their kitchens, writing in that fine handwriting script moms always have. The idea of that scene made me feel good.

I spent the winter poring over Margaret's other 40 or so books. And I learned interesting little things from each.

From the cookbook of Elm River Lutheran church in Galesburg, North Dakota, I learned that there are Scandinavian roots among the local people. I learned this from the Norwegian prayer that opens the book and the last names of the cooks: Olstad, Halvorson, Mielke. In the book published by the Junior League of McAllen, Texas, every single cook identified herself in that old-fashioned married-woman manner ("Mrs. Henry A. Brown").

There were curious commonalities between the books, too. A multitude of recipes required cream soups (one called for cream of shrimp soup, which I have never encountered) and an amazing number listed an envelope of onion-soup mix as a key ingredient.

Casseroles were the favourite supper dish (although in Galesburg, N.D., at Elm River Lutheran, they call them "hotdishes") and, of them, tuna casserole was the most popular. Stews came in a close second, and had terrific names, such as "Go Back to Bed Stew" and "Hey You Stew," from Margaret and Bert's church: St. Mark's Presbyterian in Don Mills, Ont. I love the story the cook tells about how he came up with the recipe on canoe trips: "In order to get the stew prepared I find I have to give some specific direction. 'Hey you, cut some onions; hey you, start the fire; hey you, brown the meat!' In this manner, the Hey You Stew gets done."

And then there is this passage, with its unscientific cooking methodology: "Boil the heck out of it . . . Do not remove any bits of ash, tree droppings, pine needles or anything that happens to fall into the pot unless it is larger than your thumb, dead or alive . . . This may not sound like much of a stew, but it continues to get rave reviews. I have to stress the essential ingredients necessary for a successful stew: a liberal hand when it comes to measuring, a canoe trip, the smell of smoke and bug spray, good company, and tired muscles."

I found these books to be warm antidotes to the tough, cynical, slick world around us. There isn't a hint of meanness in them. In one book, some pages were printed upside-down -- a mistake, but it only added to the book's endearing nature.

I'm not so nostalgic to think that these books were created during a "simpler" era. Still, I don't see them being produced as much any more. They should be. And if we can't do it, as we tear around overextending ourselves, then we need to find and cherish the ones created long ago.

So, go find them. Your mum or grandma has them stored somewhere, or you'll come across them in garage sales. Keep them for your next generations. Things are only going to get harder and we need soft pillows like these books on which to lay our wired-up heads. Besides, where else are you going to find a recipe for "Hey You Stew"?