Recipes and Memories

              

So I decided it was time to clean out my recipe box.  The way I figured this out was I realized for the umpteenth time that I could not only not put any additional recipes in it, but it was so full that I couldn't get any recipes out of it without extreme effort.  And with that decision, I opened the box and the memories flowed out of it.

               This lovely wooden box with its hand-tooled leather top was a wedding gift from our friend, Stella, almost 32 years ago.  It has decorated our kitchens through the decades since, slowly filling up along the way.  We enjoy using it because it reminds us of a dear friend whom we love and of the place where she bought it, a wonderful shop in Chattanooga, TN, called Plum Nelly.

               The Plum Nelly shop took its name from a "clothes line" arts and crafts festival that took place for 26 years on the back side of Lookout Mountain at a place that was "plumb out of Tennessee and nearly out of Georgia."  The name lives on, evoking a time and place where creativity came alive.

              

The woman who began that festival was named Fannie Mennen. Fannie was an artist of great talent, working for many years in block printing.  The Chattanooga shop delivered a couple of other wedding gifts to Mike and me that we cherish.  There are two pillows displaying Fannie's block prints on fabric, attached trapunto-style to the pillow covers.  There is also a beautiful wall hanging of lilies. Her gifts grace our home all these years later, long after her death.  I am sure that many other folks still treasure the works of Fannie Mennen.

               The shop in Chattanooga was begun by Fannie's sister, Celia Mennen Marks, a longtime food columnist for the Chattanooga Times.  Celia, who passed away in 2005,  had an eye for arts and crafts and stocked the shop in Chattanooga with an array of items that was as much fun to browse as to own.  She favored the work of artists who were members of the Southern Highland Crafts guild, but found pieces from as far afield as Texas. The Plum Nelly shop is still in Chattanooga, now with different owners.  We proudly display in our china cabinet the dinnerware set begun there, what our son calls the "good pottery" from  the Texas clay artist, Michael Obranovich. You can see Michael's current work at http://www.obranovichpottery.com. 

              

But back to the recipe box and the memories inside it.  As I cleaned through its collection of recipes, both those used and those considered but never tried, it was a trip through time.  Alongside the items snipped from magazines or scavenged from cookbooks were the recipes given to us by family and friends, including a couple that have become family favorites passed on to an ever-wider circle of friends as we shared the dishes with others.

               There's "Miss Marcia's Quiche" recipe.  This has become one of Mike's favorites.  He has found a myriad of twists on the basic ground beef recipe that was originally given to me by our friend Marcia Kling with whom we worked at WTVC in Chattanooga.  After 50 years on the air in many roles, Marcia retired recently, an icon to generations of Chattanoogans.  She remains one of the people I consider influential in my life, a mentor and friend, a model of grace and goodness.  Her quiche recipe delights many folks she hasn't met, but we faithfully give her credit.

              

There's a little piece of paper in the box that holds the hand-written recipe for Mike's mother's chocolate cake, his favorite.  The secret to this one is the frosting with sugar as its preponderant ingredient.  This recipe was apparently one passed down by Mike's paternal grandmother who was famous for the frosting and its more liquid equivalent that is still revered as "chocolate syrup," served by multiple generations of mothers on biscuits and pancakes.  For chocolate lovers it puts maple syrup to shame.

               There's my own mother's recipe for cheese straws, a simple mix of butter, flour and Kraft Old English cheese that came in five-ounce glass jars.  I'm not sure how easy this cheese (actually a cheese "spread," which is code for processed) would be to find today.  Despite my having become a bit of a cheese snob in my adult years and an enjoyer of fancy cheese straws from various bakeries across the South, I have never had any that tasted more special than Mama's.  She had a knack for getting just the right amount of red pepper in them.  Her recipe calls for "red pepper to taste," but there's where the magic comes in.  Her sense of taste rested on the perfect edge between just enough and not too much.

              

Another treasured and much-shared recipe in the box is one for Corn Casserole, still used on the original recipe card from Linda Eller, a co-worker at WFAA-TV in Dallas.  She brought this sinfully yummy dish to a potluck luncheon in the Channel 8 Promotion Department, circa 1983.  It is a bit like corn pudding, but thicker with its added touch of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix.  We've served it many, many times over the years, distributed the recipe and been told by more than one friend that it became a  Thanksgiving dinner tradition at their table.  Thank you, Linda.  You started something that has taken on a life of its own.  [The recipe is available at the Jiffy website.]

               Thumbing through the box further, I found several of those recipes passed along by moms and aunts that remind us that the "Greatest Generation" also lived through the Great Depression.  We, their children, grew up on meals that might have been light on the meats that were too expensive to feed several kids, but were heavy on the starches that would fill our little bellies.  There were one-dish meals with a pound of ground beef and three cups of rice with home-grown tomatoes, onions and peppers to spice them up. 

              

There were also, it seemed, dozens of variations on Jell-O salads.  Many of these recipes came through church cookbooks and included a wide array of ingredients added to the requisite fruit cocktail.  These "unique" additions to Jell-O included the much-loved Cool Whip enhanced variously by nuts of every stripe, cereals and even pretzels.  I think there were probably contests to see who could come up with the most outlandish yet edible combination.  The "J" section in my recipe box contains none of these.  I ate enough Jell-O as a child to last my whole life without ever having more.

               Truth is, the recipe box is a tribute to those Great Depression survivors.  They learned as children that food is, in fact, love.  After their generation, most of those who followed have not known the widespread hunger that left so many vowing never to know that feeling again.  We not only have more food available, but more varieties of food are shipped from near and far.  Meals that would have taken our mothers hours to prepare could be quickly readied in a microwave or even made in a slow-cooker while we were off to work outside the home. 

               Despite the fact that I don't spend the time in the kitchen that my mother did, I relish the memories of the dishes she cooked and the recipes she left me.  We memorialized even more of her dishes in a family recipe book that my sister and I put together for Mama's 80th birthday almost 20 years ago.  Like the recipe box, that little spiral-bound book is filled with love and memories of good times gathered around the dinner table.  I am grateful for the recipes, but even more for the memories.

Photos by Mike Lumpkin