PODCAST Episode 211: Family Cookbook – My Saucy Grandma (with transcript)

My mother’s mother, Ga, was a quiet, staid woman. She was peaceful, smiling, a model DAR and Midwestern sorority sister. But underneath it all…she was SAUCY. In this episode, I’ll give you some of my grandmother’s “International” sauce recipes (because sauce was a staple on her dinner table), and the reasons why I think her self-written attempts at international cuisine reveal a bit about who she was and the time and place that produced her.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of From Paper To People. This is a Family Cookbook episode, and I am your hostess with the mostest, Carolynn ni Lochlainn. This time we are talking about my “saucy grandma,” and the funny part is, of course, that she was totally not saucy. She was VERY not saucy. Grandma’s birthday is today. It’s the 25th of September. She would have been 114 today had she lived, and I don’t think she would have wanted to live that long, so I think it’s probably best that she is on the other side, looking on and smiling as we talk about some of her sauce recipes.

My grandmother was my mother’s mother. My mother’s parents met in Omaha, Nebraska, after my grandmother had started college at Drake University. My grandfather was in medical school. They got engaged, but they actually waited eight years. An eight year engagement! I’ve never heard of anybody having an eight year engagement, if they were in the same town anyway. Not unless they were cross continent from each other or something. So, they waited eight years to get married and then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. That is where my mother was born and that is where their adventures in the Army started. My grandfather became an army surgeon. He was an officer. They traveled a lot – he pioneered some surgical techniques, and so he also got to travel for the strict purposes of teaching surgeons in other countries. And sometimes, they would have surgeons from other countries come and visit. He would teach them where he was stationed. Because of that, my grandmother, born and raised in Omaha of British and German family who were, in turn, from Omaha and Iowa and before that New York State, learned how to sass up her table.

I think she did this in order to make things more interesting partly for her guests, but I know that she borrowed from cuisines in order to just make daily meals more interesting. She was tumbling from country to country and from station to station, or state to state, throughout my grandfather’s career. My mother told me once that she did second grade in three different towns in Arkansas. I think that’s what she said. Pretty crazy. So they were moving around a lot and my grandmother adopted new things as a form of adapting to that military culture that had so much going on in it, even in the mid-20th century, when they were travelling during and after World War2.

What I’ve got here are some recipes that I know that she created, things that she did not actually borrow from magazines. They’re in these plastic and vinyl books called The Recipe Collector, three-ring binder books that have plastic pages that have sleeves in them, and you can put recipe cards in the sleeves and you can put tabs on pages to separate out the sections.

We’re going to talk about some sauces and chutney, and these are things that absolutely must have differentiated her table will from the tables of the girl that she was in the sorority with at Drake University or some of the other women she probably knew from her military circles. She was very curious about food.

Another day we’ll talk about my grandmother’s obsession with putting bread on the table, literal bread, biscuits, and rolls – that’s a very mid western thing too. She always had bread going on, as well as everything else that’s going on her table, to the point that she had linens that provided a wrapper, a sort of napkin that had embroidered on it “Hot Rolls,” and she’d put that in a basket and put rolls in it and then fold that over the rolls to keep them warm.

Anyway, it’s a whole culture a whole food culture that I was never involved in because I grew up in a completely different place, but we’re gonna talk now about some sauces and Chutney.

The first thing I have for you is a tomato wine sauce and here’s how it goes:

Tomato Wine Sauce

5 tomatoes
1/2 small onion
1 bay leaf
1/2 cup white wine

Cook these ingredients together for 20 minutes on low, blend and sieve.

1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon flour
1 cup tomato juices from above
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon rosemary or basil or oregano
1/2 teaspoon tomato paste (optional)

Melt butter, add flour, add tomato juice, stirring with a whisk until thickened. Add herbs and simmer sauce 5 minutes. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

Fairly straightforward stuff and I guess she could use that on anything. I mean, she wasn’t doing a lot of Italian cooking at the time that she wrote this. I can tell from the handwriting because this is her younger handwriting.

Now we have Curry Sauce which makes six cups. If you know your curry sauce really really well, if you’re British, if you’re Indian, if you come from the Indian subcontinent, don’t “at” me about this, okay? I am not claiming that this is the most authentic curry sauce or the most authentic Chutney. What I am saying is that a woman who cooked in the midwest and in the American military in the 20th century put this on her table, OK? OK.

Curry Sauce

2 cups chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tablespoons oil
2 Tablespoons curry powder
2 teaspoons allspice
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
2 8oz jars each of “junior” prunes, apples and apricots (pureed baby food)
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup chopped chutney (see following recipe)

Saute onion and garlic in oil. Stir in curry, allspice, salt and coriander. Cook 2 minutes. Stir in fruits, water and lemon juice. Simmer uncovered 30 minutes. Stir often. Add chutney.

The Chutney is her own recipe because normally she writes up in the corner on these cards like cuisine magazine ten eighty two you or whatever it is that the issue was here. It says L. H. B. and those are her initials.

Chutney

4 cups chopped onions
14 cups chopped pears
3 packages raisins
3 teaspoons ground allspice
8 hot peppers, chopped fine
10 cups sugar
3/4 teaspoons minced garlic
4 cups vinegar
1 cup finely chopper ginger

I have no idea what kind of vinegar you’d use with that and I also don’t know how you put this together, how long you let it sit or what because, instead of there being sort of directions about how to do this on the back, there is simply a pen squiggle where I can tell that she was testing the pen to make sure it wrote before she wrote the recipe on the front. A lot of times that’s what she did.

I guess that she cooked so often that she didn’t feel the need to write the process down, and this is what women who lived in the kitchen did, of course. They made their dishes so often that it was only a question of changing up exactly what it was that went in.

Now, Pesto.

The reason I include Pesto is because I said that I would have recipes that you could make either in the northern hemisphere or in the southern hemisphere on the same day, because we’re having absolutely opposite weather at all times. It seems to me that there’s no bad time for pasta, and pesto is the main thing that I like to eat on pasta. Here are five different kinds kinds of pesto that my grandmother figured out. In every case, you can make them the same way: Toss it all in the food processor, zap it, and Bob’s your uncle. You’re done.

Basil Pesto
2 cups basil
2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup pine nuts (pignoli)
3/4 cup Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup olive oil

Tarragon Pesto
1 cup tarragon
2 garlic cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon green peppercorns
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1 cup walnuts
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup water (?)

Piston
2 cups basil
1/2 cup Italian parsley
4 garlic cloves
3/4 cup Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup olive oil
salt & pepper

Walnut Pesto
1 cup oregano or marjoram
1 cup walnuts
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
6 Tablespoons water
6 Tablespoons white wine
1/2 cup olive oil

Parsley Anchovy Pesto Spread
6 oz anchovy filets
2 garlic cloves
1/4 cup Italian parsley
2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 teaspoons fresh thyme OR 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
2 egg yolks
pepper
1 cup bread crumbs
1/2 cup olive oil

I’m going to be doing a kind-of a special recording so I want you to tell me I need some feedback from you. Did this mic make a difference in your listening experience, as opposed to the last episode? This is a special, different headset and mic that I’m using for the first time when I do a face to face interview with my dad. I’m going to be taking some folklore about about life during the Great Depression in West Texas, which I think will be very interesting to a lot of you. I think that, as much as the content will be interesting, what I’m going to try to show you is how it is that you ask open-ended questions and take questions and answers from the person you’re interviewing, and build on what they’re saying in order to get them into a real dialogue, and eventually a real monologue, so that they’re telling you everything that they can about what they remember at that particular moment. So, since we’re going to be face to face and I’ve never done face to face before, I’ve always used my big mic and headphones and I’ve had the Internet between me and somebody I was interviewing, I need to know about how you feel about the sound quality on this headset. It looks like we’re going to be using both of them at the same time, facing one another, possibly with a piece of cardboard between us to muffle the sound. I don’t want too much sound bleed.

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