Chapter 3
The Recipe Box
Do you have one of these? Perhaps yours came from some kitchen shop when you were married last week or five years ago or ten. Or forty. Perhaps it is tidy, with recipes typed or handwritten in calligraphy. Perhaps all the recipes in there were written down by you, taken from cooking magazines or your best friend’s mother or a television chef or the internet. Or maybe, just possibly, you don’t have one of these.
I do. I have two. But it is one that concerns this story – namely, my mother’s. My mother’s recipe box is a story unto itself. It is small and old and gray and metal. On its front are two labels. The first is the manufacturer – HON. The second is a green Dymo label on which is written, “Call Backs”. It is exactly the size to hold three by five index cards and looks like its original purpose of manufacture was to sit upon someone’s desk in a business office back in the 1950s.
Instead, this little box took a wayward journey. It ended up in my mother’s house and became the repository of a long and detailed history of its own. Are there typed cards in there? Yes. But there are many more cards written by many different hands. There are cards with names on them – people who are as familiar to me as my mother. Others have names of strangers. Yet others are nothing more than recipes cut from the newspaper and glued to a card.
There are tidy, white cards and others that are stained and tattered and yellow. These, I suspect, were either my mother’s favorites or else they are ones she made once and the recipe was such a trial as to cause the card injury in the making of it so it never saw the light of day again. Of this latter type was the Prune Ladder recipe. It takes two cards. One lists the ingredients and cooking instructions. The second is devoted to compiling the “Ladder”. It includes a drawing. I don’t ever remember eating this Prune Ladder but I will say, by the stained nature of the card, my mother tried it once.
So in this box is my life with my mother. Recipes that were my favorites to eat while others hold memories of long nights at the table, sitting with my glass of milk handy as I slowly worked my way through the plate of detestable organic matter my mother called, “dinner”. But what is most interesting to me about this box is what is not in there. What’s not in there are the things we ate most of the time.
I know my most familiar meals are not in the box because I have searched and searched it for, let’s say, Pinwheels, and nowhere is that recipe to be found. And as my mother passed away many years ago, I struggle to make these foods now and then when I want to return home to her. They are my life – my history, my story. Many hours were spent with her in the kitchen watching these meals made, but, as did my mother, I never wrote them down. Thus, what I remember of my mother’s kitchen and the taste of that memory has become a journey of a sort to reclaim what was never written down.
So – where did these recipes come from if not from the box? I have thought on this question a great deal as I drift upon this pig path of my story and it has been on this wandering that I have discovered something. Food that tastes much like my mother’s is made far, far away from Tombstone.
So how can this be? Obvious now, isn’t it? Because we weren’t born of the dust on that mesa. Because we came to Tombstone from far places and from these far places, I know now that a story is not just a mouthful of words. It is the food over which the words are spoken – the bartered return for the storyteller’s tale. Here, on my mother’s table, I see the journey of my family, the itinerates on the long road from Belgium, leaving little hints of who we are in the things we eat.
And so – I leave this here – a recipe of my family – given freely from our long road and put right here, from the place where I think the liking for it came. A little pebble picked up along the way. A tiny gem. A treasure handed down from one pot to the next.
Belgian Waffles
There is more to Belgian cooking than waffles, I know. Other foods more Belgian and less stereotypical. But we had waffles. My Aunt Helen, when describing my grandmother’s losses in the flood of 1955 said, and I quote, “She lost her dishes and Uncle Stan’s yearbooks and her waffle iron.” My mother made waffles as well. She had one of those old waffle makers, you know? With the electrical cord covered in thread? Hard to clean. Anyway, to celebrate my high school graduation – my first champagne and Mom’s Belgian Waffles and an ending and a beginning.
c 2017 Nicole R Dickson all rights reserved
Waffles:
2 cups all-purpose flour
¾ tsp salt
8 eggs, separated
½ cup melted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups whole milk
Mix the dry ingredients first. Beat the egg whites until stiff. Beat the egg yolks until thick and smooth. Add melted butter and vanilla extract to the egg yolks and then slowly mix in flour and milk, alternating between the two as you go. Then fold in the egg whites. Make sure your Belgian waffle iron is hot and if it is not non-stick, spray with a cooking spray or lightly brush with a vegetable oil (I use expeller-pressed Canola). Each waffle takes about 1 ¼ cups of batter. Pour batter into hot iron for about 3-4 minutes until the steam stops. Recipe makes about 6 waffles. Note – there is no sugar in these waffles. Mom’s were not sweet like many other recipes because …
Blackberry Topping:
This is simple but difficult. You are going to need to be aware of how sweet your blackberries are. If they are very sweet, cut down on sugar. If they are very tart, cut down on lemon. So –
½ cup blackberries to cook
1/3 cup sugar
1 TBL lemon juice
½ cup whole blackberries
Blend together and sieve the seeds. Then add into this compote, a half cup whole blackberries.
Crunchy topping:
4 TBLS butter
½ cup quick oats
¼ cup brown sugar, packed
¼ cup chopped walnuts
In a small pan, melted butter. Turn heat to medium high, stirring in oats, brown sugar, chopped walnuts. Stay by the pan, stirring, until contents are brown and crunchy.
Serving:
Place a Belgian waffle on a pretty plate. Pop a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Drizzle blackberry topping over ice cream. Sprinkle with crunchy topping.