Cookbookery

Sometimes we all remember things that didn't happen. Sometimes they didn't happen at all; other times, they happened in a way whose specifics we've forgotten (for one silly or sick reason or another).

Take this cookbook--Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. Before I looked at the copyright date just now, I would have told you a romantic story about how my mother had given this to us at the time we were married--her own cookbook, the one I'd seen around our kitchen at home for years. The familiar table-cloth cover ...  (I can hear the ain't-that-a-sweet-story Awwwwwwww even now from readers.)

But today--using the cookbook for a reason another picture below will supply--I looked at the date and saw, to my surprise: 1973. We were married late in 1969. So ... either my mother gave us a newer one later on (not the one she'd used) or we bought it ourselves or someone else gave it to us. Whatever. Of course, I deeply prefer the mother-story, but it just didn't happen--not in the way I remembered it.

Anyway. 1973. We've still had the book for a long time (more than forty years), and early in our marriage we used it all the time for all sorts of things in our very plain and pedestrian meals.

Nowadays, I drag it out only for nostalgic reasons around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. I use it for cornbread (see below) and for the hard sauce that adorns the steamed pudding I make on Christmas Day (or Eve, depending on when the family's here), a recipe I have from my grandmother--and, yes, I'm sure about that: It's in my mother's handwriting, and the recipe says where she got it. So there!

Anyway, I kind of wish I had not looked at the copyright date today. I much preferred the fiction to the fact ... and isn't that often the case for all of us?

out of the oven,
5 minutes ago