Family Recipes: Part II

 In a second series of embroidered pieces containing family recipes, I used yet more recipes from my Grandma Blanche's recipe books.  Some of the recipes are odd; who would need a recipe for making cheese toast?  Here again, I translated all the marks on the page onto the cloth, all punctuation, underlines and page breaks, but I made each piece the size of a recipe card. Each recipe is then approximately life size.

 

With this second series, I embroidered the pieces on two layers of discharge silkscreen printed cotton organdy.  (Discharge being a printing paste containing a chemical that strips the colour from the cloth). Of course you can barely see the print on the pale yellow organdy.

 

My Grandma Jean was not a domestic doyenne, though she had five children and ran an efficient household.  She was much more interested in the outdoors and intellectual pursuits.  She prefered extremely simple cooking.  I remember once she had made Date Surprise Muffins - the surprise being, she said, "I was too lazy to chop the dates, so I poked a date into the middle of each muffin.  Be careful of the pits".  

However, she did have a small repertoire of famous baked goods - waffles, molasses cookies and square bales in particular.  See above her recipe for molasses cookies written in her perfect school teacher script.  These are a drop cookie, soft, cakey and chewy. Molasses was a favourite of my grandfather - he liked to put blackstrap on his oatmeal.

 

Grandma Jean liked to give imaginative names to different foods - perhaps a way of convincing my father, his two sisters and two brothers to eat their meals.  Cream of wheat was Snow Porridge, cornmeal porridge was Sun Porridge.  Square Bales were simply brown sugar oat squares, but living in the rural setting of our family farm, where hay and straw were taken off the fields every year, the name Square Bales  seems more romantic and appropriate. 

Family Recipes: Part I

This recipe for drop-cookies is from Grandma's neighbour, Mrs. Myrtle Allwell.

These embroideries are part of an on-going series of work based on my collection of recipes belonging to my grandmothers.  I have original recipe books from both my maternal grandmother and her mother, and copies and scans my aunt made me of my paternal grandmother, her mother, and mother-in-law.  Some are recipes I have made myself, or tasted as a child.  Others, I've never tried, but just like the sound of them, or not at all. 

These three embroideries are from Grandma Blanche's notebooks.  She traded recipes with friends and neighbours, and sometimes the name of the lady who gave the recipe is written on the page.  Some are written in Grandma's hand, others have been given in the hand-writing of the friend.  I love the scrawl of old handwriting, and it was important to me to translate the handwriting and punctuation exactly.  I embroidered the handwritten text onto pieces of old tea-towels and tablecloths.

In another series of embroidered pieces, Family Albums, I created portraits of family members I had never met, but only knew through photographs or stories told to me as child.  In one piece, I used my great-grandmother May's recipe for doughnuts as her portrait.  My mother remembers eating these delicious doughnuts. 

I have a scrap of paper on which May wrote the recipe in pencil. Someday I would like to try making these doughnuts, but Grandma's recipe does not provide any instructions - only ingredients, and even then, there is the vague direction for the amount of flour - "flour as for cookies".

More variations on the recipe series to follow.

Embroidered on a piece of an old apron with the pocket still attached.

Detail of my great-grandmother's signature. I love the holes and stains in the fabric.

Grandes Dames: Grandma Blanche

Circa 1930s, in front of the perennial border.

This is the first in a new series of entries about the ladies and men who have played a formative role in shaping my thoughts on domestic activities.  There is no greater influence in my life in this regard than my maternal grandmother, Blanche.

Born in 1904, she grew up on a farm near Lynden, Ontario, where one of her designated chores was to hold the chicken still while her brother chopped off its head. Her father's farm was typical old-fashioned mixed use farm.  My great grandfather Frank grew a variety of vegetables and other crops, raised animals, made his own sausage and sauerkraut, and grew his own fruit.  He was also an amateur photographer and he processed his own film and photographs.  (More on him later).

Images of early life:  the old farm house, Blanche's brothers, Leo and Frank, and a favourite photo of mine, my grandmother and her sister Winnie, peeling potatoes - at work from an early age.

Blanche and Winnie on the beach at Port Dover.  'MBM' is how my grandmother referred to herself:  Mabel Blanche Mannen.

I love these old photographs of family and leisure life.  The family at the beach. The photo on the bottom left shows Blanche and Winnie again.

Blanche was the third of four children spaced four years apart, two boys and two girls.  My grandmother had only a ninth grade education because her parents could only afford to board her at Brantford to attend high school for one year. She spent much of her life working hard, in ways that I can only imagine, as a domestic servant, maid, store clerk, housekeeper, waitress.  She worked upstairs and downstairs in grand houses.  She worked in the dining room at Ridley College in St. Catherines.  She worked at Eaton's department store.  She worked at the Majestic Restaurant in downtown Hamilton.  She worked hard, and she was pragmatic and sensible.

She was the sort whose hands must always be busy, never sitting down.  When she did, she liked to watch tennis on television.  She read murder mysteries and crime fiction. But she was usually busy - cooking, cleaning, gardening, tending to hundreds of houseplants (African violets were a particular favourite), sewing, baking, canning, pickling. She was happiest when she was busy.

Perhaps typical of her generation, she saved everything.  Scraps of cloth.  Lengths of string.  Thread.  Yarn.  Bits of paper.  Buttons. Postcards.  Hardware.  Nails.  Screws. All of these things carefully organised into envelopes, tins, jars, and boxes, all carefully repurposed.  Much of which, I have inherited.

She baked mean pie crust, and made amazing lemon meringue pie. She was also a clotheshorse. More to follow on Blanche, her collections and her pie crust, in the weeks to come.