Sharing Recipes

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. We certainly did. All of our children were home and well-loved pastor Fr. Ed joined us for dinner.

Good friend Mary O. made an interesting comment on my last post about a lost family recipe. My youngest girls were horrified that I shared on my blog my mom's "Frost on the Pumpkin" recipe which they described as "a secret family recipe." I told them it was not secret and that I was sure my mom did not even invent it. It's just a special dessert that we've had on Christmas and Thanksgiving for many years. Why not share it?

My mother did not keep this recipe a secret. But I had never written it down, or if I had I somehow lost it over the years, my not being the most organized or tidy of homemakers. For a number of years I tried to reconstruct it, knowing the ingredient list was pretty simple and remembering most of it. But I never got it quite right. Finally I thought to look through my mother's old recipe books and see if I could find it.

I found a treasure of a recipe collection-- a little book of recipes one of my teachers at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Fort Wayne, Indiana had assembled. The cover, now lost, had been a piece of construction paper decorated with a design made from a "potato stamp" I had cut from a potato. Anyone remember that art project? The pages were printed with those purple mimeograph pages. (right terminology?) The inside cover had a letter from me to my mom in the painstakingly neat cursive the nuns required. In it I apologized for the "not so hot" cover, expressed the hope that she liked the cookbook, and indicated that her recipe was on page 2. And there it was!!!! "Frost on the Pumpkin by Mrs. Richard Bailhe."

I immediately recognized the missing ingredient. I think it was the ginger. We always knew there was something of a bite missing from the reconstructed recipe.

Anyway, recipes need to be shared and recorded!! The three family recipes I made yesterday were all lost at one time. (Like I said, I am not a very organized or tidy homemaker.) Maybe I'll tell the story of how each was recovered in future posts. :-) God is good.