This weekend I am gaining an apprentice!
We have an old family recipe for something called “Chili Sauce.” I’ve posted the recipe on the June 30, 2003 blog entry. Hopefully, the link will take you there.
Except for last year, Elegante Mother and I have been making this sauce once a year for the past sixteen years we have lived together. I’m not sure why we didn’t get to it, but I must have decided that we could coast on all the reserves we had stored up.
Chili sauce is an old fashioned condiment that my mother uses with roast pork. She puts a dab of it on her plate to eat along with her dinner, and mixes it with leftover pork the next day to make a sandwich spread. While some of the ingredients are like a salsa, the addition of cloves and cinnamon takes it away from the flavor of the southwest, and pushes it toward the Old World.
At any rate, there’s a huge amount of chopping to be done before you can cook the sauce down. Elegante Mother and I have been starting at 5:00 in the morning, cooking it all day long, and not getting to the canning until after dinner. It makes for a very long day. A few years ago, I divided the sauce between two pots to try to cook it down faster, and that helped a bit. Sunday, we’re going to try to break it up into four pots for the first half of the day, and then recombine them to be sure the seasonings are distributed correctly.
My only brother’s only daughter…..what should we call her…..OBOD….or Perky Chick…… Well, my niece and I will be doing the veggie prep on Sunday. I’m going to have Elegante Mother guide her in the chopping of the green pepper, the onion, and the celery, to get the right consistency. I’ll blanch the tomatoes, and peel and chop them. We’ll have EM add the seasonings and vinegar.
The nice part about all this, is that we can chat while we cook, or even play cards, if we stir the pots regularly. I’m glad to have someone to pass the recipe on to. I know she’ll see to it that the family won’t loose this little bit of heritage.
Brava! You must fulfill your tradition–especially when it provides opportunity to see one another, and results in food that you enjoy.
Elegant Friend and I have been trying to get our schedules coordinated so that we may get our summer 2005’s batch of salsa made. The last batch that we made was for Christmas, last year, and our reserves are low. EF does the veggie prep work the night before. (It is her recipe that we use, and I think that she pronounces the correct incantations over the veggies as she is preparing them, because no one else’s salsa can match hers!) I take my electric meat chopper, canning funnel, tongs, and jars and lids over to her house. We are generally finished in 3 or 4 hours. (We use two pots for cooking the salsa down. EF apportions the spices by taste, and I prefer my salsa hotter than she likes hers, so we don’t always mix between the pots.)
Cop Car, I missed something. You take your electric meat chopper to make salsa? I don’t have a clear picture of what you use it for. Could you explain?
I know that your family has a heritage of recipes, too. Have you saved any of your grandmother’s recipes?
Electric chopper/grinder–screw feed type: EF runs the tomatoes, onions, and two kinds of peppers through the chopper/grinder, with the large blade in place, prior to cooking. It makes a mess, but it makes the chunks in the salsa just the size that she likes. It is a good size for me, too, but I am not picky on size of chunks.
Yes, I have some of my paternal grandmother’s recipes. Right off I can think of her recipes for apple butter, stewed tomatoes, pickled beets, and a one-egg, single-layer cake. A couple of the recipes are in an old recipe book that her church ladies mimeographed in the 1930s or 1940s.
I also have some of my maternal grandmother’s and her mother’s recipes–mostly for sea foam and divinity candy and for chocolate and lemon meringue pies. I’m sure that the only reason I have these recipes in writing is because my mother and her sisters wanted them–not because anyone prior to their generation had ever followed a written recipe. My aunt’s recipe for date pudding is the gold standard in our family, not to mention her macaroni salad.
My family cooked to feed farm hands, so you can imagine that most of the food was simple–pinto or navy beans, fresh picked/home canned corn or green beens, mashed potatoes and milk gravy, fried chicken, or baked macaroni and cheese. During the summer, there were always sliced tomatoes from the garden, and in winter, pickled beets. My paternal grandmother cooked on a karosene stove, while my maternal grandmother cooked on a wood-burner. I think that our stove was karosene, at that time, and we had a true “ice box”.
I see, about the meat grinder. Makes perfect sense.
I’ve never canned stewed tomatoes, but we’re eating more of them these days. That might be something I’d want to try just for us.
My mother talks about a sponge cake her mother made, but my grandmother passed away when my mother was 12, and Mother never had the chance to learn the secret to making the cake fly off the plate. I’d give anything to know how to make flaky, light biscuits. I suppose it’s just as well that mine aren’t exciting enough to want more than once a year.
Imagine what your grandmother’s life was like in the summer. Not only did she have to put huge meals on the table for the farm hands, but as things ripened in the garden, she had to can and preserve. Did she harvest the family veggies, too? The work had to be physically hard, and the heat overwhelming! I’m not surprised that kids had to start helping with household chores early on.
Grandma (and I) canned tomatoes, but the stewed tomato recipe is for using fresh tomatoes. The recipe includes “a lump of butter about the size of a walnut”, so you know that the recipe only served a couple of people! I asked her for the recipe, and wrote it down as she told me, when she was in the nursing home.
I used to make sponge cake to use for strawberry shortcake in Hunky Husband’s lunch. The cake was thin, and cut in pieces to fit the old, plastic individual piece-of-pie carriers. I froze vanilla ice cream in a wide mouth thermos, overnight, and sent the crushed, sweetened strawberries in a small jar. All HH had to do was to assemble the whole thing and eat it. He was the envy of his co-workers! The sponge cake was made from a recipe in the Betty Crocker Cookbook, as I recall.
Mom made a different type of biscuit–didn’t care for flaky ones. I can make flaky biscuits–but, not like my grandma–and not like Bogie or Dudette, for that matter. Bogie is the champ in our family, now that Grandma is gone. I haven’t made biscuits in years. Maybe I’ll fix some for breakfast, tomorrow. (Hear my arteries clogging?)
Most of the time, the only farm hands were family hands; but, during haying or corn harvesting, there were a lot of mouths to feed–and it was darned hot work! I don’t know what either of my grandmothers thought about canning, but my mother loved canning. Of course, she loved everything about living on a farm. In Kansas City, when our kitchen was remodeled in 1950, Mom had Dad put the old gas range in the basement, and that’s where she did most of her canning from then on.
The chili sauce sounds delish and I’ve added it to my canning recipes!! Isn’t it great to pass on family recipes to another family member? My daughter now calls me up for recipes and wants to come home to learn to can….I can’t wait.
Cop Car, did your mother make the drop biscuits from Bisquick? I used to make those, but DH doesn’t care for them.
Pennie, I hope you enjoy the chili sauce! I was delighted when my niece stepped up to learn the family recipies. I wanted to be sure that someone knew all the tricks to getting them made. You’ll have a blast with your daughter in the kitchen, I’m sure!
I got a really big laugh from your question about Bisquick, Buffy. I don’t think that my mother ever made anything in her life that wasn’t from scratch–including the bread stuffing for a baked fowl. No, what kept Mom’s biscuits from being flaky was the way she incorporated the shortening. Instead of cutting the shortening into the dry ingredients, Mom made a well in a pan of flour, dumped the baking soda (or baking powder if she wasn’t using buttermilk) and salt into the well, added the buttermilk (or milk) and I think that she also added some melted bacon grease. She mooshed it all around with her fingers until it all clung together (incorporating as much flour as the liquid would hold), kneaded a little bit, rolled the biscuits out, cut them, then dredged each biscuit in melted bacon grease on either side before placing it into a pie pan. She placed the biscuits next to one another–seven to a pan. When the biscuits came out of the oven, they were delicious, but they were not light and flaky–they were light on the inside, with a chewy crust. (They were not only good hot, they were good cold–while many flaky biscuits are not.) My younger brother would not eat biscuits made by his first (late) wife–they were flaky–not like his mother made!
Cop Car, my arteries hardened as I read about your mother’s biscuits. I’ve never seen or heard about biscuits being made that way.
Aha! I can tell that you are not a Hillbilly, Buffy. (Of course, we all knew that.) My mom always claimed (proudly) to be a hillbilly. Hillbillies make everything with bacon grease (and fry enough bacon that there is always a container of bacon grease near the stove). I’ll bet that the “Foxfire” book that covers cookery mentions bacon grease prominently.
Funny….I have one of those cans for bacon grease, but it’s for disposal of the grease, not to save it for cooking! I adore bacon….if my body could deal with it, I’d have a pound a day! Crisply cooked thin-sliced bacon makes me want to write odes to it’s salty goodness! *G* Unfortunately, being realistic about health issues has me cutting back on the bacon served at Chez Buffy. I bet everyone looked forward to going to your Mom’s house for a meal!
Mom’s cooking was great! She specialized in cakes (especially chocolate and chiffon cakes), but the only way she knew to fix meat (other than meatloaf) was to fry it–usually in bacon grease. It’s been at least 20 years since I’ve had a good serving of bacon. Hunky Husband loves the stuff, just as you do, and he fixes his in the microwave; but, it’s been a while since he’s fixed any. We probably buy about 1# per year, these days.
Other than bacon, we simply don’t fry meat here. I’ve browned pork chops before roasting them, but that’s as close as I come to frying meat. We roast and grill and broil, so you can see how far removed we are from the days when our parents cooked.
As for bacon….we have cut back seriously on our intake, but it’s surely more than a pound a year! lol
I understand about our not frying meats, anymore. I cut that out in about 1984–when I first learned my cholesterol level. On occasion, I do fry HH a hotdog, or brown a chicken breast for him; but, I usually saute porkchops in honey, rather than grease, to give them a golden color before baking them. If I want to really treat HH, I run down to Micky D’s for a large order of French fries to go with his meal. He has the good genes for low cholesterol, and with his running, he can burn off the calories. Jealousy gets us nowhere, huh?
I’m green with envy over his metabolism and genes. I’ve never been a runner, and until recently, I used to walk a lot, but not enough. I suppose if I want to eat wrong, I’ll have to pay for it with a LOT of exercise! Maybe I need to become a farm hand….or better yet, get a job at my favorite nursery!