Grandma's Old Recipe

This started out as a comment to a Blog Britt-Arnhild’s House in the Woods.  Only as I continues writing my comment on her Blog I noticed that the comment was growing bigger and bigger.  So I changed it into an email and now an entry in my Blog.  I am beginning to have trouble with my memory so my siblings and any cousins may remember this a little different but I think I have the meaning  of this correct.  I hope I haven’t offended anyone if there are errors in my memory.

When my father died and we were breaking up his house my youngest sister asked if she could have an old dresser that Dad and Mom had in their kitchen.  When she got that old dresser home and started to go through it's drawers she found out that she had a "GOLD MINE" of valuable items.  In those drawers were letters Mom and her mother had exchanged over the years.  And if that wasn't enough there were recipes that Mom had asked for and Grandma had written down and sent to Mom.

My sister sent me a couple of those old recipes of Grandma and I just love the way they were written.  You must understand that Grandma lived on a farm that Grandpa's family had purchased from the American Indians back in the mid 1800.  So of course there was no nice gas stove and oven they had a wood burning stove and oven.  I have always assumed that was why the recipes were written with very few if any baking instructions.  Here is one of the cookie recipes:

PEANUT COOKIES – Grandma

½ cup sugar, white
½ cup sugar, brown
½ cup fat
1 egg
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon soda
1 cup flour
½ cup oatmeal
½ cup corn flakes
½ cup salted peanuts

This is the entire recipe.  I especially like the entry stating “½ cup fat” nothing is mentioned about what type fat.  In today’s recipe that entry might be “½ cup Crisco” or “½ cup vegetable oil”.  I guess that if you were a cook you would know what type of “fat” was to be used.  Also in most of today’s recipes there would be instructions about mixing together or “creaming” the eggs and sugar.  Then the most important item that we would find missing is there are no baking instructions.  Once again I guess that if  you were a cook you would just know what temperature you needed to use to bake these cookies.

There were many many other recipes written in the margins of a letter, or written on a loose piece of paper.  My sister did find one of Grandma’s recipe books which like the one in the photo had many hand written recipe on the edge of the pages.  Also there were many recipes just written on any piece of paper.

Your Blog entry today also brought back to my memory of jumping out of the car and running up to Grandma’s Kitchen door and seeing Grandma sitting on a chair with a hand operated coffee grinder grinding up the coffee beans so the adults could have a cup of coffee while they visited.  Now every so often when someone grinds coffee I am transported back in time to my Grandma’s kitchen smelling fresh ground coffee beans and the smell of a wood smoke.