From My Mother's Cookbook: Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce

My Mother's Cookbook circa 1950

     Mommy was a good cook.  Her little accounting book where she wrote or pasted her favorite recipes certainly wasn't fancy but it contained many of the good things I remember from our supper table. Our meals in those days were breakfast, dinner at noon, and supper at night.  The largest meal of the day was usually at noon.  Farming is hard physical labor.  By midday, everyone had already been working for 5 or 6 hours and appetites were hearty.  If we had a smaller meal, it was at night, but often we had two good sized meals.  The breakfast, lunch, dinner regime was clearly for city living, the way Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank lived.

     Mommy and Grammy cooked on a stove that burned whatever was available, sometimes coal or wood, but often we burned corn cobs.  Not much went to waste on the farm.  I know pioneers years before burned cow patties or sheep dung, but I very much doubt that ever happened in our house.  I would probably remember the smell! 

     I learned to cook on that stove burning corn cobs and it wasn't easy.  If the cobs were at all damp, getting the fire going was difficult and created unpleasant smoke.  Cooking was an art form dependent on the cook's skill managing the fire and stove and less on the recipe itself.  Temperature control on the stove top was sketchy for a novice and almost non-existent in the oven compared to today's standards.  

     During Mommy's and Grammy's years in that kitchen, we had no running water.  Water was hauled in a bucket from the well faucet outside the house.  At the opposite end of the stove from the fire was a reservoir large enough for several gallons of water.  That was how we heated water for washing dishes and hair.  Hot water for laundry or baths was heated in kettles directly on the stove top.

     We each had our favorite recipes from Mommy's cookbook. My favorite was a dessert, of course - Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce.  Mommy's recipes were cryptic, obviously written for her personal use in combination with her memory.

 Cottage Pudding

1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 1 egg, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1 cup flour.  Beat egg and sugar together then add milk, and dry ingredients.  Use any sauce.

Lemon Pudding Sauce

1 egg, 1 cup sugar, 1/3 cup butter, 1 tblsp. flour, 1 tsp. lemon, pour boiling water on and make like starch. 

     The above is copied verbatim from Mommy's cookbook and it is not particularly obvious that Cottage Pudding was basically a simple yellow cake made in a 8" x 8" metal cake pan.  The cake was cut in squares and served in dessert dishes with the warm lemon sauce poured over the top.  I liked anything lemon and so the more sauce the better.  Farm meals usually included dessert if there was a good cook in the house. We used real butter, cream, and plenty of sugar.  Farmers worried less then about calories because the constant physical activity was more effective than any exercise regime at a health club.  

     After Grammy and Mommy died, I as the eldest girl inherited the cooking chores.  Aunt Opal gave me a Betty Crocker cookbook for my 12th birthday and it became my "cooking Bible".  It had more detailed instructions than Mommy's cookbook, but I still had many failures because I frequently lacked some of the needed ingredients or I tried to guess without the cookbook at all.

     One of my most famous flops was pumpkin pie without the cookbook.  I never did anything in a small way.  If I had to make one pie, I might as well make three.  I had plenty of canned pumpkin and three pie tins, one very big 10" and 2 smaller 8" diameter tins.  I made the pie crusts, probably with my Aunt Alice's hot water pie crust recipe, the only one I could make work.  Then I opened the cans of pumpkin and spread the pumpkin around on the pie crusts and  shoved the pies into the oven.

     Yep!  That's right.  No eggs.  No milk or cream or sugar. No spices or seasoning.  I periodically opened the oven door to check on the pies, but nothing seemed to be happening.  They didn't look anything like pumpkin pie was supposed to look.  Eventually, my pies just plain dried up and the crusts burned.  I remember this all so well these many decades later, because I cried many tears over those inedible pies. 

    Daddy couldn't cook at all but my brother Clarence was probably the best cook among us kids.  He made marvelous fudge.  And even when it failed and didn't harden properly, we ate it with a spoon.  We were happy when Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank came, because they often brought delicacies like sliced baked ham.  She was a good cook even though she often fixed some things we thought quite weird like BEET sandwiches, served us green salads, and used Morgan David wine in her recipes.  The latter wine she considered "sort of a wine"  which was therefore okay for Methodists.

     Eating was an important part of Midwest farm life and socializing in the 1940s and 1950s.  I will share more of Mommy's recipes as well as our "eating and cooking experiences" in posts to come.