In response to TheAlleghenyGentleman re: most cook books are useless...

These are some recipes from my mother's hand written cookbook... passed down from her mother, which were passed down from her mother...lol



Blond roux...chicken coated in cajun seasonings...I use Chatchers or slap yo mamma...



Drop dumplins...bisquik



YUM!!!

Just thought I'd share some of my favorite recipes with the crowd...

a reply to: edaced4

I smell a conspiracy in this thread...

a reply to: strongfp

lol only conspiracy is how to make the perfect roux...this dummy hit enter...

originally posted by: edaced4
a reply to: strongfp

lol only conspiracy is how to make the perfect roux...this dummy hit enter...

When I lived with my God parents for a few years my god mother made a chicken stew with dropped dumplings. It does make a world of a difference in that home cooked meal. Pure comfort food.

In many old cookbooks and recipes, certain procedures and spice amounts or even which spices are absent. People were trained to know how to cook, the recipes are just a reference. Sometimes at the beginning of the old cookbooks there is a training section so people will know how to do things. Most people long ago knew what procedures needed to be done in what order, the recipe did not include the info.

So yes, if you do not know how to comprehend many old recipes, there could be some problems. My crust recipe, one I got from my ex-wife's grandmother, is written in a notebook I use for recipes, the only copy of the recipe that exists. But my kids think that they can just use that recipe, they do not understand that flours differ and that the water used is a variable depending on what flour is used, also the butters differ, some have more or less salt. You need to taste it and you need to adjust as needed.

I have created quite a few recipes and my recipes are vague. They are made to remind me of what ingredients to add. Even celery varies in taste, some organic celery has lots of flavor while commercial usually has little. Carrots can be bland or they can be flavorful, if you have bland ones, you may need more to flavor the soup. Potatoes even vary, there are different types too, there are the russets or fluffy, the waxy version, and the all purpose which is half way in between. A person has to understand these things. There are differences in all veggies and meats for flavor, how the product is grown determines it's flavor content. Even the age of a chicken determines the flavor in the egg, the older chickens and some different types of birds have eggs with much more flavor. You would not want to put a real flavorful egg in certain cakes, sometimes commercial eggs are better for that, but some commercial eggs have an almost pure sulfur like taste too. I prefer to use free range eggs bought locally.

The beef I bye is grass fed organic and aged for two weeks minimum. It is local and very flavorful, a little garlic salt and some salt and pepper is all you need with it. The stuff bought in stores is bland to us, you almost need to add stuff to it to get flavor. Ingredients vary vastly in quality and flavor, so no, those old recipes can be very wrong. Chickens were tougher and more flavorful back in the early sixties and before. The new meat chickens have been selectively bred to be more tender and grow quicker, but the flavors take months to actually develop, the new chickens die if they live too long, so they never develop the great taste.

That taste can be animal defense chemistry or it can be caused by antigens in the animal. Food chemistry varies depending on the environment or diet of the animal. I have tasted eggs from chickens eating a vegitarian diet, they do not have the flavor of the ones that eat bugs. Our society has gone amuck. People think food needs to taste bland to be healthy, that is the opposite of reality. When food tastes naturally good without a lot of spices, it is providing us with something we need. Salt is necessary in our diet, how much each person needs is determined by how much they pee or sweat out salt, a urinalasis can give false readings on this, so can blood tests.

This is what I study, my studies meant I had to research recipes and how these recipes were written down. You did not need to write things that everyone already knew they had to do.

a reply to: edaced4

That's beautiful, very very nice. The hand writing is fantastic. I love seeing things like this. I didn't grow up with much family (brother, stepfather and mom) and never connected with anybody else I was related to because they were all in Europe.

My girlfriend however is from the Deep South and she has her great grandmothers hand written notes. She would kill me if I posted anything but I love looking through them and reading the ingredients and methods that were used. She learned to really cook during the Great Depression so a lot of the recipes use odd ingredient.

Beautiful recipes.

a reply to: rickymouse

Also, many old recipes use only two or three ingredients, and the result is mind blowing, provided the ingredient quality is there. The later part is very hard to come by though.

Many recipes are lost to time.

My own mother (still with us) doesn't have any of her recipes written down so over the last few years I've made the effort to learn the methods and ingredients used in "signature" dishes.

Many of these dishes she learnt from her mother who presumably learnt it from another relative.

Being a lad from Northern England, many of these recipes are old school and hard to find equivalents. Things like pies, panack (panackelty), jam tarts and even a spaghetti bolognese.

As a kid I often got used to such recipes, my mates loved them... It wasn't until I got older I learned to appreciate her food.

Learn recipes off family and write them down, you'll appreciate it one day.

As Loam said, many old recipes have very few ingredients, the pies I mentioned have 3 ingredients max, like corned beef, potato and onion, it's the method that counts and the quality of ingredients... So frigging good! I think I'll make some tonight.

a reply to: edaced4

Thankyou for sharing.

Recipes are only useless to people who cannot cook. There really is very little PO when it comes to these things.

a reply to: edaced4

Chicken and dumplings. Good old fashioned food.
My grandmother made dumplings that floated in the air over the pot they were so light.
Mine hmmm not so much. I have to work on that recipe.

a reply to: strongfp

It's the shrimp simmering.

a reply to: TheAlleghenyGentleman

When we remodeled our kitchen in our 103 year old house I found an old index card stuck to the wall behind a cabinet. It was a recipe and had an ingredient I still don't know what it is listed.
Sorry I can't remember what it was. It listed rich milk too and I think that was just milk that didn't have the cream removed from it but I'm not 100% certain.

a reply to: edaced4

I find some of the best recipes are made when ordinary people start experimenting in the kitchen with existing recipes. Sometimes I don't have a particular ingredient and I decide to substitute something else. I have found myself adding something extra or changing some of the ingredients that have caused my family's eyes to light up and say "wow this is really good!"
(Sometimes not so good)

The big problem is if you don't write down what you've changed or added, the "great" recipe gets lost in the wind.

originally posted by: loam
a reply to: rickymouse

Also, many old recipes use only two or three ingredients, and the result is mind blowing, provided the ingredient quality is there. The later part is very hard to come by though.

We just bought a half head of grassfed organic beef. It was expensive, costing around six bucks a pound for the fully finished product. With the shrinkage from natural aging for two weeks, it came to seventy five percent of the hanging weight, and adding the processing made it about six bucks a pound

Well worth it, the meat tastes like it did when I was a kid and we bought it from farmers and had it slaughtered and aged back then. Everyone around here used to let their cattle just sit out in the field during the day and everyone fed their cows mostly hays that were planted to include the right mix of grasses and clovers. Some farmers fed them some corn and oats at the end for a few weeks to finish them to gain a little fat. No soy, very short term grains, mostly grassfed.

Back then normal was grassfed and nobody fertilized or sprayed their hay fields, so the meat was pretty much organic. That was back in the sixties around here. Half the farmers feed the cows mostly hay, but the farmer we get our beef from has been studying this stuff and is really good at doing it. I hate paying around two hundred bucks of our half just to pay for the certification, but I won't go back to buying that tasteless commercial beef that shrinks when you cook it. Our roasts get bigger when we roast them, they grow about fifty percent or more from the original size. That is because we have them hung for a minimum of two weeks. sometimes even three weeks. The water evaporates and when you cook them you need to put a half inch of water in the roaster, then the meat expands a lot. If you do not put any water in, the roast is a little dry. I like gravy too, so that juice is potent and makes enough gravy for the meal and even leftovers.

Real carrots taste good too, I don't know why most of the commercial ones have no flavor. It seems that once in a while you get a good bag of commercial carrots, I suppose the farmer had new land that wasn't all burnt out. I grew up on a farm, carrots always tasted great, and even the ones they sold in the stores forty years ago tasted so much better, the commercial carrots years ago tasted almost as good as the organic carrots today. Some of the organic farmland in California is burnt out from overfarming though, not all organic carrots are good. It depends on the land the food is grown on.

a reply to: edaced4

I agree that most cookbooks are useless.

What you ahve there, however, is a real treasure. Family recipes are real cooking.

My favorite cookbook is a 1955 Betty Crocker book that I have. I have used recipes from it countless times, as it covers many basics like basic sauces.

My "trademark" cookies are simply the chocolate chip cookies from that book, with half the butter replaced by peanut butter and using Challenge butter for the rest (higher fat content).

a reply to: rickymouse

I agree. Very little of anything today tastes like It did 40 years ago. Don't even get me started on eggs...

As you mentioned, organic doesn't necessarily mean anything in terms of taste either. The last several seasons we've sort of gone crazy with box gardening and even our results in terms of taste are underwhelming.

originally posted by: loam
a reply to: rickymouse

I agree. Very little of anything today tastes like It did 40 years ago. Don't even get me started on eggs...

As you mentioned, organic doesn't necessarily mean anything in terms of taste either. The last several seasons we've sort of gone crazy with box gardening and even our results in terms of taste are underwhelming.

We get our eggs from a woman who buys smaller chickens which results in smaller eggs. They are outside a lot, eating bugs and grasses in her yard. The eggs taste great, they are the best I have had in many years. I remember getting eggs from my uncle when I was a kid that tasted like that. The thing is that the high producing chickens that create big eggs do not seem to have the same good tasting eggs. It seems that they selected chickens to produce eggs that produce mostly large and extra large eggs, so the eggs are less tasty.

There is not much difference in the mineral and vitamin level between a medium egg and an extra large egg. The medium eggs are actually more nutritious ounce per ounce. The same goes for potatoes, the potato plant puts what is needed for a plant to start into the eggs and the big potatoes actually have added starch in them, not much more nutrition though. The B size potatoes taste great, the big potatoes are ok, but if there is a shortage of micronutrients in them, there is not much flavor. The plant creates a seed, that seed creates a plant or plants, so a small potato has nutrition equal to a larger potato under the right conditions.

Even in the organic topsoil that you buy from the store is the chemistry of the sewer sludge from big sewer plants. Our waste is considered organic so the stuff they take out of the sewer with corexit is considered organic. I know someone who works in a big sewer plant and she told me they load that sewer humus into organic trucks. I have not bought topsoil anymore from the store to add to the garden, that humus can still contain traces of medicines and chemicals. She said that they are tightly regulated as to how much corexit they use and that stuff is not good for anyone. Maybe for a flower garden it may be all right but not for food. I would rather put maple leaves into the soil to build it up, that is really good fertilizer.

The funny part is that in cities they want everyone to rake their grass and put the leaves into bags and haul them away. Mulching the maple leaves with a mower would be better, why add fertilizer that costs a lot when the leaves will take care of fertilizing the yard. It seems that we are led to believe we have to buy things from the store to accomplish things. That is propaganda. Leaves from an oak tree are not good for the garden though, they have too much tannin in them.

We buy a half a grass fed organic cow every year, it tastes like it did when we were young. Naturally aged limousine is great tasting, better flavor than that angus crap. Angus is all right if it is bred with Limousin, it has a little more fat but still has taste to it.

I read an article that beef is a mild carcinogen till the cow gets to be around eighteen months, after that the beef goes to being anticancer. At about twenty six to twenty eight months the good in beef actually outweighs the bad. Most commercial beef is around eighteen months or less. The flavor also increases after they get older, but some people do not like that beefy flavor because we have been conditioned to like flavorless beef. Then you have to add spices and lots of salt to get any flavor. We need little salt and only pepper and a tad bit of garlic salt on our beef. Onions and garlic contain thiols that actually keep people from having agglutination occuring from beef,which can lead to clots. People with A, B, or AB blood should eat some sulfur food with beef or food with sascilicates (aspirin) in it. Cucumbers are high in this, so are some veggies. That will keep the blood from sticking together too much, the sulfur or aspirin compound take the charge off the blood that causes glues. Type O people do not have to worry so much, pretty much half the population of the US is type O

Real chicken tastes great, but it costs over four bucks a pound and most times the chickens are the fast growing kind that die from heart problems if they live too long. A chicken that is say six months old has much more flavor than one that is three months old. The big chickens grow too fast, they do not develop the flavor. After the growth hormone lowers in the bird, it starts building it's immune system chemicals and those chemicals add flavor to the meat.

It seems our health officials want us to only consider certain vitamins and minerals and protein content as important. Either they are dumb or they are hiding something. A protein is a protein has been shown to be wrong many times, every protein interacts different in our bodies and that is related to multiple factors. I no longer believe the main stream Nutrition information, I have researched things and conclude that all our government is interested in is stuffing our faces full of garbage, they do not dig deep enough into nutrition. Some researchers seem to understand this and I read their research and try to evaluate it. Taste is important. But not added flavors, naturally occurring flavors.

a reply to: rickymouse

Wow dude, that was great info.

The cows you buy are they completely grass fed or do they grass feed and finish with grain? I’m a grass fed guy myself.

I didn’t know that about mulch at all. It makes sense though.

Do you break down the beef yourself into primals and subprimals?

originally posted by: TheAlleghenyGentleman
a reply to: rickymouse

Wow dude, that was great info.

The cows you buy are they completely grass fed or do they grass feed and finish with grain? I’m a grass fed guy myself.

I didn’t know that about mulch at all. It makes sense though.

Do you break down the beef yourself into primals and subprimals?

Ours is certified grassfed organic. The people we get our beef from do a good job at raising them, they are healthy and the grasses are a good mix. The land the grasses grow on haven't been depleted from overfarming either. They do subsidize with organic minerals that the cows may need, which are actually more expensive because they are certified organic. Before they went certified grassfed, they used to finish them with organic grains for three to four weeks, the beef was still good, the type of cow they are makes them more flavorful. And of course, they specify fourteen days minimum for aging. We had one that was aged over three weeks, that had lots more flavor form as the beefs enzymes broke down the elastins in the beef.

We have a beef processing plant process the meat, it is certified to do organic meats. They do a good job. We get the Ribsteaks, porterhouses, and Tbone steaks one inch thick and the sirloin and round steaks around a half inch thick. We get all the roasts, the liver and heart, and hamburger of course. There are flank steaks and some filet minyoung too. I like soup bones and short ribs for making soups so we get all of those we can. I just made bone broth from some marrow bones, we made homemade french onion soup today. The bone broth makes really good french onion soup. It had toast in it and some provolone cheese on top. We have enough for two more times. It came out costing about six fifty a pound for anything hamburger and above and about three bucks a pound for the soup bones and short ribs and liver and heart. Real meaty soup bones and short ribs, you do not need to add any other meat to the soup. I didn't count the marrow bones in the cost, that would drop the price a bit.

I give my kids and brother beef for Christmas, usually about fifteen to twenty pounds apiece. My daughter and granddaughter come over and eat once in a while too, and I make pasties for my daughters and granddaughters three or more times a year. I also make big pots of soup for them, I haul it to them. I give the oldest daughter soup bones, she has four kids at home, they need a whole huge pot of soup for a supper. Usually we only have a little left off the half when the next one comes.