After dining on cumin-dusted salmon with sundried tomato couscous one night at home this past vacation, my father and I set to work on the new recipe box. The old one had been over-stuffed and grease-splattered for years and we had volunteered to transfer the contents to a new box. I hadn't looked in the recipe box for years -- almost everything we make now comes from cookbooks or Cooking Light magazine. So what we found inside was shocking.
My family is the type that has a green vegetable with every dinner; "dessert" is a piece of fruit. But the recipes in the box told of a different diet -- a different family perhaps? -- one that included such dishes as green bean casserole (frozen green beans, cream of mushroom soup, topped with "french fried onions from a can").
Green bean casserole?
This was a diet did not at all fit with my current perceptions of my parents. But perhaps I should not be so surprised, given the environments they grew up in. My father's mother gave him Devil Dogs and a glass of milk for an after-school snack, while my mother was raised in the world of casseroles. Is it really so surprising that a marriage between these two yielded dishes like creamed chipped beef (think beef and cream of celery soup)?
So what happened from there to here? "Our tastes have matured," was my mother's answer, as she glanced at yet another recipe from the old box calling for Campbell's soup. When my mother first met my dad in college, he was in charge of cooking for the five other guys in his apartment. For a typical dinner, he'd take a veal patty and slap on some tomato sauce and a slice of mozzarella. (The only kind of pre-sliced cheese we ever have in our refrigerator now is Tofu cheese.) The most cooking my mom did at this point was warming up soup in her hotpot in her dorm room. This type of cooking carried over into my parent's first days of living together. Yet even then, they are quick to assure me, there were signs that maybe things would be different in the future -- they searched the library at Cornell's hotel school for good recipes and shopped for spices at the natural foods store on the weekend.
In the back to nature movement of the early 70s, my mother taught herself how to make bread. This is the era that her recipes for roasted soybeans and eggplant tofu casserole date from. There were quite a few eggplant recipes in the box; apparently eggplant was the hot vegetable of the day and my parents were trying (unsuccessfully my mother says) to convince themselves they liked it.
Then somewhere down the road, my sister and I came along, and though I remember eating beef casseroles at my grandmother's house, what I remember most when I think of the food I ate growing up are the green vegetables that I tried to sneak into the trash each night. I grew up surrounded by Moosewood Cookbooks and wearing a King Arthur apron when I baked. I am used to describing my father, who does all the grocery shopping and cooking, as an excellent cook (I'll continue to do so even though I know about the Green Bean Casserole lurking in his past). My dad has gotten more and more interested in food through the years, and this attraction to cooking has passed down to me -- the girl who got a subscription to Gourmet magazine for her 22nd birthday.
Back to the recipe box. There were some recipes that, no matter how repellent to our current taste buds, could not be thrown away. So we made a new file in the box: heirloom dishes. Things we won't ever make again but thought we should preserve in our own sort of culinary museum -- each recipe card a handwritten testimony to past times.
One by one, my father and I went through the recipes. Creamed chipped beef promptly made it to the discard pile. Springtime vegetable pie (think cheese, vegetables and Worcestershire sauce all baked in a pie shell)? My dad ripped the card in two, just as my mom ran in from the next room. "Barney, no! That was the first dish we made together!" My dad contritely taped the recipe back together and stuck it into the archive file.
Some of the recipes I did remember eating -- and wanted to eat again. We had a family conference over whether or not we'd retry onion noodleburger or banish it to the trash. I had vague memories of what the dish tasted like, and both my parents admitted that it was quite tasty. Only we rarely eat beef anymore (especially if it's not grass-fed) and it was another one of those recipes that used a can of Campbell's soup.
Nostalgia prevailed. On my last day home for winter vacation, we gathered around the table to dine on onion noodleburger, the only substitution being ground soy protein for the meat. We laughed as we did so, but we all had seconds.
