Gearing up for Thanksgiving 2011

I'm gearing up for Thanksgiving now. And, that makes me think of my grandmother, Ella Haltiwanger Wingard, my father's mother. We eat family meals at her oak table purchased from the Sears Roebuck catalogue in the early twentieth century. I had it done over when my father gave it to me and the $7 price tag was still attached to the bottom. I can easily transport myself back to a childhood memory of her delicious fried chicken suppers accompanied with rice, gravy, and seasonable vegetables and fruits. I loved the summer sweet iced tea in the summer as much as winter sweet hot Russian tea.

Not only do I have her table and memories of good food but I also have her collection of cookbooks and handwritten recipes. With the exception of an early edition of The Joy of Cooking (I suspect a gift from my mother), her cookbook collection consists mainly of pamphlets published by standard brands and probably ordered from magazine or newspaper advertisements. A particularly beautiful one, with exotic colored pictures endorsing Jell-o, is “Desserts of the World” published in 1909 by The Genesee Pure Food Co. On the front of this book, she referred to "Layer Jello p 15" which must have been a favorite recipe.

Another pamphlet, Delicious Desserts, carefully preserved in an old brown envelope dates from 1898, before my grandmother married. Her maiden name, Ella Haltiwanger is carefully inscribed over “Delicious.” This booklet promotes “Dr. Price’s Delicious Flavoring Extracts."

My grandmother clipped recipes from magazines, newspapers, and the backs of boxes. She wrote out recipes from friends on old envelopes, advertising supplements, butcher paper, brown paper bags, and index cards. The recipes sometimes included the name of the person who gave it to her or her own comment, such as “These are good” for Refrigerator Rolls 1 (on the back is Refrigerator Rolls 2).

She stuffed these recipes in binders. A black one with “Pet Milk Recipes” imprinted on the front also includes her canning record for one week in July 1943. She put up 3 quarts catsup, 3 pints figs, 12 quarts peaches. In addition she dried 1 pint figs and made 3 pints fig conserve. Her recipe collection contained many books about putting up food. "Your Guide to Home Canning" was published by Kerr in 1938.

My favorite of her recipes and the one that I look forward to making at Thanksgiving is her cranberry relish. I’ve lost the original but I know it by heart. I chop up a bag of fresh cranberries and two oranges, both the rind and the orange but not the bitter white part. I add sugar to taste just right and then chopped pecans. My grandmother kept both a grater and a nut cracker bolted onto her kitchen table. The pecan tree was right out the back door.