Good Housekeeping Cookbook Brings Unexpected delight
Looking through the pages of The Good Housekeeping Cookbook (1963), I didn’t find anything exciting; though I didn’t know what I was looking for.
This 1963 cookbook includes useful information like a glossary of cooking terms, meal planning for hosting a dinner party, and a guide for storing and cooking different cuts of meat. But it is a reminder of a certain type of woman heralded in the 1960’s. For example, in a section titled, “Family Weight Watching,” a suggestion to mothers with teenage daughters reads:
remind them they‘re preparing for marriage and motherhood. A girl who enjoys being a girl, who looks like a girl…stands the best chance of having a whirl.”
This cookbook included pictures of recipes that looked gross like the pictured Roast Beef Hearty Party Salad. This picture showed a trifle bowl lined with sliced sirloin filled with iceberg lettuce, lima beans, French string beans, turnips, and carrots served with Italian dressing. No thanks.
As I looked through the book, I saw a recipe for Savory Baked Spaghetti. This seems so basic and bland that I wanted to make it to see if I was correct. The dish was layers of spaghetti, tomato sauce, and cheddar cheese. The sauce only included tomatoes, onion, and garlic seasoned with ground chuck, salt, pepper, and cumin. Although it didn’t include wine, Italian spices, and red pepper; what I would add. Yet, it was delicious.
This recipe reminded me of the way my mother made spaghetti. She made her spaghetti on top of the stove with a sauce made with onions, garlic, green peppers, ground beef, beans, and sometimes mushrooms mixed with cooked spaghetti. I loved it. We ate it with garlic bread or toasted buttered Zesta crackers.
As I cooked the Savory Baked Spaghetti, I thought of other foods from my childhood: breaded pre-made veal cutlets (or whatever meat it was), pork chops and gravy, Dad’s Salisbury steak and chipped creamed beef over melba toast were all served out of my mom’s kitchen. But one of my favorites was tuna casserole.
When my mom passed, one of my aunts made my siblings and me tuna casserole with bearnaise sauce on the side; that made it fancy for me. I remember how comforting I felt eating that casserole with a fresh green salad. My soul smiled as I ate it. I can still remember that day.
That tuna casserole was like nourishment for the days ahead. When mom died, I went with the flow. I had no idea what her passing from this world to the next meant. It is a reality like no other, I remember it feeling like a bad dream.
Later, I told my aunt how good that tuna casserole tasted and how that sauce was “it.” She seemed surprised by how much I liked the sauce. She later gave me a pack of the Knorr Bearnaise Sauce she made for the dish. As I ate the casserole. I was not only enjoying something familiar but something familiar with a twist. Something new.
I was experiencing the familiarity of home and my mom with me in a new way. She will never again be with me physically, but I will now experience her presence in a new way. I am learning this new day by day and each day is different. But this I know for sure; she is with me and will forever be.
I dedicate this post to my mom, Dolores Johnson.
Mom on my wedding day
