These Times

From the archives: The history recipes can tell

Kirk Ericson | May 15, 20250

I’m taking three weeks off, mostly to putter around. We’ll run reruns while I’m gone. This one was published in the Shelton-Mason County Journal on Feb. 11, 2021. Fresh, unfocused content will return May 29.

On the flip side of a recipe for Peachy Upside Down Cake, cut from the Friday, Feb. 21, 1975, edition of Spokane’s Spokesman-Review, is a three-paragraph Associated Press story with the headline “Sentencing set for Watergate 4.”

On the backside of a recipe for Hot Cross Buns, also cut from Spokane’s morning newspaper, is an ad for “PANTS SUITS: You’ll be impressed with these polyester double-knits in solids, dots and novelty jacquard patterns.” The dictionary defines jacquard as “a fabric of intricate variegated weave or pattern.”

And on the rear of Mrs. Everett Dunn’s recipe for Molded Ham Salad, which was a runner-up in a recipe contest sponsored by the Review, is a coupon, which expired June 30, 1976, for 19 cents off your next purchase of Tang.

A few months into this plague, Mrs. Ericson and our two sons divided our kitchen duties. We each have two nights when we’re responsible for dinner and dishes, except for the 16-year-old, who got just one night because he’s eclipsed me as the worst cook in the house.

It took many years, but I can now fix a meal that’s dependably edible. But I get into cooking ruts during plagues, apparently, so I opened my paternal grandmother’s recipe book, which I inherited despite being the worst cook among my siblings. I am, however, the best among my siblings at ping-pong, shooting free throws and holding my breath the longest.

We all have our talents.

Last week, I opened Mareta Ericson’s recipe book for the first time to see whether I could resurrect an entrée.

I discovered it’s mostly a dessert book — three-fourths of the recipes are desserts. It’s 100 pages, with recipes on the back and front of 8 ½-by-11-inch unlined paper, all bound inside a three-ring leather binder. More recipes, on index cards and cutouts from newspapers, are tucked into a sleeve at the end of the book.

My grandmother died in 1975, and most of the recipes appear to be from the 1960s and ’70s, although one, for Christmas Plum Pudding, is dated 1984. Perhaps my grandmother’s cookbook was visited by the chef of Christmas past.

Her cookbook showed that Jell-O was a staple, right next to protein and vegetables. Jell-O was the ingredient in dozens of her desserts, including parfaits, Cherry Jubilee Salad, Joann’s Salad (two pks orange + pineapple Jell-O) and Lemon Jell-O Salad.

Her recipes show how our taste buds are evolved. I didn’t find any recipes that included turmeric, cumin, curry, cayenne, paprika or saffron, and the only recipes I found for food with names beyond the U.S. were Beef Casserole Mexican Style, Chinese Noodle Dish and Swiss Steak (with Lipton’s Onion Soup).

I did, however, find lots of recipes that required lard, shortening or whipping cream. Those were the days, the days when real men died of massive heart attacks while shoveling their sidewalk.

Mareta, who we called Namie, was raised in the Eastern Washington town of Davenport, not far from Harrington, where my paternal grandfather’s first wife was from. Wife No. 1 died in her 20s in the 1920s, when my father was a babe in arms, and my grandfather, Eric Ericson, married another woman from the same neck of the prairie a few years later. Grandpop was an immigrant from Sweden, so maybe he had a thing for farm country girls raised on meat, wheat and sweets.

Namie was a housewife and a hostess, and we learned dining behavior from her, including a proper hostess eats as long as someone else is eating, those two forks to the left of the plate have separate purposes, and putting olives on your fingertips isn’t original or amusing. Namie was the director of dining, and we were the cast that followed her direction.

After an hour in that recipe book, I finally found something I wanted to prepare. Amid all those food recipes was a recipe for cleaning a bathtub:

Saturate a cloth with peroxide then sprinkle tub with scouring powder and cream of tartar. When powder gets well dampened by peroxide, rub stain well. Allow paste to remain for half an hour. Rinse.

“Well, that sounds just toxic and lovely,” Mrs. Ericson said.

And that’s what I made: A clean bathtub.