Relatively Speaking

Mine are weird.  Relatives that is.  As a child, I would consider my parents against their siblings and other family members and wonder how I got so lucky to get as parents the only two sane people in those wacky two families.  There was Great Grandmother Never Lose At Checkers because she'd dump the board over if defeat seemed imminent.  Great Great Grandfather Never Seen Again who out of the blue with no note or warning woke up three of the 6 or 7 kids in the middle of the night and took off with them to parts unknown.  The most hushed up family story is Cousin Who's My Father, who resembled favorite Uncle Hermit In The Woods who apparently left the woods to visit his sister-in-law at least once.  The funniest stories detailed Aunt Ag and Uncle Crawford, a truly odd duck couple, she the diminutive little housewife and he the great imposing bully and definitely not a Feminist supporter.  Invitations to their house for dinner were not sought out because their spousal relationship ... well.  Crawford, the stories go, parked his imposing girth at the head of the table, with Ag stationed behind his right shoulder, serving fork and carving knife in hand to tend to his every want.  When he wanted, he'd point at the object and grunt.   In between his grunts, she stood there, entertaining herself and whatever hapless guest sat at the table by screwing up her face and sticking her tongue out at Crawford or raising the carving knife to make threatening gestures at Crawford's corpulence.  Guests were expected to keep the show secret from Crawford.  These are not the relatives who shared treasured family recipes so there are no heirloom recipe boxes handed down through the generations. 

My mother has cookbooks.  Lots of cookbooks.  Some mainstays like Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow Cookbook, some oddballs like an old obscure Scottish cookbook with recipes for haggis.  One year as my sisters and I were approaching the age of leaving the household, we all, unbeknownst to each other but giving my mother fits of giggles, came up with the same Great Idea and bought each other the same Christmas presents: parakeets and cookbooks.  The same cookbook.  The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  I had my Fannie Farmer Cookbook all the way through birthing my children and well into their growing up years.   I treasured it.  But it finally fell apart and large chunks were missing.  It felt like losing one of those wacky but loved relatives.  A couple years ago, out of the blue, my husband handed me a package, said he'd found it on the internet somewhere and thought I'd like it.  Yep,  inside was a Fannie Farmer Cookbook, the exact same edition as the one we all traded at Christmas that year so long ago.

For New Year's Day dinner, I made Pineapple Upside Down Cake, using the following recipes from Fannie Farmer.

Upside-Down Cake

Melt in a heavy frying pan or a cake pan
  1/4 cup butter
Add
  1 cup brown sugar
Spread it evenly in the pan.  If desired, sprinkle with
  Pecan nut meats
Put in the pan, close together
  Peach halves or drained canned sliced pineapple
Sprinkle with lemon juice.  Cover with
  Cottge Pudding  batter (p. 481)
Bake at 400* until the top is brown and crusty (about 35 minutes).  Turn out on a serving dish, fruit side up.  Garnish with whipped cream.  Serves 6.

Cottage Pudding

An adaptable recipe.  For a small family bake either in cupcake tins or a small square tin.  Use part for cottage pudding and frost the rest for another meal.  For a richer dessert, top with whipped cream.  One-egg Cake (p. 462) is excellent for cottage pudding, too.

Set the oven at 400*.  Butter a shallow cake pan, 8 by 8 inches, a small angel cake pan or cupcake tins.

Sift together
  1 1/2 cups flour
  2 teaspoons baking powder
  1/2 teasponn salt
  1/2 cup sugar
Mix
  1 egg, well beaten
  1/2 cup milk
  1/2 cup butter, melted.
Sift gently into the flour mixture.  Pour into the pan.

Bake until brown and crusty (20 to 25 minutes).

Serve warm with
Vanilla Sauce (p. 402), Creamy Chocolate Sauce (p. 399), Lemon Sauce (p. 402, Orange Sauce (p. 404),   or Melba Sauce (p. 404), or with crushed and sweetened strawberries, sliced peaches or stewed blueberries.
Serves 6.

Comments

[Kim]

Hahaha!! The description of your relatives is priceless!

That very same FF cookbook is still my favorite today too :-)

[Anne]

I'm not even going to visit the Great-Uncle Fred stories. I don't think the blog world is ready for a cheatin', philanderin' 1-armed preacher selling contraband Metamucil to fund covert missions to China. Honestly, sometimes you just can't make shit this good up.

[Marie]

Oh my stars! I think we're related!! LOL

But you forgot great grandma has-a-bad-green-tattoo-on-her-arm. She always said she was ashamed of it. Not quite enough to stop wearing those sleeveless smocks showing it to the world though. (every day even in winter)

Or Uncle-pinches-cheeks-and-laughs-to-loudly who everyone tried to avoid like the plague. (those pinches hurt!) Somehow even without a proper invitation he always managed to find every family gathering and fresh victims.

Ahhhh family.

[DebbieB]

I just about died laughing at the descriptions of your relatives and your names for them. :-)

[Maureen in Rockport]

I LOVE weird relative stories. How about my grandma we called "Bette Davis" because she was so dramatic? She once hid in the coal bin with her apron over her head because she thought her sister-in-law had shown up at the house to give her the evil eye.

I wish we had some of your cottage pudding. Some one gave us a crock of homemade hot fudge.

[Leslie Wind]

Weird relatives, one of the few topics about which I have no doubt I can hold my own! There was my Aunt Money Is Everthing (married with one son)who took her male poodle puppy to the vets because he had these little ball-like"growths".
I confess I do want to hear about the one armed preacher with contraband Metamucil.

[Manise]

What a priceless post- OMG! I so want to hear about Uncle Fred in Part II tomorrow! And the comments- HA! I don't know between you and Norma today it's been quite a pissah!

My mom kept her recipes in an accountants ledger- one of those long skinny ones. Some were written in and others were pasted. We lived overseas so every 3 years when we returned to the US for the summer she'd collect the recipes off the back of the brown sugar boxes and tape them in too or leave them loose between the pages. When my mom left my father in the mid- 80's she thought in her haste that she had left it behind much to my chagrin. After she died, I found the recipe book in the bottom of one of the many trunks and boxes that she couldn't bare to open and deal with her loss and memories. In it is the family birthday cake she was known for.