| Charlotte's List Banana Sandwiches - sliced bananas on white bread with
either butter or walnut raisin cream cheese
Marzipan fruits - little European candy type
cookies you have to hunt in Import shops for.
Keillor's Marmalade on Toast - just because
my Granny was a chocolate packer at Keillors at the beginning of the 20th Century and I
like to remember her. And I didn't like marmalade that much when I was growing up in
Scotland!
McIntosh apples - because my Granny was
Charlotte Beat McIntosh
Lyle’s Golden Syrup Tablet – I
don’t know how my Granny did this, but this was kind of like peanut brittle, but
without the peanuts. And she used Lyle’s Golden Syrup – you get it in a green
tin in better grocery stores and, of course, in British import shops. Just had a thought,
if I can’t find the recipe, maybe I’ll try making peanut brittle without peanuts
and using Lyle’s Golden Syrup!
Sago with Raspberry jam in the middle -
because that was served to us as a dessert, or pudding, from the school meals ladies in
Scotland. The closest thing to it in America is Cream of Wheat.
Porridge served with salt instead of sugar -
I'll eat my porridge this way when I'm in a snit because only the English put sugar on
their porridge, and telling a Scotsman to put sugar in his porridge is the ultimate
breakfast insult!
Here’s a porridge rhyme:
Pease porridge hot.
Pease porridge cold.
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
Some like it hot.
Some like it cold.
Some like it in the pot,
Nine days old.
Toblerone - because that was my favorite
chocolate growing up in Scotland. I love to open up that triangular cardboard box to get
into the silver paper, then bite off those kind of scratchy triangles one by one and eat
them.
Rhubarb and Sugar
Even though the leaves of rhubarb are poisonous (something I never knew
growing up in Scotland) it seemed like everybody had a rhubarb patch in their back garden.
I remember my mother or granny taking some greaseproof (known as wax, in this country)
paper and rolling it up into a cone and putting sugar in it and washing a stalk of rhubarb
for me. I would happily go off with that rhubarb and bag of sugar and dip the raw rhubarb
in and out of the bag, sucking that sugar until the rhubarb stalk became positively
stringy. I was probably eating more sugar than rhubarb! I still love rhubarb pie, or
stewed rhubarb and custard. But rhubarb is a lot more expensive over here it seems, than
it was in Scotland, where it grew like a weed. So I don't buy it too often.
Kelly
No, kelly had nothing to do with green or Ireland. You bought your kelly
"loose" (measured out by the sweetie man) at the sweetie shop. I think the
closest thing to kelly is Koolaid mix, because we knew it was intended to be added to
water to make a drink, but we never did this. I remember my mother and granny giving me my
Saturday shilling (about a dime) and going downstairs, out of our tenement and into the
shop below us to carefully spend that shilling on as many "bargains" as possible
- I bought a lot of "two for a penny" stuff like gobstoppers and dolly mixtures
and jelly babies. Sweetie shops always had a special tray for this! When you bought kelly,
you would get a wee bag of kelly and pour it out a little at a time onto the palm of one
hand, preferably the left if you were right handed. We'd eat kelly by sticking a wet
finger (preferably the pointing finger) from the right hand into the dry kelly, then
sucking it off. All right, it sounds disgusting - but we enjoyed it, right down to licking
off both palms at the sad moment when the kelly was gone.
Sugarelly Water
I love licorice, as in Bassett's Licorice Allsorts, but I can't imagine
doing this again: Our little gang of kids, right up until we were about 12 or 13, I think,
would go on this binge where we would want Sugarelly Water.
We would get a lemonade bottle (lemonade is what we called
pop - and hardly ever got - so those bottles were hard to find, especially since your mum
got money back when they were returned) and put in about 3 or 4 sticks of pure licorice -
that you could only get from the chemist, or pharmacist. With the licorice in the bottom
of the bottle, we would fill the bottle with ordinary tap water and put in a dark place
for about a week for it to dissolve. (I realize now it was probably also fermenting). I
liked to put mine under the kitchen sink - we called that "the cubby hole" -
where it was nice and dark and cold. After a week you had Sugarelly Water - nice and black
and thick. I don't know if we ever really connected all that rhubarb and licorice with the
bodily function results!
Lemon Curd - this is another Scottish treat,
preferably made by Robertson's of Scotland. It's a preserve made from lemons and is really
good on home made white bread, or used instead of custard in my Granny's puff paste
custard squares recipe.
Tongue
I rarely eat this, because to get it really tasting good you have to cook
it up in tripe, or menudo. The tripe I can do without, and although the memory of that
tongue is so smooth and tasty, getting to it I can do without!
Mincemeat
I love mincemeat - even straight from the jar. The children leave me alone
to eat this, so I don't make it very often because I hate to see it wasted, so I have to
eat the whole thing all by myself. (Now, you know why I am so rotund!) Mincemeat cookies
are delicious, too, and I'd add the recipe if I still had it.
But, you are not off the hook after all. Now that I am
thinking about these cookies, I thought it was in the Culinary Arts cookbook. And so it
was. So now here it is:
They're called "Mincemeat Goodies"
1 cup shortening
2 cups sugar
3 eggs, well beaten
About 4 cups cake flour
1 cup mincemeat
1 teaspoon soda
1/8 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup chopped nuts.
Cream shortening and sugar thoroughly. Add the well beaten
eggs to the creamed mixture and enough of the flour to keep it from curdling. Sift the
remaining flour with the other dry ingredients and add. The exact amount of flour needed
varies with the amount of liquid in the mincemeat. However, the dough should be the
consistency of a rolled dough. Add the chopped nuts and drop from a teaspoon onto a
greased cookie sheet. Allow 2 inches between each cookie for spreading. Bake at 375 for 12
minutes. Makes 96 three inch cookies.
John’s List
Goetta and Eggs This is a kind of breakfast
sausage that you can only get in Cincinnati, although I’ve seen it in other states
listed as "scrapple." John loved it when his mother would make home made goetta.
I remember the recipe a little, because John had me get it - you know how new brides will
do this kind of thing for their husbands - and I made it once and I think I ate goetta two
or three times. Goetta involves grinding up pork chops into ground meat and adding some
kind of oatmeal called "pin oats" then making up patties and then frying it up
as a breakfast sausage and serving with fried eggs.
Adriana's List - 99's
I taught Nan this little goodie. All the ice cream shops in
Scotland would sell this, and remember, the Italians had the best ice creamers and fish
and chippers. Ice cream from the Italian in Scotland was kind of like the ice cream you
make at home (I know this because my first job was in Louie's ice cream shop where at 12
years old I was their maid and helper in the shop).
All you do is take an ice cream cone and stick a Cadbury's
Chocolate Flake in it. Flakes can be bought in America in British import shops -
they're made by Rowntrees and are just sticks of melt in your mouth chocolate, about 6
inches long and an inch circumferance, of flaked chocolate held together by some magic
process.
Let me tell you about Louie, his wife Mary, their daughter,
Rose, and my first job. Their sweetie and ice cream shop also had a little tea room, and
they were just across the street from the famous Hilltown years where in later years I
would meet the few boyfriends I had before I got married - Samuel's jewelry store on
Reform Street was another well known courting landmark in Dundee's downtown and it's a
happy memory to me that that's where John bought my engagement and our wedding rings.
Anyhow, Louie was diabetic and he didn't do much except
entertain his many friends - Rose made the ice cream and ran the shop and Mary kept the
house going. My job was to help in the shop (I graduated to making ice cream cones when I
was about 14) by serving the customers their sweeties, being the little waitress in the
tea room (I really enjoyed the summers when the specialty was strawberries and ice cream -
and I loved making these up) and making the tea, coffee, hot orangeade, and serving
biscuits, etc.
I also helped Rose by "getting her messages". A
Scottish housewife's "messages" were her groceries and I seem to only remember
Mary's messages as Italian spaghetti and green peppers.
Too bad she didn't have me help her cook - could you imagine
what might be in this book?!
I earned about One Pound (maybe $2 or $3) each 12 hour day I
worked. I remember how proud I was to have enough money to buy nylons and lipstick and how
equally proud I was when I saved enough from my tips to buy my mother a box of chocolates
called a "Whitman's Sampler" because she once said to me that she liked those
when she was in America.
Oh, by the way, for those of you who think I don't like
chows, Louie had the most beautiful white chow that I also took for walks. They tell me
that when Louie died, his dog pined away and died shortly after he did. |
