Family Recipes

These days I keep thinking about the wonderful meals that Pamela and Mommas used to make. Maybe it’s because it’s not long before the Nashville Farmer’s Market gets into full swing with it’s aisles of bright, fragrant fresh fruits and vegetables or maybe it’s just because there is always a little part of me that is homesick for those two lovely ladies and their comfort food.

Mommas’ peach cobbler in mid-summer, fresh hot buttered biscuits with clouds of fluffy creamed corn crowning the top, crisp and tasty fried chicken – it was all good! But there were also the quiet suppers with Pamela at home with her savory, cheering goulash or salmon croquets and a little dinner salad. I have eaten at some major-league restaurants in my life, but those dishes made by Mommas and Pamela win every culinary prize in my book.

I’ve said it before but CiCi’s cooking gives me the same contentment, whether it’s one of Pamela or Mommas’ recipes that she prepares for me or one of her own signature dishes. I hope that it won’t be too long before I’m sitting at her table again.

Someone gave me a photo album about a year ago and I decided to use it to store my most treasured recipes – the ones that you want to make SURE you don’t lose! It has been wonderful to just thumb through at times and think about how good some of those dishes were!

As a little girl I remember really disliking having to eat and recall excruciating moments when I was told “I would have to sit there until I finished everything on my plate”! Arg. These are some of the recipes that began to change little girl Auntie J’s mind about food:

Mommas’ Peach Cobbler
3 cups peaches
1 cup water
½ cup sugar (Mommas added a comment: “or more if you like” – hee-hee!)

Peel peaches and slice them. Put in pot with sugar and water and cook until done. Put in deep pan so the juices won’t come over the side. Get pie crust mix and roll out just for the top. Put butter over and sugar on top. Put in oven and brown well at about 350 degrees.

Pamela's Hamburger Goulash
½ lb hamburger meat
1 can tomatoes (1 lb)
1 medium onion chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup cooked macaroni

Brown hamburger meat, sauté onion in oil, add tomatoes, seasonings and macaroni and heat all together. (This should serve three or four people. Double amounts for five or six people.)

Mommas’ Biscuits
Flour - 1 & ½ cups
Crisco - “heaping large spoon”
Baking powder – 1 teaspoon
Sugar - half “a spoonful”
Milk - ½ cup (or a little more)
Salt - 1 teaspoon

Mix together until just a little stiff.
Knead on floured board
Roll out to about ½” thick
“Poke” with fork
Cut out with small glass
Put in greased round cake pan (with sides touching)
Rub grease on both sides
Put in 350 degree oven and cook until brown

Mommas’ Chocolate Pound Cake
2 sticks oleo
½ cup Crisco
3 cups sugar
3 cups flour (plain)
1 cup sweet milk
1 cup cocoa
½ teaspoon soda
½ teaspoon salt
5 eggs

Cream butter and Crisco.
Add dry ingredients then add all together.
Add milk a little at a time with eggs.
Beat well.
Cook in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour or a little longer.

Love to the Pamela's Girls,

Auntie J.