Today would be my Grandma Nellie's 120th birthday so I'm posting her cookbook. The pages were collected from the White Loaf Flour recipe service over the years from 1938 to when it ended in the 1940s. I love this battered old cookbook, it's yellowed and falling apart but it's full of family history. There's the recipe for a walnut cake that was served for Thanksgiving in 1914 and Aunt Fanny's lemon jelly filling. There's the recipe for Ella Graham's Divinity written on the back of a Bank of McLouth check. All of these and recipes from the newspaper were taped, pinned or stuck into it's pages.
Grandma Nellie was one tough lady, she raised chickens, planted a huge garden and took in roomers to make a living. She walked to the post office twice a day to get the mail and could touch her toes into her 80s. She made a great pie from dried apricots, and a chocolate cake that was so rich it was black. She'd stand over a gas stove in a hot Kansas kitchen beating the 7 minute frosting to ice it with. Her homemade noodles were delicious served with tender chicken gizzards. I even can't remember the last time I ate a chicken gizzard, where do they all go now a days?
There were a few things we didn't care for, Grandma thought it was fine to use the left over bacon grease for pie dough so they sometimes had a slight savory taste. She thought there was only one favor of Kool-aid and that was lime. It also had to be made with 2 cups of sugar, you could stand a spoon up in it. This was strange because she usually wanted to save money, I don't know how many times I was reminded 3 sheets of toilet paper were plenty if you folded it right. I have to smile now when I see the commercials on TV with the bears. Mom bear grabs back all the toilet paper from the little bear and hands him three sheets. I guess Grandma was just ahead of her time.
She had a hard life, she lost one young son when he died suddenly at age 8, that's her holding him in the photo with her mother and grandmother. Her youngest son Dan died in the skies over Germany in WWII, she was a widow for many, many years. She did complain about never seeing us enough and being lonely but the only time I ever saw her cry was when the song "Danny Boy" was played. At church last Sunday they played a hymn based on the same Londonderry Air tune and I clouded up too. So here's to you Grandma Nellie, cookbook #20 is White Loaf Flour Recipes.
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