Connections: Good Taste

My husband and I have a domestic disease. Let’s call it recipe-itis. My personal collection of recipes goes back to having been a counselor at a camp where outdoor cooking was a daily routine. We made dishes with names that were often more appealing than the food. Not just the old, familiar Egg on a Rock but, for example, Blushing Bunny, a mixture of tomato soup and American cheese over Saltines.

Mmm.

 My mother never took cooking seriously, and I can’t think of anything I still make today that she handed down. She didn’t pass along her penciled recipes for the carrot or spinach soufflés that were her favorites when I got married, or the fund-raising cookbooks of the organizations she belonged to.

 But my recipe-itis did begin in the ’60s, when I was a young bride. I started clipping recipes from newspapers and buying cookbooks and, years later, inherited a fascinating collection of cookbooks from my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Rattray. My collection only grew vaster when Chris and I got married.

Here it is about 20 years later, and we have more recipes than anyone could use in a lifetime of dinner. Chris not only joined the Yotam Ottolenghi fan club (turning again and again to Mr. Ottolenghi’s “Jerusalem,” “Plenty,” and “Plenty More,” and seeking out rare ingredients like sumac and dried barberries), but has become an inveterate watcher of recipes posted on the New York Times website.

It was probably 30 years ago that I hired a young family friend to organize my recipe clippings. She gotmost of them categorized and placed in two plastic bins, which, hidden under a small desk in the kitchen, have, naturally, sat there undisturbed for three decades. This week, for whatever reason, I decided to rummage through a plastic bag of miscellaneous recipes that had remained unsorted. My vague idea was to decide what to keep and what to ditch, but I got sidetracked by the trip down memory lane.

One of the nicest finds was a recipe for stone soup, written and illustrated by my daughter at the age of 7 or 8. Another was a recipe for malted milk in a child’s large capital letters. I found a commendable recipe for sea scallops and green linguini, written by an old friend years ago. And then there were amusing reminders of how sophisticated, or should I say snobbish, we have become about food.

My daughter, also a near-maniacal cookbook collector, long ago laid claim to her grandmother Jeannette’s entertaining cook booklets (those brightly illustrated little pamphlets put out by, say, the Jell-O company or the Robin Hood Flour Co.), but there in the long-forgotten plastic bag under the small desk in the kitchen was a 1963 relic from the magazine Better Homes & Gardens. It really got me laughing. Catsup and monosodium glutamate are prevalent ingredients, and Liquid Smoke and meat tenderizer are called for, too. Mmm! (Even the “Taste of Home” crowd — who still cheerfully included cake mixes and canned goods in their simple meals — have long-since said good riddance to chemical additives like those, I’m sure.) And how about “Tomato Salad Mold”? Better Homes & Gardens, undoubtedly, would be ashamed to be reminded of that one: It uses an eight-ounce can of seasoned tomato sauce as the only tomato in it. Another recipe in the same book claims “kids will clap their hands for” a fully ripe banana mashed together with a half-cup of peanut butter and a squeeze of lemon juice, all spread on a hamburger bun. Perhaps I should gather the grandchildren and test whether they would clap their hands.

Then, amid all this, was a clipping I will set aside to preserve more carefully. It’s a July 3, 1969, New York Times article by Craig Claiborne about a pot-luck dinner at a converted barn in Amagansett then owned by Gina Beadle. It shows her cutting into a cake, the late Peter Dohanos preparing fish for a ceviche, and, among other elaborate dishes, it gives a long and complicated recipe  for “Everett and Helen Rattray’s Eels in Beer, Herbed and Jelled.” The recipe called for nine eels and nine egg yokes and made 40 appetizer portions! At that time, we were probably the only family on the East End making a regular effort to “eat local,” as they now so trendily say, and frequently served the kids things like venison, squid, and raw fish (bay scallops, for instance, dipped in soy and ginger). People didn’t think we were food snobs, exactly, just a little crazy. It was the ’70s. We let the kids eat Spaghetti-Os, too.