One of my favourite recipes in Mom’s recipe book is for chilli con carne. It has only a few ingredients: hamburger, kidney beans, onions, Heinz tomato soup, salt, pepper and chilli powder but only if desired. With fresh rolls and tomato slices, it was a meal we often had at the cottage, without the chilli powder. I was surprised to see that there was no Campbell’s tomato soup in the recipe.

Mom started this book when she got married in 1948. It contains recipes cut out of magazines and newspapers, her handwritten recipes and ones collected from friends and family. In her later years, she mostly cooked from memory but sometimes would open the book just to check.

The book is now falling apart. It has been taped and covered with mactac but those adhesives don’t hold forever. The favourite recipes are worn, smudged with sticky fingerprints and ingredients. The newspaper clippings are starting to disintegrate.

My mother’s recipe book used to travel back and forth from Montreal to our cottage in the Laurentians. When Mom moved into a senior residence, it remained in Dunany. I then took charge of it, not wanting to leave it to the mice over the winter.

I thought I would make a book or calendar of some of the recipes as they all have stories to tell. Funny how most of them are for sweets. Main dishes at home were mostly roasted meat and boiled potatoes, which didn’t require recipes.

As kids, we would ask Mom what was for supper but all we really wanted to know was what was for dessert. Would it be a cake, a pie, a pudding, a cobbler, squares, cookies and ice cream or my least favourite, canned fruit? We had to eat our dinner before we got dessert but we always had dessert.

Mom’s planned menus were similar each week. She would make a list and only buy what was on the list. On Sundays, we had a roast at noon with potatoes, vegetables, gravy and then omelet, pancakes or bread broiled with cheese and bacon for supper. Monday was usually chicken, with one cut up for six people. Tuesdays meant leftover roast and on Wednesdays the menu varied with veal patties, liver, sausages or pork chops. We ate leftover roast again on Thursdays, sometimes being shepherd’s pie. On Fridays, we always ate fish even though we were not Catholic. This was our least favourite meal as it mostly consisted of frozen white fish, sometimes with a soup sauce. On Saturdays, we had hamburgers, usually without buns.

Mrs McNally’s cookie recipe came from the mother of a university friend of mine. Eileen’s mother used to send cookies back with her daughter, much to the enjoyment of her roommates. It is a basic oatmeal cookie with raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, cinnamon and nutmeg. It became my mother’s go-to recipe and she added whatever was in her pantry. The cookies were often stored in a ceramic cookie jar in the kitchen. Dexterity was needed to quietly raise the top and sneak a cookie.

There are many pictures of decorated cakes. Mom took a class but only made a few very fancy cakes. Most were just plain iced layer cakes. She made some doll cakes with a Tammy or Debbie doll (we never had a Barbie doll) in the center of an angel food cake with fancy icing for her skirt. She also put money between the layers of cake, wrapped in wax paper. Pennies, nickels and dimes with one quarter. She would mark on the cake plate where to find the quarter and show the Birthday person.

Rhubarb upside-down cake replaced pineapple upside-down cake when my mother got the recipe from her sister. We always had this dessert in the spring and summer with rhubarb from the garden. Rhubarb and chives were the only edible things my mother grew.

Mom was an excellent pie maker. Her book does contain a booklet on how to make pie crust. She mastered this skill in no time. She would make all her fruit pies without looking at a recipe. I preferred blueberry and raspberry pies made from berries she picked around our cottage. Apple was my father’s favourite. One day, she anxiously watched as he cut into a pie and asked if it was ok. “When is your pie not alright? ” answered my father.

There would often be a little sugar pie made with the leftover pie crust sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon and little pats of butter. Pieces were eaten right out of the oven if you were lucky enough to be around.

There were definitely things we didn’t like, such as porridge every morning before school but we were well fed!