Some recipes are timeless: these aren’t
Food never goes out of style. But recipes do. When the ladies of St. Basil’s Ukrainian Women’s League were putting together their 1867-1967 centennial cookbook, bean sprouts came in cans and Mazola was the only oil worth using.
In other words, Culinary Treasures would give a modern food god like Gordon Ramsay nightmares.
By the way, have you ever seen Ramsay make scrambled eggs? It’s a thing of beauty. He doesn’t beat them, merely massages them with a knob of butter — on the burner and off repeatedly — until they turn into fluffy clouds of happiness. Then he folds in a scoop of creme fraiche at the end.
By a show of hands, how many of you have creme fraiche in your fridge right now? Anyone?
Not that Culinary Treasures doesn’t have its charms, too. It’s one of my mother-in-law’s favourite cookbooks and deserves some reverence for that reason alone. All the traditional Ukrainian favourites are here, regardless of spelling: perogies and perohee, borsch and borscht, holubtsi and cabbage rolls. I never knew about vushky, a little mushroom-stuffed perogie folded into a triangle to resemble the ear it’s named after.
There’s a recipe for horseradish with red beets. My mother-in-law recalls her mom making it. I’m going to give it a try. Anyone with half a pound of horseradish root they don’t need, please stop by.
But if you’re going to fill a 250page cookbook, there are only so many variations of the all-time classics. It’s when the St. Basil ladies branch out that things get weird. “Shepard’s” pie with consomme? I’ve never purchased a can of consomme as an adult. But when I was a kid, my mom fed it to us when we had the flu in the dead of winter, which is to say early April. It kept us home from school an extra week due to fatigue and electrolyte imbalance.
They say if you don’t learn from history, you’re bound to repeat it. With apologies to my mother-inlaw and St. Basil ladies Tillie Werbitsky, Mrs. Rose Storoshinko and Mrs. T. Baron, I’ve prepared this three-course meal for you. Think of these recipes as the equivalent of the windshield-sized eyeglasses once considered stylish.
THE VEGETABLE COURSE
Corn Scramble 1 can luncheon meat, cubed (Gordon Ramsay, your thoughts so far?)
2 tbsp Mazola oil (told you) ½ tsp salt (God knows why) 3 eggs beaten
1 tsp mustard
1 20 oz can cream style corn. (This is the vegetable). Method: Brown the luncheon meat, stir in the goo. Enjoy.
THE MAIN COURSE
Hamburger Chop Suey
Method: Brown a pound of hamburger with one onion and six stalks of celery. Add 1 tin (that’s a can, children) of mushrooms ( because that’s where mushrooms come from), 1 tin of mushroom soup, 1 tin of bean sprouts with juice. And simmer for ONE HOUR. Serve after I Dream of Jeannie and before All in the Family.
THE DESSERT
Heavenly Rice 1 ½ cups cold, cooked rice
1 ½ cups marshmallows or 1 cup coconut
½ cup crushed pineapple, drained.
¼ cup maraschino cherries ¼ cup chopped nuts
2/3 cup evaporated milk
½ cup icing sugar
2 tbsp. lemon juice Method: Whip milk stiff, fold into the rest and be thankful that the glycemic index won’t be invented for another 15 years.
Buon appetito. And if you get a chance, please don’t let me know how it goes.