In the OLD days—late 1970’s—we thought they were a lot of us—but the WE was just the 8 Smith siblings, 7 spouses, and quite a few kids not old enough to be interested in reading cookbooks. In 1976, I started a family storybook for a Christmas gift to our parents and asked Jeanne to do some illustrations. Her subjects were things we all recognized immediately—the backyard garden on Lakeview Drive in Lorain, the ceiling grate in Grandma Smith’s house—and nothing needed to be identified.
In 1979, I decided to get everyone to contribute to a family cookbook, and Jeanne did an illustration of the Minton china we all knew so well. I mailed requests via the U.S. Postal Service to my 7 siblings, and—finally—everyone sent me back some carefully hand written or typed recipes. Then they were all re-typed on a typewriter—and never proofed or word-checked!—and taken to a shop that had a copy machine, an invention just becoming more accessible.
The recipes included some that Grandma Smith had written down for me in her handwriting in an old steno pad notebook when I got married. I tried to update her words and practices from the 1940s and 50s—none of which work so well in the new millennium!
The title of the old book, Try to Make a Meal Out of It, was taken from Grandma’s ironic refrain when she’d set a beautiful, home-cooked and –baked multi-course meal in front of us. The refrain is much truer in meals served today! The sub-title was from Mary Louise, who never said a bad word in her life in front of us—but did refer to “the whole fam damily” in moments of exasperation. By the 70’s we were at least capable of saying damn ourselves.
In 2001 I got recipes for the 60th anniversary of Len and Mary Louise from many family members in what was then the new generation. There was just one printed copy of those recipes and Meghan put some online.
Now in 2013, Meghan has created this digital version of all the old and many more to come. ENJOY!
-Maureen, October 2013