This Page will be about My Mother's Book, a small recipe book I am putting together of
Maxine Rose Booth Vannais
So far I have the introduction done, which Dory and Helen encouraged me to post.
(thank you)
but I guess those Christmas presents won't be much of a surprise, now...
My mother, Maxine Rose Booth Vannais, was an excellent cook, taking an organized and yet adventurous approach to putting three meals a day on the table. Her nursing training, as she often reminded us, demanded no less, and for years I can remember the weekly menus posted on the fridge, Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, etc.: each dinner filled with protein, 2 veggies and a carb. The shopping list, thus constructed, was a wonder of organization, aisle by aisle , where shopping took a prescribed time, and they rarely needed more than the occasional eggs and milk to complete the week’s needs.
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| the kitchen at 144 Coover Street, Leonia, NJ |
She counted out the peaches, bought everything on the cheap, and was still interested in expanding her repertoire after forty years. Impressive.
Early on, she had been trained by her father, L.E. Booth, a stern German who was called ‘Sir’ by his children, to make the perfect Manhattan. When 'Peaches' wasn't around,
This is the card he had for the wait staff
when he went out!
His wife, my mother’s Mother, who we called Bema, came to cooking later in life, after she’d lost the luxury of a cook, and a nanny and a chauffeur, and had had to fend more for herself, out of the big garden down the shore where she grew prized melons. Her recipes were for pickles and Sauerbraten and a salad dressing based on copious amounts of paprika devised by her husband, who liked it so much he was reputed to have happily ate green napkins dressed with it. I got the impression that she cooked more from necessity rather than from the joy in it that my mother obviously had.
For my mother, however, recipes were her stock in trade, the common thread she used to connect to people, the sharing of them, and the endless discussing of this or that excellent repast, and the joke became that we usually began discussing the next meal before the current one was even over.
My father did not cook.
Sometimes he made me fried eggs in butter rather than cereal for breakfast, but that was about the extent of his expertise outside of the bar-b-q ring, where he reigned supreme. .He was the clean-up man, though, always eager to jump in the dishpan while we were all still lingering over coffee and a second piece of pie.
My father’s mother, Dorothy Anne Cox Vannais, was known as ‘Nana’, or Mother Van, and was very British. I remember Sunday dinners at 222 Christie Street, her apartment in Leonia, NJ, with the table set with linen and silver in the middle of the living room, and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and thin gravy. Later, I found what must have been her first cookbook, perhaps made when she first fled England with my grandfather, Leon Eugene Vannais. In it, the recipes are finely handwritten into a little spiral notebook of graph paper, in two colors of ink, small alphabetical tabs cordoning off the mostly empty pages.
“God help…” “As we bless…”
I read a hint of desperation into the delicate scroll letters on the first page, but perhaps that is just because I know her story, and how it all turned out for her.
Characteristically, she did not sign her book, despite its obviously heavy use, but then, too, she had three boys. But I know it is hers by the recipe for World War I Cake, and for the Peanut Butter cookies I remember incised with criss-crossed fork tine marks.
bread, (two recipes, the first heavily crossed out, as if in anger, prune bread, chocolate layer cake (with which she did better, coming to be famous for it later in life), cocnut macaroons, christmas pudding, devils food cake, dolly varden cake (?), dumplings...ending simple with War Cake, my father's unlikely favorite, and which we called Spice cake.
Nana also had a file box of 3 x 5 cards, toasted and brittle with age, now, brown-edged and distinctive, the simple recipes still in her straightforward handwriting, become large now, or typed in a staccato shorthand rising out of her long secretarial career.
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| M V (Mother van's) Chocolate Cake, a favorite of my brother's boys |
I find these interspersed in my mother’s file boxes, also rigorously alphabetical. In this they were both modern and scientific in their recipe keeping…an organized approach to an ancient tradition of family manuscript cookbooks, passed down from generation to generation.
Here is the same recipe, transcribed by my mother for me, with my scrawled annotations undoubtedly during her demonstration.
This exact thing has been the focus of my work at Pennsbury Manor, where for many years I was the Assistant Horticulturist and Historic Herbalist, gardening and teaching for three seasons, and studying the Penn family cookbook./ medicinal manuscript in my office above the barn in the winter. 15 winters of trying to unravel women’s lives through the books and records they left behind. It got me to thinking ....that it was a little sad that this tradition, these books, were being swept away, first by the unlikely 3 x 5 card, then by a succession of electronic equipment.
What are we leaving to our daughters and sons that will not disappear when the software becomes obsolete?, that can record the spills and tell-tale splatters that mark a recipe as oft-used?…(or perhaps the spills record the presence of the glasses of white wine I remember at Nana’s elbow?) or the splatter of whisk or new electric mixer?
The story of our family is embedded in this succession of dressed tables, family dinners great and mundane, feasts set out awaiting the hungry hoards tucked around a succession of dining room tables. This, too is the legacy of my Mother, and hers before her: the now heralded "family dinner" with restricted conversational topics punctuated by 'Please pass the salt", and unreswtricted laughter.
What will the cooks of the future come to know about us from our file boxes of recipes?
our ‘history’ of Google searches in the cooking line?
So I thought I would make use of these same destroying technologies that threaten my precious books, and reconstitute some few of my mother’s recipes into a small volume in an edition of twenty or so, enough for each of her grandchildren, and perhaps a few for cousins and extended family. The conceit is more mine than hers, who was decidedly practical about such things.
