Mammy's Notes from inside "100 Tested Receipts"

A lot of the hand-written recipes are stained, smeared, or at times, illegible. So keep in mind this is what I could best decipher.



Theses were written in the front inside cover:

Eggless Cake
2 cup Sug
2 cup Sour Milk
1 cup But
4 cup Flour
1 pt. Jam
2 teaspoon soda
2 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoon cloves
3 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 of a nutmeg

Bulles(?) Seoleh(?) Pie
Put 1 cup of brown sug.
a lump of butter the size of an egg
and enough water to dissolve it on stove.
Cook until it threads.
Then mix the yolks of 2 eggs,
one pt. of milk
one Tablespoon of flour
one teaspoon of vanilla
Stir this in the boiling sugar, but, and water.
Cook until thickens

Eggless Black Cake
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 cups buttermilk
2 teaspoons soda
4 cups flour
1 big cup jam

Soup Jam No. 1
1 pk tomatoes-peal and cook or chop
1 doz carrots-peel and chop
1 doz corn
1 gal ocher
Cook tomatoes 1/2 hr.
+carrots 1/2 hr
+ corn and ocher till done

Chili Sauce
30 Ripe tomatoes
6 green peppers
6 large onions
1 teacup sugar
6 cups of vinegar
salt and spice to taste

Mrs Bogous
1 cup sug
1/4 cup lard
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1 1/3 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoon Bak. P (Baking powder?)

And in a loose sheet of paper inside the cover was this:

Sponge Cake Balls
Four eggs, beaten separately
one tea-cup full of sugar
one teacup of flour
one teaspoonful of cream of tartar, mixed in flour;
one half teaspoonful of soda in a little water
Bake quickly in biscuit pan,
turn out on damp towel
put in dressing and roll while warm
This is excellent
"Ora Mae Hart."

It's about time!

Growing up, all us Barnes offspring have heard the raving stories about Mammy (aka Bernice Burns Walker Barnes): her impeccable meringue-topped pies, handy craftiness, and sharp countenance seem almost solidified into some sort of mythical immortality. She lives on in our parents' stories, in her handy crafts, in her large drawer of salt in the kitchen, and in her last canned jam from 1976, still sitting in a closet at the farm. My own father always likes to recall her smart independence, which set her apart from other women of her time: she supported herself as a teacher for 15 years before marrying Pappy and even owned her own section of the farm! Goggie, my grandmother, writes that Mammy was, "proud of all the creative things she had done" and that she had an uncanny memory, one that allowed her once to recite "a very long poem as she was cooking in the kitchen."

After our great uncle Tom passed away and we started going through all the drawers and closets in the farm house, we came across a few cookbooks of Mammy's, many with hand written recipes in the margins or inside covers. Thomas and Ekky were kind enough to temporarily lend them to me, as I promised to put the material up on a blog for the whole family. Well, finally, thanks to my new-found unemployment, I've started to assemble this material! However, it should be noted that Mammy often cooked her famous recipes without any notes or measuring utensils, so I don't even know if she used these recipes often.

I'll go book by book, posting the hand written notes and recipes that seem to have been used frequently, due to stained pages or broken binding.

I hope this can also become a family forum where people will feel welcome to share their own memories about Mammy or other family members now gone.

It would be a bit odd here to add some Julia Child-esque "Bon Appetite" sign off here. So, in the infamous words of Pappy:

"Does very well."