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repairs for. “Put this in the can,” he says.



6

DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE

Chicken Pie à la Mississippi
    OLD FASHIONED METHOD
    Start with a 4 pound chicken. Cut the chicken up as you would for frying and simmer the pieces in boiling water until tender. About 30 minutes before the chicken is done, add a chopped onion or two. Add a dash of pepper, a dash of salt, and a little Worcestershire sauce. Leave the bones in the chicken. When it’s tender and in a pan, add dumplings. Then make a sauce … melted butter and flour, and about 2 cups of chicken broth. Pour it over the chicken and dumplings
.
    For the top, make a good baking-powder biscuit dough, rolled thin, cut in finger-length strips one inch wide. When the pie is covered, put it in the oven to brown
.
    MODERN RECIPE
    Start with a 4 pound chicken. Simmer with 1 tablespoon of salt, 2 stalks of celery and one bay leaf. Add onions, too. When the simmering is done, bone the chicken and place in a two-quart casserole. Make the sauce of butter and flour in a double boiler. Add salt, pepper, mace, and perhaps sherry wine. Then, instead of strips of dough, cover the pie with small baking powder biscuits and brush with top milk or cream. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, at 450 degrees
.
    • • •
    JANUARY 2008
    HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY
    In addition to the recipes Nana wrote down and collected, I found booklets in the old brown folder.
Famous Recipes in the Philadelphia Manner
, for example, was “Printed in limited edition as a tribute to all lovers of fine living.” It includes directions for preparing rabbit ragout, shad roe salad, and Philadelphia hash, and it implores, “Don’t call hash ‘lowly,’ please. It’s a dish raised to an aristocratic level by cookery as it was practiced in earlyPhiladelphia.” We haven’t been doing much fine living in the New Jersey manner lately—vacations canceled, restaurants off limits, curtain’s down on the theater, the fat lady’s sung on the opera … So now I’m really looking forward to whipping up some of that hash.
    A few of the booklets are promotional materials from food companies:
Fun with Coffee
from the Pan American Coffee Bureau;
Old-Fashioned Eating Pleasure
from Pepperidge Farm; and
Mealtime Magic with California Long White Potatoes
, which features a tantalizing recipe for Potato-Ham Fiesta Cakes. Nana dog-eared the “Winter Salad” page from the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Cookbook
, and she paid thirteen cents for
250 Ways to Prepare Meat
in 1943. Its companion volume,
250 Ways to Prepare Vegetables
, looks less used.
    “When we lived on the farm, our vegetables came right out of our garden,” Mom says. “We didn’t do much to them, just cooked them with a little butter. They were so good—and huge! The tomatoes and the strawberries, especially.” Their secret was an old farmer’s trick: put the outhouse by the garden. “Itsounds disgusting now, but the natural fertilizer made that soil practically atomic,” Mom laughs.
    Nana also saved a little book called
1003 Helpful Hints and Work Savers to Help You Beat the High Cost of Living
, which was published by the National Newark and Essex Banking Company in 1947. It was written before the postwar boom, when homemakers like my grandmother had to stretch food dollars far, old clothes were mended and kept in as good condition as possible because there wasn’t much money for new, and everyone was looking for ways to save on gas, electric, and phone bills. Some of my favorite tips include
    #23: For longer girdle life, fasten garters straight and in the center of the stocking’s hem
.
    #339: Stale, dried-up cheese turns into a delicious spread when placed into the meat grinder with chunks of raw onion
.
    #924: It’s the rightest kind of thrift to lubricate your car every thousand miles. The friction “gremlins” in your automobile are the little devils that steal the power and waste gasoline, bearings, and other parts in a hundred different ways. This