Spaghetti Honduras is a spaghetti dish with warm, fragrant tomato sauce. There doesn’t seem to be anything Honduran about it. This recipe is more like Mediterranean food than anything you’d find in central America. The recipe comes to me by way of a 1949 community cookbook from the Eugene (Oregon) Welfare League. In my older……
Ingredient: ground cinnamon
Fruit ‘N Filbert Pork Chops (adapted from A Treasury of Prize Winning Filbert Recipes, 1973)
Fruit ‘N Filbert Pork Chops is easily my favorite recipe from A Treasury of Prize Winning Filbert Recipes, transforming a usually bland and dry pork loin into a delicious weeknight meal. The fruit is arguably central to the flavor profile, but the recipe still showcases the toasty bitterness of roasted hazelnuts. It’s also deliciously old……
Pumpkin Crumble Cake (Oregon, 2006, adapted)
Pumpkin Crumble Cake represents one of my rare attempts at baking. For a home cook I feel like I know my way around a kitchen. But everyone’s got their blind spots, and mine is baking. I don’t enjoy it and I’m not good at it, and despite a background in chemistry I’m especially bad at……
Lamb Shank Vindaloo (inspired by Hotpoint Storybook Kitchen Cookbook, 1964)
Lamb Shank Vindaloo is a mid-century American interpretation of a popular Indian dish with Portuguese roots. The lamb shank is cooked in a sour and spicy sauce that’s addictive and delicious. Vindaloo dishes are now an Indian restaurant staple, but the sauce has its origins in a vinegary Portuguese stew. As such you’ll often find……
Apple Pudding Bread (Wisconsin, 1989, adapted)
Apple Pudding Bread is a spiced dessert bread recipe from Ascension Lutheran’s 1989 community cookbook. The recipe’s author was a longtime member and mother of three. She was an avid bridge player and teacher and her husband served in various lay leadership positions at the church. In the recipe description she brags that Apple……
Gooseberry Ketchup (adapted from Mountain Memories)
Perhaps the recipes that best capture the spirit of Mountain Memories are the jams and jellies and pickles. Both the vegetable and fruit chapters are prefaced with memories of sauerkraut barrels in the family cellar, the necessity of storing food through rough winters, and pioneer methods for food preservation. They rely on local fruits and……
Belgardin Brod (from Christmas Convoys, 1952)
Belgardin Brod is one of several traditional European “cookies” featured in Christmas Convoys. In practice it looks and feels more like a cracker than a cookie, and tastes kind of like a cross between a ginger snap and a snickerdoodle with strong citrus overtones. It’s kind of like the old fashioned grandma candy equivalent of……
Chicken and Mushroom Cream Soup (Egypt, adapted from Together: Our Community Cookbook, 2018)
Chicken and Mushroom Cream Soup is one of the more enjoyable recipes in Together: Our Community Cookbook. The original recipe was submitted to the cookbook by one Amaal abd Elrasoul, who came to London to help her sister-in-law after the Grenfell Tower fire. She credits the recipe to a neighbor in Cairo. In her own……