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    Food That Really Schmecks
    Food That Really Schmecks
    Food That Really Schmecks
    Ebook538 pages6 hours

    Food That Really Schmecks

    By Edna Staebler, Wayson Choy and Rose Murray

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In the 1960s, Edna Staebler moved in with an Old Order Mennonite family to absorb their oral history and learn about Mennonite culture and cooking. From this fieldwork came the cookbook Food That Really Schmecks. Originally published in 1968, Schmecks instantly became a classic, selling tens of thousands of copies. Interspersed with practical and memorable recipes are Staebler’s stories and anecdotes about cooking, Mennonites, her family, and Waterloo Region. Described by Edith Fowke as folklore literature, Staebler’s cookbooks have earned her national acclaim.

    Including this long-anticipated reprint of Food That Really Schmecks in our Life Writing series recognizes the cultural value of its narratives, positing it as a groundbreaking book in the food writing genre. This edition includes a foreword by award-winning author Wayson Choy and a new introduction by the well-known food writer Rose Murray.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateAug 2, 2009
    ISBN9781554587926
    Food That Really Schmecks
    Author

    Edna Staebler

    Edna Staebler who recently passed away in her 101st year was an award-winning journalist and a regular contributor to Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and many other magazines. She is the author of Cape Breton Harbour, Places I’ve Been and People I’ve Known and the Schmecks cookbook series. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries, edited by Christl Verduyn, was published by Laurier Press in 2005.

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    • 5/5
      This is a family favourite cookbook which we still use up to the present day (2010 as I write this).It is full of Mennonite, Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e Deutsch/German) and Canadian country cooking recipes. It is from another era so in the present day we find ourselves substituting a lot in recipes that call for generous amounts of butter, cream and sugar. This doesn't harm the basic failsafe recipes which are all quite simple to make.Highly recommended if this sort of cooking appeals to you.

    Book preview

    Food That Really Schmecks - Edna Staebler

    FOOD THAT REALLY SCHMECKS

    FOOD THAT

    REALLY SCHMECKS

    MENNONITE COUNTRY COOKING

    AS PREPARED BY

    MY MENNONITE FRIEND BEVVY MARTIN,

    MY MOTHER AND OTHER FINE COOKS

    EDNA STAEBLER

    We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

    Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

    Staebler, Edna, 1906–2006.

    Food that really schmecks : Mennonite country cooking as prepared by my Mennonite friend Bevvy Martin, my mother and other fine cooks / Edna Staebler. — 3rd ed.

    (Life writing series)

    Includes index.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-88920-521-5

    ISBN-10: 0-88920-521-3

    1. Cookery, Mennonite. 2. Cookery, Canadian. 3. Cookery — Ontario — Waterloo (Regional municipality) i. Martin, Bevvy. ii. Title. iii. Series.

    TX715.6.S69 2006          641.59713’44          C2006-906195-5

    © 2007 Estate of Edna Staebler

    Foreword © 2007 by Wayson Choy

    Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.

    Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

    Printed in Canada

    No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

    CONTENTS

    About the Author

    Foreword by Wayson Choy

    Preface

    Introduction by Rose Murray

    Those Mouth-Watering Mennonite Meals

    The Twin Cities with Schmecks Appeal

    Some Drinks, Wines and Punches

    Soups

    Meats, Fowl and Fish

    Vegetables

    Salads

    Sweets and Sours

    Brunches, Lunches, Suppers and Leftovers

    Baking with Yeast

    Biscuits, Muffins, Quick Breads and Fat Cakes

    Cookies

    A Cake in the House

    Pies and Tarts

    Desserts

    Candy

    A Variety of Things

    And Finally

    Measurement Conversion Table

    Index

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Born in 1906, Edna Staebler, award-winning literary journalist and author of twenty-one books, lived in Mennonite country north of Waterloo, Ontario. Her first book, Cape Breton Harbour (1972), documented the people and history of this small fishing village; her last, Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries, was edited by Christl Verduyn and published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Her Schmecks series of cookbooks became outstanding bestsellers, including More Food That Really Schmecks and Schmecks Appeal.

    A recipient of the Order of Canada, Edna won the Toronto Culinary Guild’s Silver Ladle Award in 1991, and she was the first winner of Cuisine Canada’s Lifetime Achievement Award (which is to be known as The Edna in perpetuity). Edna established a writer-in-residence program at the Kitchener Public Library and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, a national award presented annually to encourage first- or second-time published authors. This award is administrated by Wilfrid Laurier University.

    Edna died on September 12, 2006, in her 101st year, after participating in the judging of her award.

    FOREWORD

    Wayson Choy

    A Living Document for Living Well,

    or How to Taste Life in the Olden Ways

    What a pleasure to know that Edna Staebler’s Food That Really Schmecks will continue to be an inspiration to both cooks and readers alike. The author is not a professional chef with foreign credentials in search of the exact ingredients for some exotic fare, but a singular writer who, in the 1960s, recorded over seven hundred Mennonite recipes from the Kitchener-Waterloo County district. The work still sets the highest standard among community-centred cookbooks.

    In fact, this unusual volume is not only a cook’s reference work but also a reader’s delight. For Edna Staebler ended up with much more than a collection of homespun recipes with tagalong bits of information. Busy cooks who love reading and thoughtful readers who rarely go near a stove, like me, have all felt that something more resonates beyond these pages. Perhaps a clue is found in the lingering delight she leaves us, for example, in the way she interweaves anecdotes and frank, matter-of-fact commentary about the recipes. On the preparation of asparagus, she says,

    You probably know more about preparing asparagus than I do.

    Doesn’t matter that your answer might be yes: you read on because her narrative voice is compelling.

    But I do want to tell you: never throw away the water your asparagus was cooked in.

    And we read on, knowing that one can open the book anywhere and hear that trusted voice giving frank instructions, often freely noting details that read like the sauce of an untold story: To begin the particulars for making Bevvy’s Butternut Squares, the author pulls us aside:

    Have you seen any butternuts lately? When we were kids Daddy used to take us into the country, stop our Briscoe at the side of a bush and we’d wander around till we came to a butternut tree with sticky green nuts lying under it. At home we’d spread the nuts on papers in the attic till they became hard and dry, then Daddy would open them for us with a hammer.

    One almost hears the hammer cracking down.

    I like to think that something more in her work has to do essentially with the same storytelling force that animates these genres we only think about in literary terms: short stories, novels, biographies, even creative non-fiction; those works with dramatic characters involved with living their lives in plotted landscapes. Books that have a beginning, a middle and an end. Cookbooks and recipe collections would be excused from such literary intentions.

    Yet I wonder if Food That Really Schmecks isn’t worthy of some kind of literary notice.

    Certainly characters (personalities) occupy this cookbook. Edna Staebler can’t help herself. She observes the living, takes part in their community lives; and if the central stage or arena is the kitchen, devoid of any major plot line, who is to say that her recipe book does not signal a special genre that has escaped the academic criteria of a classic work of literature. For here in these pages are characters we glimpse among those seven hundred recipes: they tenderly exist in a world that Edna Staebler has recreated and rendered timeless. Here Wende Machetzki, the darling bride, still sits in her Provident Mennonite bookstore and tells us about her favourite cake recipe:

    I don’t call it carrot cake because people don’t want to even taste it then. I call it Wednesday cake or whatever day of the week I baked it on.

    Staebler is a born storyteller, deceptively weaving into her no-nonsense attitude towards the ingredients of recipes an unconscious reflection on the decency of people. I doubt if she was aware that she was using recipes as her decoy to attract us into her understanding of those deeper values she is devoted to, and which she witnessed in action in the now historic kitchens of family and friends. Here and there she illustrates the active trust bestowed upon the other, the loyalty not to betray intimate tales, the generosity to share what has been treasured, and the warmest affection even for the imperfect.

    Having said how much this work seems a piece of literature to me, I remarked at her one hundredth birthday party before her overflowing crowd of admirers, what would have transformed Canadian cookery— if only.

    If only Edna had lived in Vancouver, I said, and visited the Chinatown kitchens of immigrant families like the Choys in the 1960s, and if only she had written down those Old China recipes that were passed along for generations to my mother and my two favourite aunts, Mary and Freda—none of you today would be without soy sauce or a seasoned wok in your kitchen. And all of you would be using chopsticks at Sunday dinner.

    But Edna never had the chance to visit Chinatown.

    I envy any community that has been so gently and faithfully recorded by a writer like Edna Staebler. She intended only to share the gift of good cooking with us; instead, she transcended her purpose through her own astute character and innate talent, and left us to acquaint ourselves again and again with a breathing, living world.

    PREFACE

    Edna Staebler

    Before you read any further I must warn you: I have absolutely no qualification for writing a cookbook except that (a) I love to eat, (b) my mother is a good cook and (c) I was born, brought up and well fed in Waterloo County, Ontario, where the combination of Pennsylvania Dutch-Mennonite, German and modern cooking is distinctive and wonderful good.

    Like most older Waterloo County mothers, mine made sure her three daughters would not be helpless in a kitchen. She told us what to do and we did it. Mother cooked as her grandmother did and when we three were married we cooked the same way. Our husbands seemed to think it was fine—thrifty, appetizing and plentiful. But whenever company was coming we frantically scrambled through cookbooks to find recipes we thought more impressive than our accustomed, easy-to-make local dishes.

    I was in a panic the first time I invited some rather special people from Toronto to have dinner at our cottage on Sunfish Lake, near Kitchener–Waterloo. They were prominent writers and editors—with their wives—who frequently travelled all over the world, ate in sophisticated dining rooms, talked and wrote columns about fabulous foods and were proud of their own gourmet cookery.

    What could I serve them that they would find tasty and interesting? I went through all the recipes I had collected; I spent hours reading French and American cookbooks borrowed from the Kitchener Public Library. What? What? What in God’s green bounteous earth could I feed them?

    Why don’t you give them bean salad with a sour-cream dressing? suggested a friend. It’s tremendous, and I’ll bet they’ve never tasted it; I hadn’t until I moved to this area, she said. And how about a schnitz pie for dessert?

    Bean salad? Schnitz pie? Ordinary, everyday food for company? Unthinkable! I pondered. But why not? Why not a typical North Waterloo County meal—my own way of cooking, my mother’s, my neighbour’s, my Mennonite friend Bevvy Martin’s? My distinguished guests couldn’t get that in a flossy restaurant anywhere, or even find the recipes in their epicurean cookbooks.

    My dinner would not be elaborate, or exotic, with rare ingredients and mystifying flavours; traditional local cooking is practical: designed to fill up small boys and big men, it is also mouth-wateringly good and variable.

    My guests from Toronto arrived. I served them bean salad, smoked pork chops, shoo-fly pie, schmierkase and apple butter with fastnachts. At first they said, Just a little bit, please, but as soon as they tasted, their praise was extravagant—lyrical to my wistful ears. They ate till they said they would burst. They ate till everything was all (nothing left).

    For the past fifteen years they have been coming back to my cottage for a weekend in August, and each time I invite them they say they hope I’ll give them another old-fashioned Mennonite meal.

    Why don’t you write a cookbook? they ask me whenever they come, and I tell them I couldn’t, I’m just a sporadic amateur in the kitchen, not a trained home economist.

    That doesn’t matter, they say. All you have to do is write down how you make your bean salad; how your mother makes her pahnhaas, potato dumplings and divine coffee cakes; how Bevvy Martin makes drepsley soup; and you need only copy your sister Norma’s gorgeous cookie recipes and your Peterborough sister’s way of making nine-day pickles and relishes.

    So, that’s what I’ve been trying to do in this book. I’ve put down recipes from my sisters’, my neighbours’, and my own collections; some traditional ways I’ve learned from Mennonite vendors at the Kitchener market; some German ones from local I.O.D.E. and Ladies’ Aid cook-booklets; two from the Walper Hotel; a few of my own originals, adaptations and modern favourites that I can’t resist sharing. I’ve called my mother innumerable times to find out how she made some of the dishes that brought bliss to my childhood; I’ve gone many times to Bevvy Martin’s ancestral stone farmhouse to eat myself full, to talk about food and watch her prepare it.

    I borrowed my mother’s and Bevvy’s little old black-covered notebooks with the handwriting faded and often obscured by splashes of batter or fat. There were recipes for cakes, puddings, cookies—and, in Bevvy’s, how to make soup, cheeses, sours, candies and wine. Only the ingredients were listed, no directions for putting them together—any woman should know how to do that! When I asked Mother and Bevvy how they made their soups, salads and pies and cooked their memorable meat and vegetable dishes, they said they didn’t have recipes, they just made them; they learned from experience and tasting.

    I’ve used the vague instructions Mother and Bevvy have given me and tried to translate them into definite measurements and methods by making the dishes myself. Some of them were successful, others were flops, and I’ve had to try them again and again—to the lasting detriment of my waistline. Forgive me, please, if you find some of my directions inadequate. If you test and taste for yourself, you might achieve something fantastic; anyway you’ll have fun and a feeling of enthusiastic adventure—integral components of Waterloo County cookery.

    Every good local cook of pioneer stock has her own variations of standard recipes: she substitutes an ingredient she likes for one that she doesn’t; she improvises, adapts and invents with daring and zest: sometimes to suit an occasion, to use up leftovers or a surplus, or simply to see how a mixture will taste.

    This jolly, creative cookery is a heritage from the Mennonite pioneers who, in 1800, came in their Conestoga wagons from Pennsylvania to Waterloo County and devised palatable ways to cook whatever they found in the wilderness or could grow on the land they were clearing, using the cherished little handwritten recipe books they had copied from the similar books of their forebears who came to America from Switzerland, Alsace and the Rhineland of Germany.

    When Roman Catholics and Lutherans from the same parts of Europe settled amongst the Mennonites in North Waterloo, they too schnitzed and made sausages, schmierkase and sour-cream salads. Throughout the county recipes were generously swapped and invented till a way of cooking developed that is unique and indigenous to this heaven-blessed area that rejoices in its cultivation, preparation and tranquil digestion of irresistibly good-schmecking (tasting) food.

    I do not exaggerate. That’s the way it really is here in our beautiful pastoral Waterloo County.

    But there is a paradox: we talk and we talk about our bountiful food; we copy out recipes, we cook and we bake and we sniff the good smells; we taste, we savour, and we eat; we eat till it’s all; then we look at each other—or at ourselves in a mirror—and we say tomorrow we really must start to eat less. Tomorrow, tomorrow—it is always tomorrow—until the next day when again we cook some more lovely fat, good-schmecking food, and again we eat till it’s all.

    INTRODUCTION

    Rose Murray

    On the stove there’s a kettle of simmering beef broth; a pot of potatoes is boiling; ham is frying in an iron pan; a sauce for salad is thickening; and in a pan of hot lard the fetschpatze are becoming a tender golden brown.

    We can just catch the heavenly aroma of the broth, hear the burble of potatoes and the sizzle of the ham; we can see the salad dressing is almost finished and that the little fried fetschpatze (fat sparrows) for dessert are ready to dunk into maple syrup. Edna has taken us right into Bevvy Martin’s kitchen in her opening essay to Food That Really Schmecks, and it is here and in the kitchens of Edna’s mother and other fine Waterloo cooks we remain as we explore Mennonite Country Cooking for the first time.

    But how did Edna happen to be in Bevvy’s kitchen?

    Edna Staebler grew up in a privileged household where her mother and the maid did the cooking, although she does say her mother made sure her three daughters would not be helpless in a kitchen. Since they were just two blocks from the Berlin (now Kitchener) Public Library, Edna used her time to devour the books she found there. She grew up wanting to write a book herself—some day.

    Edna proudly graduated from the University of Toronto in 1929 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. When she approached the president of Simpson’s to offer her services as manager of a new store in Kitchener, he told her she might consider starting as a clerk first. The clerking jobs she took did not last long; her bosses told her she had too much imagination for such work! Her teaching position in Ingersoll (where she taught geography, Latin, French, English literature, spelling, composition and all the physical education for the girls) lasted only a year after the principal saw her turning a back somersault on the front lawn. The school board fired her, saying she was too close to the age of her pupils.

    When she married in 1933, she did what wives were expected to do—stay home and learn to cook and sew, even hook rugs and make furniture—but instead of playing bridge, she read. And she faithfully kept a journal, acted in Little Theatre productions, and wrote a couple of one-act plays that won contests: but still no book.

    In 1954, on a trip to Nova Scotia, she suddenly realized her first book would be about a bleak Cape Breton fishing village, Neil’s Harbour. When she returned home with this idea, there was no support from her family, and neither were there formal writing courses in those days. It was through a chance meeting and subsequent correspondence with Dr. John Robins, an English professor at the University of Toronto, that Edna found the encouragement and help to follow through with her plan to write a book.

    In the spring of 1948, Edna put on her new gold lace straw hat with the flowers all around the front and her new beige suit with its flared skirt and fitted jacket (her own recollection many decades later) and personally delivered an unsolicited article based on her Cape Breton trip to Maclean’s magazine. The story was not only published but was the most-read article in the issue and the first in a long series of articles Edna would write for various magazines—Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Saturday Night and Star Weekly. The story eventually grew into her book, Cape Breton Harbour, described by author Harold Horwood as one of the best works of travel literature published in Canada, and the first of twenty books she would write.

    Each magazine story took Edna directly into the world she was writing about, and it was her affinity with people that won her their confidence. She had the ability to see inside a person, gather the ingredients of that person’s life and articulate it in her writing so that we could all understand it. Such was the case with her honest and sensitive portrayal of the Old Order Mennonites in the Waterloo region.

    W.O. Mitchell (Bill to Edna), fiction editor of Maclean’s magazine in 1949, and Pierre Berton, then the articles editor, decided between them that because Edna’s sword-fishing piece was number one in the magazine’s readership test, she should write a piece about the horse-and-buggy Mennonites in her home area. It was early in her magazine career, but she agreed.

    Edna felt she didn’t know much about the Old Order Mennonites apart from seeing them every Saturday morning at the market and hearing stories about their strange ways and expressions. Although she knew they kept to themselves, Edna realized the only way to get to know them was to find a family that would let her live with them for a while. Her research as a journalist is unparalleled today. When she asked at the general store in St. Jacobs if there was a friendly family who were less withdrawn than most of the Old Order, she was given the Martin name and directions to their farmhouse. The family agreed that it might be good to have their way of life without cars, radios and the like explained, so that people might understand them. As a result, How to Live without Wars and Wedding Rings was not only published but also won the Canadian Women’s Press Club award, the first of many awards to follow.

    It was this article and another Maclean’s piece later called Those Mouth-watering Mennonite Meals, the first essay in Food That Really Schmecks, which lead a publisher to ask Edna to write a cookbook.

    In the beginning Edna was a reluctant cookbook author. She was passionate to write, but other kinds of books—perhaps a novel. Her journal entry of March 26, 1966: Beginning to worry about cookbook. How in hell am I to collect enough recipes and write interestingly about them? She does say, however, that her research for Those Mouth-watering Mennonite Meals was the most enjoyable of any [she’d] ever done. She goes on to say: "Almost every Friday throughout the fall and winter of 1953–54 I drove to Bevvy Martin’s farmhouse to talk about food and to watch her prepare it. For every dinner and supper she made something different. While she hovered over the stove or mixing bowl, I drooled and copied her recipes. Then I sat with the family to eat myself full of drepsley soup, schnippled bean salad, summer sausage, fetschpatze (fat sparrows), schnitz and shoofly pie, or dozens of other delectables that I’ve since tried to immortalize." And in this, she certainly has succeeded, even keeping the Pennsylvania Dutch or German names for most recipes.

    When friends first started suggesting she write a cookbook, Edna was again reluctant: I tell them I couldn’t, I’m just a sporadic amateur in the kitchen, not a trained home economist. Perhaps this was to Edna’s advantage. Because she felt she knew nothing much about the subject of Mennonite or any other cooking, she approached it as any other assignment, with the in-depth research she pursued in all her writing. What resulted was a book full of wonderful, detailed mental pictures, colourful anecdotes and flavourful dialect, as we peek into the cooking pots of her friends and family. Food That Really Schmecks, first published in 1968, was different from any Canadian cookbook before it.

    In Canada, early cookbooks were either British or American, or, as in the first cookbook to be published in Canada, The Cook Not Mad; Rational Cookery, published in Kingston in 1831, copied from American books. As the nineteenth century progressed, cookbooks changed. In the earlier part of the century, they were written either for the upper classes who needed them to instruct their servants or for the lower classes who already knew how to cook, having learned from their mothers, but required instructions in household tasks and husbandry.

    Most of the cookbooks of the 1820s and ’30s were a disorderly jumble of recipes, household hints and medicinal remedies. The recipes were neither precise nor complete. Cookbooks of the 1840s,’ 50s and ’60s reflected an economic expansion, and those written after the mid-century began to address themselves to the rising middle classes. They were much more thorough and organized than the earlier cookbooks. Those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stressed the economic urge to preserve some of the season’s abundance for the cold winter, so they were heavy on preserving recipes. In the second decade of the twentieth century, milling companies promoted Canadian flour with cookbooks (full of cakes, puddings, cookies and pies) that would be treasured and passed down through generations.

    It was not until 1923 that a large, all-purpose Canadian book was published. Written by Nellie Lyle Pattinson, the Canadian Cook Book set new standards for accurate measurements and recipe writing, with much more detail in terms of methods, pan measurements, cooking temperatures and times.

    A few decades later, Edna’s style is not this standard recipe formula Canadian cookbook readers had grown to know and expect. Her delightfully vague instructions grew out of her creative writing style, and it is ironic that although there are within their pages mouth-watering dishes many people still make, her cookbooks succeeded more for her stories than her recipes. It is the kitchen settings, descriptions of people, their direct words and actions, that make Food That Really Schmecks more like a collection of short stories based on Edna’s adventure into Mennonite Country Cooking than a cookbook. Along the way, she relates the food customs of other Mennonites and even other groups like the Lutherans as well as the German way of cooking found in Waterloo County, but it is the Martin family that we eagerly wait to hear from in each chapter. Very few cookbooks have been written by real writers, and although her books are homier than those created by Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, Fran Warde, who wrote The French Kitchen, and playwright Alexandre Dumas, the creator of thed’Artagnan romances as well as the Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, I believe that Edna Staebler should be numbered among these writers.

    There was also a change in the type of recipes and cooking described in Schmecks that sets it apart from other Canada cookbooks of the time. Right up to the Second World War, there was a Canadian style of cooking based on foods grown here. After that, there was a certain decline in this tradition, brought on by urbanization, women working outside the home, less home gardening, more food being imported, more processed food, and big companies taking over the production of quality cheese, meat and flour to be sold in huge supermarkets. The 1950s brought the first hint of regional roots in cookbooks, along with ethnic cookbooks and cookbooks using convenience foods like canned soups and Jello.

    It was refreshing, therefore, in 1968, to read about the Old Order’s old-fashioned cooking and their respect for the land with its seasonal cycles, their refusal to rely on processed food and supermarket fare. Their cooking was cooking from scratch, using everything they had at hand. Edna asks Bevvy’s husband, David, Have you never tried canned soup? We never bought a can of anything yet, Bevvy answers. We always chust make our own.

    There was also great appeal in reading the intimate details of the daily lives of a group of people who were different and mysterious. Edna successfully uses food to demonstrate the Mennonite lifestyle—in many ways no different from others. Readers become more sympathetic toward those whom they once considered strange people with a strange way of talking. In her introduction to Shoo-Fly Pie, Edna states, Whenever people talk about Mennonite food they mention shoo-fly pie—which is rather like a cake baked in a pie shell. It is a favourite with busy farmers’ wives because it keeps moist in the cellar. All farmers’ wives of the time could appreciate this detail.

    As well, many readers will identify with the precious little black book in Bevvy’s kitchen drawer. Until the publication of Schmecks, recipes had been passed from generation to generation of Mennonite housewives without being printed in a cookbook, as it had been for many other Canadian cooks. For years, the only recipes any busy housewife read were those family recipes penned in a little black book where only the ingredients are listed. For the Short Cakes recipe, Edna admits to copying it straight from Bevvy’s book, and there is, indeed, no method given.

    Because the reader may know about that little black book whose recipes have no accurate methods, we can overlook precise methods as Edna records the recipes in a very conversational tone. This conversational tone partly comes from her being with the women who made the recipes and who told her what was going on in the process of each. In fact, it seems we are right there in the big old-fashioned kitchen with Bevvy as Edna looks over her shoulder and writes down what Bevvy is doing. In the method to Thick Milk Pie, there is no direct instruction to the reader; rather, it is Edna’s description of what she sees Bevvy doing: Bevvy deftly blends all the ingredients, pours the mixture into the pie shell and sprinkles the spices over the top. She bakes it at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then at 350 degrees for 25 minutes—or until it is set.

    You will notice in this case there is an exact time and test to the recipe, but often there is not. In her recipe for Sand Cookies, she states: bake in a 350-degree oven till lightly browned—not very long. In fact, even her ingredient lists sometimes reflect the charming vagueness that fills her recipe methods. In the Grumbara Gleess (Potato Sausage Dumplings) recipe, salt to taste is usual, but maybe a tablespoon of flour, "a chunk of

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