Easter Rabbit Wall Hanging

About 15 years ago, my oldest daughter and I had a booth at a large craft mall.  My contributions were all decorative painting and I did a lot of design sketches inspired by  photos, greeting cards, calendars, etc.  I used my sketch of an Amish girl feeding rabbits to make a 6×6 inch redwork panel.

The log cabin blocks surrounding the redwork are 3×3 inches.  The finished piece, made to fit my mini quilt rack, is 12×15 inches.

It’s not the typical Easter bunny quilt, but I like it.

My daughter made the beautiful crocheted doily.

School Days–Cincinnati–1930s-40s

The day after Labor Day in 1938, I began my education by entering old Raschig School in downtown Cincinnati.  I’m sure Mother must have pointed out the school to me many times before I started the first grade there.  It was just across Central Parkway from our first floor two-room apartment on Elm Street.  If we were standing on the street or even sitting on the front stoop, we would have been able to see the big red brick building and the heavy iron fence that surrounded it.

I remember the dress I wore on my first day of school because a picture had been taken the day before at the County Fair in Dayton, Ohio.  My grandma had bought it for me – a yellow silk dress with brown velvet ribbons and a full circle accordion pleated skirt.  This was before World War II when silk was the fabric of choice for special occasions.

I can remember Mother walking with me to my first day at Raschig and then suddenly being gone.  I don’t recall being particularly happy or unhappy – I was just there.  Because I hadn’t been to kindergarten, they put me in a class with kids who needed to be evaluated.  The teacher was a middle-aged lady and not particularly friendly  Soon after I arrived,  I noticed kids were passing around food for our mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks.  One bowl held the most gorgeous purple plums.  I don’t believe I had ever seen plums before.  I asked the teacher if I could pass the plums and she was very brusque and said the children were chosen ahead of time and to go sit down.

Luckily, I left her class within a couple of weeks and had Mrs. Clark and a young student teacher who were wonderful.  I remember struggling with reading – it didn’t seem to make sense and then one day it all came together and I never had any problems after that.  I also struggled a little to make the cursive letters that spelled out Lillian.  We never did learn to print but went into handwriting immediately.

I looked forward to the stories the teacher read to us – “Lazy Liza Lizard”, “The Three Bears”, and particularly “Little Black Sambo” because I loved the description of the butter and the pancakes.

Ours was an inner city school but during the housing shortage of those war years there were many middle-class people living in the area with children going to Raschig.  Kids like Rollo, a black boy who always wore stylish knickers and argyle knee socks and appeared to come from a well-to-do family as well as a girl named Mary Jane and another girl named Patty Lou (double names were big in the 1930s).  Our family was about middle-ground economically – there were kids much poorer – Dorothy, Mary Lou, and poor Otto, a raggedy boy whose shoe soles flapped as he walked.

This was a Valentine I designed one year to show Rollo, Otto and myself in our classroom

Those Raschig years were good for me – I did well in school, the teachers seemed pleased with my work, I thought most of the kids liked me, nobody bothered me except for teasing occasionally about my long finger curls and I never took that seriously.  When I was 9 years old, I jotted down a poem about school starting again at old Raschig.   I never did outgrow my love of school.

Poem by Lillian (9 years old) – August, 1942

I love to go to school
And see the teachers dear
There to teach us children
All through the year.

I love to go to school
To learn to write and read
And there to learn to be
Very good indeed.

I love to go school
Because it’s so much fun
For when I have gym
I sometimes get to run.

I love to go to school
Way up into June
For you see I am so anxious
School will be starting soon.

In autumn when the leaves are falling
We hear the children’s voices calling
I think how glad they must be
To go to school the same as me.

Christmas Fudge

During the rationing of World War II, we children craved sugar

As we watched Mother sprinkle carefully measured sp0onsful over our oatmeal.

We wanted more sweetness in our hot chocolate, in our pudding;

We longed for a bottomless sugar bowl.

But in the fall Mother stood in long lines that coiled around the city tenements

To get an extra bag of sugar allotted for canning and preserving.

She squirreled this away until Christmas

When it was transformed into the most glorious pecan studded fudge,

Sweet enough to make up for a whole year of rationing.

“Christmas Fudge”, by Lillian – 1997

My mother was famous in our family for her homemade fudge, made without benefit of a candy thermometer and cooked and beaten until it was perfect.  Then, it was placed in a special rose-bedecked tin to be brought out on Christmas Eve, opened and squares of never-to-be-forgotten goodness placed on her fancy Christmas plate.

I was never able to duplicate her fudge and have had to rely on the easier candy since she passed away in 1991.  I have several good recipes but my oldest daughter asked for some fudge made with marshmallows rather than marshmallow creme, so this is the version I made for her.

FUDGE MADE WITH MARSHMALLOWS

• 2 cups mini-marshmallows*
• 1 cup chocolate chips (I like Ghiradelli)
• 1-1/2 cups coarsely chopped toasted walnuts
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup undiluted evaporated milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla

*20 large marshmallows = 2 cups mini-marshmallows.  Cut large marshmallows into 8 pieces using kitchen shears that are dipped in water to prevent sticking.

Butter a large plate or platter

In a medium bowl, combine the marshmallows, chips and walnuts.  Have ready and at hand before starting the fudge.

In a large, heavy bottomed pan, combine the sugar and milk.  Cook over medium high heat (#6 on my gauge) until the mixture comes to a boil, stirring occasionally.  When there are bubbles across the entire top surface of the mixture, set a timer for 5 minutes and cook at the same heat setting, stirring occasionally.

After 5 minutes, remove pan from heat and stir in the marshmallows, chips and nuts, stirring quickly until the marshmallows and chips are melted.  Stir in the vanilla.

Immediately pour onto the buttered plate and let cool at room temperature.

This is a batch made with milk chocolate chips.  I also made a batch with semi-sweet chips, resting on Mother’s World War II era platter.

Mother always cut her fudge in big squares.

The fudge does not need to be refrigerated.  Should be stored in a container with a tight lid.   My mother’s old rose tin is just the right size for a batch of fudge.

This is not even close to my Mother’s fudge, but brings back the memories of all the Christmas Eves when I enjoyed her wonderful candy.

Happy Thanksgiving

In the 1990s, my oldest daughter and I had a booth at a large craft mall which we kept supplied with a variety of handmade crafts.  My interest was in decorative painting.  I liked to scour antique malls and thrift shops to find old wooden or enamelware items to paint and sold hundreds of pieces over the years.

Fast forward to 2010 and a walk through the Ohio Valley Antique Mall in Fairfield, Ohio (near Cincinnati).  In one of their beautifully decorated booths, I saw a familiar object….an enamelware platter that I had painted in 1996.  I had adapted the design from a picture in a school textbook, simplifying it and adding a few items.

I had painted the design on several projects through the years but had never kept one for myself.   A week before Thanksgiving, this old platter seemed to call to me to take it back home, so I bought it and after 14 years, it’s on display in my living room.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYBODY.

Granddaughter at her First Grade Thanksgiving Dinner

Cincinnati’s 6th St. Market in the 1930s

When I was a high school junior in 1949,  one of our assignments in English class was to write an autobiography.  A portion of my life story was about visiting the old Sixth Street Market with my mother and little sister.  In 1936, our family had finally left the home of relatives during the Great Depression and rented a one-room flat on Elm Street in downtown Cincinnati.  My 20-something father had a job on the WPA and my teenage mother made the one room into a comfortable home and took care of my sister (age two)  and me (age four).  Since we didn’t have an ice-box, one of our daily chores was to walk about 4 blocks to the Sixth Street Market to get our supply of perishable food.  My father would tell my mother what to fix for supper, give her a list of ingredients and the money to cover it, and we made our way through the city streets which were completely unfamiliar to my mother and her small-town upbringing.    Since my memory at age 16 was much sharper than it is now, I’m offering my chapter on this experience from my 1949 high school autobiography, exactly as I wrote it then.  Accompanying the piece are pen and ink sketches I did in 1992, using old Cincinnati photographs as my reference.

MARKET DAYS

“One of my earliest memories is that of going to the Sixth Street market with Mother and Shirley.  Each day we took the trip and made our rounds of the stores.  In the butcher shop, the friendly butcher always presented Shirley and me with a fat, juicy hot dog.  You can imagine what kind of picture we presented walking along the street, hanging onto the handles of Mother’s shopping bags, munching hot dogs.

Sixth Street market was a fascinating place, always bubbling over with loud-mouthed vendors who tried to out-do each other in shouting their bargains.  I can remember the outdoor stalls and the piles of fruits and vegetables each one contained.  The apples and oranges were wrapped in flimsy, red tissue paper, and an abundance of these wrappers could be found laying on the pavement near the stalls.  The vendors of oranges or lemons were always anxious to cut one of the fruits in half in order to show the good quality of their products.

There was a row of little shops along the street and we frequented all of them.

One shop was full of poultry products.  Cages of cackling chickens were setting all around the room.  That queer, stale odor that goes with fowls filled the shop and floated out of the open door into the crowded street.  Men with blood splattered aprons were on hand to kill any chicken the customer might desire.  Fresh eggs could also be purchased as well as fat ducks.  The chatter of the men, the demands of the customers, and the quacks and clucks of the fowls added to the general confusion of the shop.

In the very middle of the square was a huge meat house.  It was very quiet and cool in the house, and it proved to be a welcome place to enter from the scorching street.  Great halves of beef hung on the walls, and fat,  jolly butchers cut the scarlet meat and wrapped it in brown paper taken from a big roll that was kept on the counter.  Attached to the ceiling was a large ball of string with the loose end hanging down so that the butcher could grasp it and use it in wrapping the packages of meat.  Through the windows of the showcase,  I could see heaps of juicy, soft hamburger; strings of pink hot dogs; piles of lean steaks and chops; and smooth, red liver laying beside big hunks of rich, yellow cheese.

At the very end of Sixth Street was a little store which sold such articles as tobacco, cigarettes, gum and candy.  Mother would always take us to the store and let us choose a piece of penny candy.  There was never any hesitation – Shirley and I always chose “candy fudges”.  Sometimes, we purchased dark, rich chocolate ones, but more often we chose the creamy, smooth vanilla squares of fudge.

On our way home from the market we passed an ancient Jewish synagogue.  It was a gloomy-looking building, its dark, yellow walls covered with vines.  Surrounding the temple was a short, wide wall, and my sister and I delighted in walking on top of it.  We thought that we were performing quite a daring feat, although the wall was only two feet tall.  At the end of the wall, we scrambled down with mixed feelings of satisfaction and regret that the fun was over, and headed for home.”

A Snowy Day Retro Meal

My oldest daughter was here for supper in the middle of a weeklong siege of snow and I wanted to fix some kind of comfort food.  What says “comfort” more than a casserole and some cookies from the late 1940s-early 1950s?

The Casserole:  I loved to have lunch at my Aunt Mabel’s house when I was a kid.  Mabel shared a two-family house with my maternal grandmother and each week they and Mabel’s two young children got together with my mother, my sister, and me.   Mabel was something of a kid herself – in her early 20s, funny, good with young people, a tomboy in jeans long before girls had started to wear them in the mid-1940s.  She wasn’t particularly interested in cooking but she always served fun food – cold cuts, store-bought cookies, potato chips – and sometimes she would try out a popular recipe such as her Tuna Noodle Casserole.  My father wouldn’t touch anything that even looked like a casserole with its conglomeration of ingredients, so this was a real treat for us.  At Mabel’s, we enjoyed the food we never had at home, as well as all the latest magazines and, the best thing for me, the chance to sit with the three women and listen to them talk while the younger children went off to play.

This is my version of Mabel’s casserole:

LILLIAN’S TUNA NOODLE CASSEROLE

• 6 oz. dry noodles (about 1-1/2 cups)
• One can cream of mushroom soup
• 1 cup milk
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1/2 tsp. seasoned salt
• Several gratings of black pepper
• 1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed
• 2 Tblsp. chopped pimiento
• 2 Tblsp. dry minced onion
• 2 cans white albacore tuna (6 oz. each), drained &  flaked
• 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
• 1 cup crushed cheese crackers

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Spray or oil a 9″ baking dish

Cook the dry noodles in boiling, salted water until al dente (about 7 minutes).  Drain and set aside.

In a large bowl, combine the soup, milk, sour cream, salt and pepper.  Mix well and stir in the peas, pimiento, onion, flaked tuna and grated cheese.  Stir in the drained noodles.  Pour into the prepared 9″ pan.  Sprinkle the top with the crushed cheese crackers.

Bake @ 400 degrees F for 20 minutes until the mixture is hot and bubbly.

Serve at once.

The Cookies: These cookies are especially good when they’re first baked and the chocolate is still soft.

PEANUT BUTTER BLOSSOMS

• 48 Hershey milk chocolate kisses
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup light brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 Tblsp. milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  Remove wrappers from chocolates.

Beat shortening/margarine and peanut butter in large bowl until well blended.  Add granulated sugar and brown sugar, beat until fluffy.  Add egg, milk and vanilla, blending well.

In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and salt.  Gradually beat the flour mixture into the peanut butter mixture.

Shape dough into one-inch balls.  Place on an ungreased cookie sheet about 2″ apart.  Bake @ 375 degrees F for approximately 8-10 minutes until cookies are lightly browned.  Remove from oven and immediately press a chocolate kiss in the center of each cookie.  Remove cookies to wire rack to cool.

Yield:  48 cookies

I would love to have just one more chance to sit around the table with those dear people, listen to them talk and enjoy Mabel’s casserole.

Retro Coffeecake

This recipe goes back to my early days of marriage in 1952.  It came from either a Crisco or Sunbeam mixer cookbook (two of my favorite sources at that time) and I made it countless times.  The crumb topping is very sparse and light but is just right for the cake which is richer than most coffeecakes.  I have always called it my “best coffeecake”.

BEST COFFEECAKE

• 1/2 cup shortening (Crisco)
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 Tblsp. baking powder
• 1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Grease and flour a 9″ baking pan.

In the large bowl of an electric mixer, place the shortening, sugar and egg.  Beat until light and fluffy.

In a separate medium bowl, mix together the flour, salt and baking powder.

Add the flour mixture to the sugar mixture alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with flour, and beating until well blended after each addition.

Pour into a greased and floured 9″ pan.  Sprinkle the following topping on the top of the cake:

TOPPING

• 1-1/2 Tblsp. melted butter
• 4 Tblsp. granulated sugar
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 Tblsp. flour

In a small bowl, mix together the butter, sugar and cinnamon.  Stir in the flour and mix well.  Crumble over the top of the unbaked cake.

Bake cake @ 400 degrees F for approximately 25 minutes, until cake tests done.

Cool for 10 minutes on a rack.  Cut into squares to serve while still warm.

In the early 1960s my husband and I were raising three children in a 1922 house on Maple Drive in Oakley (Cincinnati).

I used to bake this cake as a treat during the evening when we didn’t have money for snacks like potato chips and soft drink.   I would omit the crumb topping and after it was cool, frost it with some powdered sugar icing and sprinkle raisins on top.

ICING FOR TOP OF CAKE

• 1 Tblsp. softened butter or margarine
• 1 Tblsp. undiluted evaporated milk
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 cup powdered or confectioners’ sugar
• Dash of salt

Place all of the above ingredients in a mixer bowl and beat until smooth.  An additional drop or two of evaporated milk can be added gradually to make a good spreading consistency.  Frost top of cooled cake while still in the pan and sprinkle about 3 Tblsp. of raisins on top.

The three kids (age 2, 6 and 8), my husband and I would eat the entire cake that evening while watching television.

Grandma Mary’s Doughnut Balls

When I met my future mother-in-law in 1951, she introduced me to her very popular Doughnut Balls.  She told me that when her four kids were little, she would get up early in the morning and make these treats before her husband went off to work so he could have some fresh and warm for breakfast and the kids could eat some later when they woke up.  Actually, the recipe is easy and quick enough to do just that.  I never made them for her son for breakfast because he preferred bacon and eggs, but I did make them many times for my own four children and my mother loved them for lunch with a cup of hot coffee.

Here’s a 1950s picture of my mother-in-law, later known as Grandma Mary, at her familiar place in the kitchen, getting a meal ready for her family.

For our first Halloween together as a married couple in 1953 before there were any children, I decided to make special treats for the “beggars” as we called them in those days.  When I was a child out begging one Halloween, word had come along the street that someone was handing out hot doughnuts.  We raced up to the house only to find they had run out, but I always thought that sounded like an ideal Halloween treat.  So, using a wedding gift electric deep fryer, I set up an operation near the door, mixing up batches of Grandma Mary’s recipe and offering piping hot, sugary Doughnut Balls to some very surprised trick or treaters.  I had also made a huge batch of hot chocolate and passed out small paper cups of this to wash down the doughnuts.

I was very pleased with my Halloween treat idea but by the next year, I had a six-month-old baby and after that there were more children and less time, so I never duplicated that 1953 Halloween.  However, we still enjoy having these Doughnut Balls for breakfast and I think of Grandma Mary every time I make them.

GRANDMA MARY’S DOUGHNUT BALLS

• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 2 Tblsp. melted Crisco shortening
• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• Crisco for deep frying
• 1-2 cups of confectioners’ sugar for coating

In a medium bowl whisk together the sugar, milk, egg and melted shortening.  In a separate small bowl mix together the flour, salt and baking powder.  Combine dry and wet ingredients, stirring just until dry ingredients are incorporated.

Heat Crisco shortening to 365 degrees F in a large pan with a fryer basket*.  Drop batter by teaspoonful into hot shortening – 4 to 5 doughnuts at a time.  Fry for 3-4 minutes.  Doughnut balls will flip over and become golden brown on both sides.

*If you don’t have a basket, lift and turn doughnuts with a slotted spoon.

Drain doughnuts on a paper towel.

Continue frying remaining doughnuts, placing the drained doughnuts in a brown paper sack along with about a cup of confectioners’ sugar and shaking until doughnuts are coated.

I’ve never had time to count how many doughnut balls this recipe makes since it requires fast work for a few minutes, frying, draining and coating – and anyone who is in the kitchen grabs a warm doughnut as soon as it’s finished.  These are best when eaten while still warm.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Update: It’s a long time since 1953 and a different world.  I wouldn’t recommend having children eat anything homemade by people they don’t know.  But Doughnut Balls and hot chocolate would be nice for a family Halloween party!

A Little Christmas Baseball Story

I can’t remember when I didn’t love baseball.  I was encouraged in my devotion by my father who took me to Crosley Field to see the Cincinnati Reds, explained the fine points of the game during radio broadcasts, and by the time I was 10, appointed me as his pitching practice catcher.  I had a great ball glove with well-oiled pocket, but what I wanted for Christmas was an official, grey flannel, pin-striped baseball uniform.

Sure enough, on that wartime Christmas Eve in 1942, under the tree was the gorgeous soft uniform with elastic-banded knickers.  I couldn’t wait to put on the uniform although I had to look a little strange wearing it with finger curls hanging halfway down my back.

I wore the uniform all evening, watching my little sister with her toys, admiring the tree and eating my favorite Christmas candy – Mother’s fudge and the old-fashioned chocolate drops with cream centers and dark chocolate coating.

Toward the end of the evening, I plunged into a big leather chair and threw my legs luxuriously over the arm, not realizing that I had sat down on a big gooey chocolate drop.  There was a dark brown stain on the seat of those grey flannel knickers that never did wash out completely.

But it didn’t matter – the thrill of the gift and the pride in the wearing had already taken place on a long-ago memorable Christmas Eve.

1950s Spritz Cookies

For quite a few years, I’ve created personal memory-type Christmas cards for close family and friends.  In 1995, I sketched and scanned this Spritz cookie scene.  Since I didn’t have a printer with colored ink at the time, I hand water-colored each card.  This was the inside message:

In December of 1953, I took the trolley bus downtown and bought a beautiful copper and aluminum cookie press.  I could hardly wait until the next morning to try it out and kept getting up in the middle of the night to read the little recipe pamphlet that described all of the different shapes possible with this marvel.  I’ve baked hundreds of cookies of all kinds since that December, but every year I get out the old cookie press and look again with wonder at the dainty Christmas tree and wreath cookies, sparkling with green and red sugar.

Have a Christmas full of wonder.

Once again last week, I pulled out the press and the plates for the tree and wreath, making Spritz cookies from the 1950s for St. Nicholas on December 6.

Here is the recipe:

1950s SPRITZ COOKIES

• 1 cup margarine (I like Imperial)*
• 1 large egg (should measure 1/4 cup when broken)
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2-1/2 cups all-purpose fl0ur
• 1/2 tsp. salt

*Back when I first started making these cookies, I couldn’t afford butter but in later, more affluent times, I’ve found that I prefer the consistency of the Spritz made with margarine.  Certainly, butter can be used if you prefer.

Cream margarine, egg, vanilla and sugar until smooth.  Add flour and salt.  Mix until blended.  Wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least one hour.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Put one of the plates and half of the dough in the cookie press.  Press cookies onto an ungreased cookie sheet.

Sprinkle with colored sugar and bake for 10-12 minutes until light brown.  Remove to rack to cool.

Repeat with other half of dough, changing to the star plate which I use to make long strips which can be cut and formed into wreaths.  On these cookies, I have traditionally added bits of red and green candied cherries.

I’ll make another batch of these cookies for Christmas and this year, I’ve been asked to make enough of the wreath cookies  to serve  14 of my granddaughter’s pre-school classmates at their Christmas party.   Since my granddaughter likes them so much, I hope her friends will, too.