Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Mondays Should Be Celebrated

Once again, TGIM. I look forward to every Monday, for sharing Memories of My Mom with you, and I hope that this creates a happy Monday for you.

As the first Monday in January (for 2026), it’s… Thank God It’s Monday Day. According to NationalDayCalendar.com, on this day, we should… “Stop shaming Monday and look at what Monday has to offer… 52 CHANCES to see a beautiful sunrise… share your talents with the world… teach someone a new skill that will better their lives…”

I LOVE MONDAYS! For me, they are my 52 Chances to celebrate my Mom’s life, tell her story, and share some of her own memories from her many editorials, newsletters, and books. By the way, this is also Celebration of Life Week.

Hopefully, I’m igniting happy memories in those who remember her being the ORIGINAL Secret Recipes^TM Detective, as well as (re-)inspiring love in the kitchen, in the home, in the family, throughout the neighborhood, and around the world… just as Mom did in everything she wrote.

My mom was very gifted as a writer, publisher, promoter, artist, crafter, homemaker, cook and so much more. It was her taste buds and culinary skills, combined with her creative writing and artistic abilities, plus a cynical sense of humor, that contributed to her success, as the Secret Recipes^TM Detective.

In a time, not unlike what we are in now – with political upheaval, low wages, and high costs of living – Mom found, while writing a “food column” for a local paper, an unchartered niche in the food and cookbook industries that people wanted.

She called her concept “copycat cookery”, for “eating out at home”. Mom discovered how to mimic fast foods & restaurant dishes, as well as shelf-stable grocery items, using nothing more than her own common kitchen appliances and pantry products. If it saved her household money, she wanted to share it with others to help them save money too.

Mom was an innovator. Starting in the early in the 1970s, she blazed her trail of uniqueness among all the “Betty Crockers” and “Julia Childs” of that time – and the newspapers and magazines wrote articles about her, discovering the secrets of making famous restaurant dishes, fast foods, and convenience products right at home.

She developed and wrote her own recipes, marketing her talents, herself. From 1973 to 2014, she was interviewed on radio and TV programs, as well as by newspapers and magazines, all around the world.

For nearly 40 years she was a regular on a few local radio talk shows like “Ask Your Neighbor”, hosted by Bob Allison, and “The Warren Pierce Show”, hosted by Warren Pierce, both airing in the Detroit area; plus, “Listen to the Mrs.”, hosted by Art Lewis, in the Saginaw area. One was on Mondays.

Although she did radio talk shows all around the country and internationally, every week or month, these were her cornerstone shows. It was these radio audience fans who first named her “The Recipe Detective”.

Critics first called it a “fad” and predicted that it wouldn’t last – especially since they also were the ones promoting that these kind of foods were unhealthy. However, it not only lasted but it also became a movement that’s still popular today, as copycats came out of the woodwork to copy the original copycat.

FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…

As seen in…

Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, pp. 6-7). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3^rd Edition)].

IT ALL STARTED WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN

DEAR FRIENDS,

I DO, WITH RECIPES, what Rich Little does with voices! Imitating the “Secret Recipes” of the food industry has been an exciting experience for me. The critics felt that “fast foods” and restaurant dishes were not worth the effort to duplicate at home, when you can just as easily buy the products already prepared!

The critics who contend that “fast foods” are “junk foods” and not good for us, have probably never prepared [them]. Certainly, they have no access to the closely guarded recipes from the food companies that created these dishes, as there are only a few people in each operation that are permitted the privilege of such information!

So, 99% of the critics’ speculations are based on their own opinions. To know what these dishes contained, they’d have to be better chemists than I, as I have tested over 20,000 recipes with only the finished product as my guide to determine what each contained. “Fast foods” are not “junk foods” unless they’re not properly prepared.

Any food that is poorly prepared (and just as badly presented) is junk! Unfortunately, “fast food” has carried a reputation, by default, of containing ingredients that are “harmful” to us. Yet, they contain the same ingredients as those foods served in the “finer” restaurants…

Wine stewards, linen tablecloths, candlelight, coat-check attendants, and parking valets… separate the plastic palaces of “fast food” from the expensive dining establishments.

One “eats” at McDonald’s, but “dines” at The Four Seasons. Steak and potato or hamburger and French fries – the ingredients are practically the same. How they’re prepared makes the difference!

In the early 1970s, I was trying to juggle marriage, motherhood, homemaking and a newspaper column syndicated through Columbia Features, when it seemed obvious to me that there wasn’t a single cookbook on the market that could help me take the monotony out of mealtime.

There was not a single recipe in the newspaper’s food section that did not smack of down-home dullness! “Okay,” they said at the newspaper I worked for, “YOU write the column on foods and recipes that YOU think would really excite the readers and make them happy!”

I did but that didn’t make the Editors happy because it made their advertisers miserable. When I was told that I’d have to go back to monotonous meatloaf and uninteresting side-dishes that made mealtime a ritual rather than a celebration or “pick up my check”, I told them to “MAIL it to me!” I went home to start my own paper!

It was probably a dumb thing to do, amid an economic recession with the highest rate of unemployment I had ever experienced, but it was worth the risk. I was a dedicated writer that knew someone had to give homemakers something more than what they were being given in the colored glossy magazines…

There had to be more to mealtime than Lima beans and macaroni and cheese with Spam and parsley garnishes. There also had to be more to desserts than chocolate cake recipes that came right off the cocoa can. The food industry gave us more appealing products than did the cookbooks we trusted.

They laughed! They doubted! They even tried to take me to court when some famous food companies insisted that I stop giving away their secrets. They couldn’t believe me when I said that I did NOT know, nor did I want to know, what they put in their so-called secret recipes.

I did know that there are very few recipes that can’t be duplicated or imitated at home. And we could do them for much less than purchasing the original product. I proved…it can be and should be done!

Famous foods from famous places have intrigued good cooks for a long time – even before the fast foods of the 1950s were a curiosity. When cookbooks offer us a sampling of good foods, they seldom devote themselves to the dishes of famous restaurants.

There is speculation among the critics as to the virtues of re-creating, at home, the foods that you can buy “eating out”, such as the fast food fares of the popular franchise restaurants. To each, his own! Who would want to imitate “fast food” at home?

I found that over a million people who saw me demonstrate replicating some famous fast food products on The Phil Donahue Show (July 7, 1981) DID – and their letters poured in at a rate of over 15,000 a day for months on end!

I’ve investigated the recipes, dishes, and cooking techniques of “fine” dining rooms around the world [but] I’ve received more requests from people who wanted to know how to make things like McDonald’s Special Sauce or General Foods Shake-N-Bake coating mix or White Castle’s hamburgers than… Club 21’s Coq Au Vin.

Mom found that she could take the junk out of so-called “junk foods” by making them at home, where she controlled the ingredients. In the early years of her “Secret Recipes^TM” business, she sold her recipes individually, for 25-cents each or five-for-a-dollar. They were printed on 4”x6” index cards from a mimeograph she kept in our laundry room.

Mom quickly built up an index of more than 200 recipes from her family’s and readers’ requests. She capped her catalog, at that point, so as not to get too overwhelmed by the number of recipes to keep printed and on file for orders.

As new requests kept coming in, Mom decided to delete titles that weren’t selling as well OR that were selling SO WELL she put them on a sheet of “Free Sample Recipes”, which she offered in exchange for a self-addressed stamped envelope – because who doesn’t like to try out free samples, before committing to buying a product?

Her inventory of recipes continued growing. She went from index cards to monthly newsletters and multiple cookbooks in the blink of an eye. But it was her first appearance on “The Phil Donahue Show”, in 1981, that created the most attention and huge response, worldwide. Our whole family was taken aback. We never expected a million letters to come from it.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Mom fully retired, due to health reasons. Dad tried, unsuccessfully, to get her to retire almost two decades earlier. He wanted to fully retire, as he was six years older, but Mom wasn’t ready. She just couldn’t let go of what made life a daily celebration for her.

They compromised on a partial retirement plan, letting go of the newsletter commitment and not re-printing most of her cookbooks, going instead into small “bulletins”, each of which focused on recipes and backstories for famous restaurant chains.

They continued to work side by side – dedicated partners, in every way, to the very end. Life should be celebrated every day, not just this week, and Mondays should be celebrated every week, not just today.

LAST THOUGHTS…

Thanks for visiting! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my memories of my mom, her memories, and other related things. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at therecipedetective@outlook.com. You can also find me on Facebook: @TheRecipeDetective.

https://www.balboapress.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001062253

IN CLOSING…

In honor of January, being National Slow Cooking Month, here’s Mom’s copycat recipe for “Tomato Paste”; as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 64). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3^rd Edition)].

As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.

#NationalSlowCookingMonth