Thank God it’s Monday, again. As always, I look forward to Mondays. They make me happy. They’re my 52 Chances a year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with you. Thus, I hope this post brings you a happy Monday, too.
#TakeOurDaughtersAndSonsToWorkDay
This Thursday (for 2026) will be observing National Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, which is often much easier said than done – unless you own the business or your employer is a willing participant in the event. Not all are and not all can be, due largely to safety rules and regulations in the workplace.
For Mom, once she started working from home, EVERY DAY was Take [her] Daughters and Sons to Work Day. We all helped her in one way or another (depending on our ages and abilities) with her self-published recipes and mail-order business.
I remember helping Mom color the covers of her first cookbook, using colored pencils, since her mimeograph only printed in black ink. As a budding, almost-9-year-old, want-to-be artist, the pressure was on because (for that project) it was VERY important that I “color within the lines”.
The family business somewhat began in the early 1970s, just before Mom released her first self-published cookbook, The Better Cooker’s Cookbook (Happy Newspaper Features, Algonac, MI; 1973). That limited-offer cookbook was compiled from recipes she posted in one of her weekly food columns, called “Cookbook Corner”.
Back then, Mom wrote and syndicated several columns in various papers; all designed to appeal to homemakers, like herself – to those who wanted more than what the “humdrum” cookbooks, at that time, were offering. Incidentally, last Thursday was Get to Know Your Customers Day and this Saturday celebrates National Columnists’ Day.
When some of Mom’s readers started asking her for recipes to duplicate something special at home – like how to make a cheesecake that they enjoyed at a local restaurant or how to make McDonald’s special hamburger sauce – she excitedly set to work – investigating, taste-testing, and developing her own make alike versions.
She surprisingly found that the “special sauce” on McDonald’s “Big Mac” (and the sandwich, itself), was very similar to that of her local Elias Brother’s “Big Boy”, a double-deck hamburger that she enjoyed as a young girl almost 30 years earlier. And the cheesecake tasted exactly like the frozen ones she’d been buying at the grocery store for years.
When Mom printed her “secret make alike recipes” in her column, she received a large, favorable response from her readers. That greatly pleased her editor until the cheesecake company saw her recipe, for imitating their product. They were very upset and told the editor that they were going to pull their ads from the paper.
That’s when Mom’s editor directed her to go back to the semi-ordinary recipes she had been offering, previously, or collect her last paycheck. Knowing what her readers really wanted (and discovering she did, too), she told him to mail the check to her and left.
She went home and started building her brand – later known as “Gloria Pitzer’s Secret RecipesTM”. It began with the individual recipe cards then a limited edition cookbook and what was to become her own newspaper (aka: “Gloria Pitzer’s Homemaker’s Newsletter”); plus, many more cookbooks followed – at an average of one a year, for 40 years.
Mom was thrilled to be doing something different from the traditional food fare columns but too scared to tell Dad she quit her job. She was able to keep it all secret from Dad for almost a year, employing us kids to do whatever we could, at our various ages, to help her, while he was working at the sign company.
Obviously, taste testing was the best job – even the “duds” (the ones that didn’t taste like the targeted products) were still really good. We also kept watch for Dad to come home after work so Mom could hide everything in the laundry room before he came in the door.
Sometimes me and my sisters had to stop him from walking in too quickly by meeting him right at the door with a barrage of hugs and kisses and loud exclamations (to warn Mom), “Yeah! Daddy’s home.” However, when Mom and the whole family were invited to be on a Detroit area TV talk show in late 1974 – she couldn’t hide it from him any longer.
He took the news better than she expected. It helped that she was already making a good profit from what she had been secretly doing. Mom had swiftly built a small following through her newspaper contacts and some Detroit Metro Area radio talk shows that were popular with homemakers.
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 RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
IT ALL STARTED WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN
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 [food industry] 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 new someone had to give homemakers something more than what they were being given in the colored glossy magazines, where a bowl of library paste could even be photographed to look appetizing!
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 fast foods of the 1950’s were a curiosity… 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!
And while I’ve investigated recipes, dishes, and cooking techniques of “fine” dining rooms around the world, I’ve received more requests [for] how to make things like McDonald’s Special Sauce or General Foods Shake-N-Bake coating mix or White Castle’s hamburgers than I’ve received for things like Club 21’s Coq Au Vin.
Mom quickly developed a collection of over 200 recipes for imitating all kinds of famous dishes and food products at home. She printed them on 4×6-inch index cards with the mimeograph she bought from the money she earned taking in ironing.
She rented a postal box down the road, in Pearl Beach, and sold the cards through the mail for 25 cents each or five for a dollar. The first cookbook was only $1.50, and her monthly newsletter was 50-cents an issue. She advertised them in newspapers and magazines, as well as on the radio shows that called her or she “cold called” them, herself.
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 8). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
ALTHOUGH I’VE BEEN WRITING longer than I’ve been cooking, the notion to investigate the secrets of the food industry didn’t become a full-time labor-of-love until I was working for a small-town newspaper [about 1971.]
As the only “married lady” on the staff, I was always assigned the food page and recipe column, and I was willing to try the dishes at home and present a column or article about their results to the paper. When you work for a small-town paper, you wear many hats.
You set type, sell advertising, proof read, design headlines, create art work, campaign for subscribers; and, before you know it, you acquire skills you didn’t even know you possessed.
The food department became such a welcomed relief from the local politics that I poured my heart and soul into it, learning some of the essentials of good cooking by default! Everything went well until I initiated an idea to create advertising interest among local restaurants.
It started when I answered a reader’s request in my column for a recipe like McDonald’s “Special Sauce”. I knew it was a kissin’ cousin of a good Thousand Island dressing, so the development of the recipe wasn’t difficult.
The response from our readers was so appreciative that I contacted local restaurants for their advertising in exchange for my printing one of their recipes and menu in my column and a complimentary review of their place.
No one was willing to part with any of their “secrets!” So, I decide to see if I could “guess” how they prepared their specialties of the house. I came across a hotel in town that advertised “home baked” cheesecake, and I felt they should be telling their customers “homemade.”
The difference to the public is very slight, but they wanted the public to “think” it was homemade, from scratch, when it was, in fact, simply taken from a carton and popped into the oven like brown-and-serve rolls… At any rate, that was when I parted company with the paper and set out on my own…
Once Dad was let in on the big secret, he started helping Mom in the evenings and on weekends until he retired from the sign company two years later. From then on, they worked and lived together, side-by-side, every day.
The food industry offered unlimited possibilities for imitating our favorite foods at home. Within a few years, Mom went from the recipe cards and one cookbook to the monthly newsletter and multiple cookbooks; eventually eliminating the recipe cards, altogether.
LAST THOUGHTS…
Next Monday is National Tell a Story Day. So it’ll be a wonderful opportunity to tell more of Mom’s story, regarding how she balanced her working homemaker’s life, daily – with a husband, five kids, and a couple of pets trailing closely behind.
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.
IN CLOSING…
READER’S RECIPE REQUESTS…
I was recently contacted by a new reader, requesting any of Mom’s Tim Horton imitations. She only had a handful of copycat recipes for Tim’s muffins and muffin-style donuts, which she featured in her self-published cookbook, The Great Imitator’s Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, Marysville, MI; October 1999, p. 31).
As seen in that book, here’s her copycat recipe (the main one, from which there are 3 variations) for “Muffins Like Tim Horton’s (Donuts Without Frying – Muffin Style)”. As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.
P.S. Food-for-thought until next Monday…
The month of April celebrates… National Month of Hope, Keep America Beautiful Month, Lawn and Garden Month, National Fresh Celery Month, National Garden Month, National Humor Month, National Soft Pretzel Month, National Soy Foods Month, National Poetry Month, National Pecan Month, National Volunteer Month, Scottish-American Heritage Month, Stress Awareness Month, National Records and Information Management Month, and more.
This week (19th-25th), being the third full week of April (for 2026), is… National Volunteer Week.
Today is also… National Cheddar Fries Day, National Lima Bean Respect Day, National Pineapple Upside Down Cake Day, and National Look Alike Day.
Tomorrow is… National Chocolate Covered Cashews Day and National Kindergarten Day.
Wednesday, April 22nd, is… National Earth Day, National Girl Scout Leader’s Day, National Jelly Bean Day.
April 23rd is… National Cherry Cheesecake Day, National Picnic Day, and National Take a Chance Day.
April 24th is… National Pigs in a Blanket Day. Plus, as the last Friday in April (for 2026), it’s also… National Arbor Day.
April 25th is… National DNA Day, National East Meets West Day, National Telephone Day, and National Zucchini Bread Day. Plus, as the last Saturday in April (for 2026), it’s also… National Kiss of Hope Day, National Pool Opening Day, National Rebuilding Day, and National Sense of Smell Day.
April 26th is… National Kids and Pets Day, National Pretzel Day, and National South Dakota Day. Plus, as the last Sunday in April (for 2026), it’s also… National Pet Parents Day.
Have a great week!
…16 down and 36 to go!
