By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… The Joy Of NOT Cooking – Any More Than You Have To (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Nov. 1983, p. 148)
INGREDIENTS:
14-oz can Sweetened Condensed Milk
¼ cup lemon juice
¼ cup light vinegar
1 tsp bottled [or fresh] grated lemon peel
3 raw egg yolks
Baked & cooled 9” pie shell
INSTRUCTIONS:
Combine first five ingredients listed, beating with an electric mixer on medium speed, until smooth. Pour into pie shell and chill for several hours before cutting to serve 6. Garnish slice with crushed pecans or walnuts or chopped Maraschino cherries.
By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – Best Of The Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 251). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
When you visited a Chuck Muer restaurant, this was their desert specialty. It’s much like the pie served at Win Schuler’s restaurant. So, depending on where you would like to be at the time you prepare this, have it a-la-Muer’s or a-la-Schuler’s!
When I was invited into the kitchen of Chuck Muer’s River Crab restaurant (St. Clair, MI) to observe them preparing some of their dishes, I made a mental note to try this pie at home. With a great deal of work on the exact proportions for making only one pie, while they made up to 15 or 20 at a time, it was indeed a challenge! But this is my version of it – and it is almost as good!
INGREDIENTS:
Half of a 1-pound bag of large marshmallows
¼ cup milk
1/3 cup Crème De Menthe liqueur
¼ cup Crème De Cacao liqueur
20 Oreo (cream-filled sandwich) cookies
1 envelope, unflavored, gelatin powder
6 tablespoons melted butter
8 ounces heavy whipping cream
INSTRUCTIONS:
Melt the marshmallows with milk in a sauce pan over low to medium heat until smooth, stirring constantly. When completely melted, remove from heat. Stir in [both] liqueurs and refrigerate the mixture until completely cooled. Meanwhile, crush cookies to fine crumbs. Mix well with gelatin powder and melted butter.
Pat evenly over bottom and sides of a buttered 10-inch Pyrex pie plate and chill. Remove the marshmallow mixture from the refrigerator to a medium-sized mixing bowl. In a smaller bowl, beat heavy whipping cream until it holds its shape. Fold it into the marshmallow mixture, using low speed of electric mixer, just to blend thoroughly.
Pile it neatly into the chilled Oreo crust. Garnish top with ½ cup more crushed Oreo cookies and return it to the refrigerator to chill for several hours or until firm enough to cut into 6 to 8 serving pieces. Keep pie refrigerated until served, up to a week. Freezes well up to 3 months.
Today is, among other things, one of the biggest virtual shopping days of the year, otherwise known as Cyber Monday. It was officially named so by the National Retail Federation in 2005. Since early this century, continuous increases in online shopping, over the years, have caused a ripple effect of brick-and-mortar stores and malls having to close their doors.
After the Covid-19 pandemic started a couple of years ago, online shopping has soared. Cyber Monday sales are far surpassing Black Friday’s sales, by leaps and bounds. Virtual shopping has become so much more commonplace, now – especially with the younger generations.
I’ve noticed, this year, a lot of brick-and-mortar stores have been offering extremely early “Black Friday deals” to compete with online sales campaigns like “Prime Day”, “Cyber Monday”, and the like. I feel bad for them. I prefer shopping in person, myself. Besides, there have been more and more warnings on my local news programs for “buyers beware”, as scams are everywhere in cyber-land.
Regardless, virtual stores are competing on the world-wide web for everyone’s hard-earned dollars; offering rock-bottom, price-cut deals and fast or free shipping. These days, with inflation and the cost of fuel, shipping can be a deal maker or breaker on many online purchases.
Traditionally, since about the 1950s, Black Friday has been the highpoint of holiday shopping, when shoppers physically went out to the brick-and-mortar stores for the all-time-best deals of the year. Extreme shoppers have waited in lines outside of stores for hours (even days) before they opened for their “special” Black Friday deals.
However, the trend is changing, now. Due to the ever increasing online shopping, over the past couple decades, we’ve witnessed the closings of many small shops, department stores, and malls across America. It’s a new “Amazon era” for online shopping and home delivery. Unfortunately, brick-and-mortar retailers are becoming relics of the past.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, p. 108)
SMALL BUSINESSES DISAPPEARING – THE CLOWN SHOP IS GONE!
IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE to change things, yet I noticed this morning, for the first time, that the clown shop in the mall is gone – vacated, empty. I kept meaning to go there, but in the year or two that it was there, time passed, and I never did. It must’ve been a wonderfully unique shop – operated by a retired circus clown, from what I’ve been told.
Yet, I put off stopping in to see what gifts [and] what fun he had to offer. My husband was in the shop perhaps a few times. He even bought me a little clown statue for my birthday last January [1988] and the thimble shaped like a clown for our niece in California. I was going to stop into the shop soon. I really was.
Now that the shop is gone, I feel personally responsible for the loss. And, of course, multiply me by a few hundred folks in town, too, who could have stopped but didn’t, even though they meant to. We’re all to blame for the loss.
Of course, the shop was located on the ‘street side’ of the mall, too, rather than in the concourse, so it would have to be a special trip around the buildings to get me there. But now that I think about it, I’m saddened by the prospect that my not patronizing the shop contributed to its going out of business.
Certainly, we need clowns in this life. And while my feet are usually anchored firmly in reality, I feel a great need for stepping often into the light-hearted dimension of the whimsical, the amusing, the ridiculous. There comes a time, each day, when the sadness of the tragedies in the worldly arena seem just too much to bear, too much to accept.
The newscasts of radio and television hammer away hourly, repeatedly at whatever catastrophe has occurred recently. There seem to be no good reports of what’s going on in the world. I know there is good. We just don’t hear too much to cheer us though.
The clown shop could easily have provided something to lighten the gloom, lifting the shade to see beyond hardship and unhappiness. But it looks as if people are becoming hardened to the beauty of simplicity and humor. It looks as if they’re growing paranoid instead about their priorities, about cholesterol, sodium, the sun’s rays (which we used to call ‘sunshine’), about how much they should weigh and how long they will live.
More human energy seems to be spent desperately worrying about the uncertainties of the future than is used to enjoy the simple beauty of our NOW! Our precious ‘now’ should hold more than fear. It should instead hold wholesome fun and the expectancy of good.
The interest in outsiders and people with marginal lives is rooted in my own sense of self as I look for the erasers of the gloom, diversions from the serious and the morbid. By no means do I imply that gloom and seriousness and what is morbid should be ignored.
It should be a must be dealt with, but it should require more of our attention than does the lovely, the light-hearted, the lively in life. I could have found some little offering of fun in the clown shop. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you. [Cry] and you [cry] alone.’ [Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Solitude (1883)]
If I cry, it is because I know it was there – like a lot of life’s jewels at our feet. I just didn’t do anything about it. If I get another opportunity to patronize a good and wholesome thing, like the clown shop, I will. I promise I will – even though the clown shop is gone.
When I was a young teen, Mom used to take me and my sisters to Lakeside Mall. Back then, that was the popular place to shop, with its big, anchor, department stores like Sears, Macy’s, J.C. Penny’s and J.L. Hudson’s. It was an all-day shopping and working event.
Mom gave each of us girls a handful of her business cards to stick in the pockets of various clothes and purse displays, while we shopped. She developed this innovative way to advertise, locally, after hearing an inspiring interview of an award winning car salesman from Detroit. By the way, National Salesperson Day is on Friday of next week (for 2022)!
After a few hours of shopping and marketing, Mom treated us to lunch at one of the department stores’ dining rooms, where she usually found more great dishes to imitate at home. You can’t do that when you shop virtually. There aren’t any interactions with other people – no smiles, no conversations, etc. – I miss those days, at the mall, with Mom.
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
This is not a Cook Book! It’s Gloria Pitzer’s Food for Thought (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Oct. 1986, p. 43)
YOU’VE MADE A FRIEND
A SMILE IS the universal, unspoken language between us. Some people smile more easily than others, but a smile is as good as a hug. I just LOVE people who smile a lot! Even when I’m shopping or [when Paul and I are] walking around the campgrounds on one of our abbreviated ‘get-aways’ with our motorhome, I find myself smiling at people I have never seen before, and they smile back. It’s contagious!
People don’t smile as much as they should! I’ve noticed lately how seldom strangers smile at each other in shopping centers and restaurants and other places where average folks mingle or pass. It occurred to me that there was nothing to lose by smiling and nodding at people as I shopped or glanced across a restaurant to other tables.
A surprising thing happened! Grim looking faces spontaneously responded with smiles and nods, as if they were trying to place me or recall where we might have met before. It was just wonderful!
LAST THOUGHTS…
Did you know that synonyms for “cyber” include replicate and imitate? I find it ironic that Mom, the ORIGINAL recipe replicator, never learned how to use the internet to replicate and expand her mail-order business in the new millennium’s digital era.
Early in the new millennium, Mom bought a computer and tried to learn how to operate it, but it proved to be too over-whelming for her to comprehend. She felt so stressed from it, she ended up giving her new computer to one of her grandchildren, instead.
In August 2008, my brother, Mike, created the TheRecipeDetective.com’s original website for Mom and Dad’s business. It was a new platform from which they could promote their current Secret RecipesTM offerings and give out free recipes too, as Mom traditionally had done from the beginning.
Since Mom and Dad knew nothing about technology, Mike created and managed the website for them for 10 years. They were so grateful for his help in that area! The summer after Mom passed away, I wanted to start writing this blog about her being the ORIGINAL “Secret Recipe Detective”. I asked Mike if I could put my blog on the website that he was still managing. Instead, he transferred the domain to me. For that, I am forever grateful to him, too!
In honor of Thursday, being National Pie Day, here’s TWO of Mom’s copycat pie recipes. The first one is for Grasshopper Pie, like Michigan’s famous Chuck Muer’s and Win Schuler’s restaurants once served; as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 251). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)].
This second pie recipe of Mom’s was first printed in her self-published cookbook, Top Secret Recipes a la Carte (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Sept. 1979). It’s called Vinegar Pie, from our northern, mid-west roots. Mom updated the recipe and reprinted it in her self-published cookbook, The Joy Of NOT Cooking – Any More Than You Have To (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Nov. 1983, p. 148).
Happy Cyber Monday! Personally, I always look forward to every Monday because they are my 52 Chances each year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with all of you!
Today is, among other things, Cyber Monday, which is always the Monday after Thanksgiving. “Cyber Monday” was officially named so by the NRF (National Retail Federation) in 2005, when consumers had noticeably increased shopping online; particularly at work, after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Ironically, the virtual shopping tradition was initially conceived by retailers to encourage people to shop online for what they wanted when they couldn’t find it at their local brick-and-mortar stores or couldn’t even get to the actual stores at all, due to other responsibilities, such as work.
Since early in the new millennium, the increase in online shopping has been causing a falling Dominos effect on many stores and malls across America. Consequently, store and mall owners have been forced to close their brick-and-mortar doors permanently – and at alarming rates.
The large department store chains that “anchored” the malls, like Sears, JC Penny’s, and Macy’s, started depleting first. With the advancements made in the world-wide web, the way of shopping and peoples’ needs and wants had, once again, evolved – a new generation of “convenience” cyber shopping was embraced, especially among teens and young adults.
According to DepartmentStoreHistory.net, “The three biggest department stores in the mid-1960s, both in sales volume and physical size, were Macy’s, Hudson’s, and Marshall Field, in that order.” It’s no wonder they were commonly used for mall anchors nationwide.
Austrian architect, Victor Gruen, designed the first fully enclosed, American mall. The Southdale Center, in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota, opened in 1956. Most of the smaller storefronts faced inward, while large “anchor” stores (i.e. JC Penny’s, Macy’s, Sears and others) were placed at each end, attracting shoppers and creating foot traffic to the smaller stores in between.
Inside the mall, Gruen created a European-style central court area with an aviary, sculptures, and an open-air-style café. The mall was an island, surrounded by a sea of parking places designed to accommodate the masses. It was also designed to provide local employment and economic growth to the area.
By 1960, there were 4,500 malls nationwide. They were built to house dozens (even hundreds) of retail stores and restaurants in one conglomeration. They were envisioned for the middle-class consumers’ socializing and shopping conveniences. Even in ancient Greece, societies tended to congregate in central marketplaces.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, p. 43)
MARKETING INSPIRATION
To make the mimeograph pay for itself, I even printed up my own business cards on it, using dime-store construction paper and then cutting the cards apart with scissors until I had neat little stacks of about 50 and a total of 200 or 300 cards. These I distributed at the mall whenever and wherever we might be in one. Paul did not know I was doing this, at first, either, or he would’ve disapproved.
It was unprofessional and risky, but I thought anything was worth a try and what I could do ‘quietly’ until I could prove it was either a mistake or a benefit, would have to be my little secret. Well, actually, the kids were a part of that secret too.
I had heard an interview on TV or radio with ‘the world’s most successful salesman’, who was a Chevrolet salesman in Detroit and who believed heartily in business cards, placing them everywhere and anywhere that it was allowed.
From his story, I found it was easy to drop my card into the pocket of a bathrobe in the ladies’ wear [areas] in the department stores and in the purses and tote bags, on public phone booth stands, [in] restaurant restrooms, even in cookbooks in the bookstores. From these, you’d be surprised, we DID hear from people who wanted to know about my recipes, which was the first experience I had with public response.
By the 1980s, American malls were thriving, out-shining “Main Street”, and taking over pop culture. But, like other rising sensations, this one wasn’t going to last either. Between the rise of online shopping and the setback of the recession in 2008, there was a significant drop in sales and foot traffic at big-brand retailers and malls, alike.
Around 2010, consumers began turning in larger numbers to Amazon and other online retailers. The steep, nationwide drop in sales for brick-and-mortar stores has been accelerating in recent years, but the pandemic put their decline into overdrive.
The entire district has been devastated as consumers have lost the habit of shopping and browsing in person, while the Covid-19 pandemic and related shut-downs have just about hammered the last nails in the shopping mall’s coffin. Except that people are itching to get out again, making it appear that malls are being resurrected. But stores are still struggling, and malls are not as full as they used to be.
According to The Week’s staff article, The ‘Retail Apocalypse’ (Aug. 7, 2021), “Roughly 40 percent of the nation’s department stores have closed since 2016, including every Lord & Taylor store and nearly all Sears and Kmart stores. Neiman Marcus and J.C. Penney have filed for bankruptcy; Macy’s has shuttered dozens of stores and will close 125 more by 2023.”
Because of the internet, the way people socialize has also evolved, just like their shopping customs. For many decades, malls were more than just shopping and dining hubs. They were the new public squares and market places for social gatherings of average, middle-class Americans.
I think malls are memory-makers! I remember when Lakeside Mall opened in 1976 in Sterling Heights (MI). Mom took me and my sisters there on the weekends to shop and eat, as well as help her advertise her newsletter and cookbooks – a story I’ve mentioned in some of my other blog posts.
It was so exciting to ride up and down in the glass elevator that overlooked the beautiful, 3-sided, waterfall fountain. I loved getting to toss a coin into the fountain and making a wish. I remember getting my ears pierced, there, for my 12th birthday, too!
I also remember taking my own children to the “new” Birchwood Mall, in Fort Gratiot Twp. (MI) in the 1990s, for entertainment. We had play-dates and lunched near the carousel. Sometimes we went to the movies or did some shopping. We usually got our annual family pictures taken at one of its anchor stores, like Sears or JC Penny’s, to include in our Christmas cards for family members and close friends.
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
This is not a Cook Book! It’s Gloria Pitzer’s Food for Thought (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Oct. 1986, p. 43)
YOU’VE MADE A FRIEND
A SMILE IS the universal, unspoken language between us. Some people smile more easily than others, but a smile is as good as a hug. I just LOVE people who smile a lot! Even when I’m shopping or [when Paul and I are] walking around the campgrounds on one of our abbreviated ‘get-aways’ with our motorhome, I find myself smiling at people I have never seen before, and they smile back. It’s contagious!
People don’t smile as much as they should! I’ve noticed lately how seldom strangers smile at each other in shopping centers and restaurants and other places where average folks mingle or pass. It occurred to me that there was nothing to lose by smiling and nodding at people as I shopped or glanced across a restaurant to other tables.
A surprising thing happened! Grim looking faces spontaneously responded with smiles and nods, as if they were trying to place me or recall where we might have met before. It was just wonderful!
LAST THOUGHTS…
These days, everything – even socializing – is being done online more than in person, just like shopping. Unfortunately, for the brick-and-mortar retailers, the ease and expediency of online shopping caught on quicker than anyone anticipated, increasing its popularity considerably over that of hands-on, in-person shopping.
Josh Sanburn wrote in his article, ‘Why the Death of Malls Is About More Than Shopping’ (July 20, 2017), “Malls were designed for leisure, abundance, ambling. You parked and planned to spend some time. Today, much of that time has been given over to busier lives and second jobs and apps that let you swipe right instead of haunt the food court.”
‘Malls were built for patterns of social interaction that increasingly don’t exist.’ – Leonard Schlesinger, Business Professor at Harvard University
Since department store and mall eateries are just another niche in the vast food industry from which Mom found inspiration in imitating “famous foods from famous places” and since this is still Spinach and Squash Month, here is Mom’s copycat recipe for imitating Hudson’s Spinach Pie; as seen in her cookbook… The Original 200 Plus Secret RecipesTM Book (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; June 1997, p. 17).
December 4th is… National Dice Day, National Sock Day, and National Rhubarb Vodka Day(which is always the first Saturday in December)! Plus, as the first Saturday of the month, it’s also… National Play Outside Day! Plus, in honor of Saturday, also being National Cookie Day, here’s a re-share of Mom’s imitation of Wally Amos’ famous cookies; which appeared on her “Free Recipes/Information” sheets that she used to give out in exchange for a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
