Because great recipes need to be shared!
PUNCH-A-TRAIN RAREBIT SAUCE
By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Eating Out at Home (National Home News, St. Clair, MI; September 1978, p. 22).
INGREDIENTS:
½ cup Pabst Blue Ribbon beer
1-lb sharp cheddar cheese, grated
2 TB butter
½ tsp dry mustard
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
A few grains of cayenne [pepper]
INSTRUCTIONS:
Cook [ingredients, as listed, in top of double boiler] over hot water, stirring until cheese is melted. Serve on hamburgers.
See also…
RUM SAUCE TOPPING
By Gloria Pitzer, as seen in… Secret Knock-Off Recipes (Secret RecipesTM, Marysville, MI; Nov 1996, p. 19)
INGREDIENTS:
1¼ cup apple juice
1 cup tea (hot or cold)
4 TB butter or margarine
2 TB cornstarch
1 tsp apple pie spice
2-oz dark or light rum
½ tsp molasses
INSTRUCTIONS:
Bring 1 cup of the juice and tea to boil. Turn heat to low and stir in butter or margarine. Keep on low heat while you put the remaining apple juice and cornstarch through blender, until smooth. Bring apple/tea mixture back to a boil just for 30 seconds, reducing heat at once while stirring in cornstarch mixture, plus apple pie spice, stirring well.
Continue to stir until thickened and smooth. Remove from heat. Add rum and molasses. Serve warm over sliced apple pie or Swedish Apple Pie. Makes enough for 6-8 servings.
See also…
Thank God Its Monday and, as such, #HappyMonday to everyone! Welcome to #MemoriesOfMyMom!
As I wrote last week, since 1987, March observes and celebrates National Women’s History Month – to honor women and their endeavors in making the world a better place for ALL women – regardless of their age, race, ethnicity, or religion.
Additionally, yesterday began the start of International Women’s Week. Plus, Wednesday is International Women’s Day. Thus there’s no better time, for me to re-tell Mom’s story about being the trailblazer who started the “copycat cookery” concept in the food industry.
There are so many famous women, who have had great influence and blazed the trail for other women, to recognize world-wide – Amelia Earhart, Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa, Madam Curie, Rosa Parks, Margaret Sanger, Princess Diana, Sandra Day O’Connor, Eleanor Roosevelt, “Rosie the Riveter”, Maya Angelou – and so on!
For some great stories about women’s history, check out History.com’s editors’ story, Famous Firsts In Women’s History (Updated: February 4, 2021), and 100 Women In History, by Jone Johnson Lewis (Updated: July 3, 2019).
I also want to celebrate “moms”! Most of what my mom knew in the kitchen, when she first started what became her “Secret RecipesTM” business, she had initially learned from her mom and mother-in-law (as well as an older sister and many aunts). I think, in most families, the moms are probably the greatest sources of inspiration and influence.
Aside from her family, Mom was also greatly inspired, throughout her life, by many other notably talented women – comedians, actresses, and writers like Carol Burnette, Mary Tyler Moore, and Lucille Ball probably top the list. Others include Erma Bombeck, Carol Duvall, Elsie Masterton, Peg Bracken, and Irma Rombauer; just to name a handful.
I’ve also mentioned more than a few times, in my blog posts, that one of the greatest influences, in Mom’s life as a writer, was the 1946 Warner Brothers film, Devotion, about the lives of the Bronte sisters (also notably talented women, to be recognized, as well). That’s from where Mom’s dedication to writing first blossomed – and it grew for over 70 years!
Mom was a “creative master” at whatever she attempted. I wish I had half of her talent. She wore so many hats in our family and in the “family enterprise”. In our family, Mom was the cook, maid, chauffer, doctor, seamstress, counselor, mentor, teacher, and more.
In her home-based business, Mom was the recipe developer, author, illustrator, layout creator, publicist, promotion specialist, public speaker/lecturer and (again) so much more! She was a “Wonder Woman”, who devoted every day to balancing all of it!
As a semi-modernized, yet somewhat old-fashioned housewife-turned-homemaker-turned-entrepreneur, during the 1970s, amidst the Women’s Lib Movement; Mom felt extremely blessed to be able to write (for a living) – and to be able to do it from home. She always said, she made a living with her writing, but it was her writing that made living worthwhile!
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES
As seen in…
No Laughing Matter, by Gloria Pitzer (circa 1970s)
JUST A HOUSEWIFE AND A PRO!
AS A ‘SUBURBAN HOUSEWIFE’, I fail to see how anyone could classify my routine as ‘dull’! For one thing, everyone knows that the mother of an active family has no routine! We’re lucky if we can get our slippers on the right feet first thing in the morning.
In fact, we’re lucky if we can even find those slippers, having to, first, plow through an undergrowth of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs on the way to the kitchen, where we must witness testy debates over who gets the [prize] in the box of [cereal] and why a 40-year-old man refuses to take the Donald Duck Thermos in his lunch…
What’s wrong with a quest for a roll of Scotch tape that’s your very own or having the phone ring and the call is for you instead of your teenager? [Margaret Mead’s] working definition [of a ‘first-class’ woman, not being a housewife or homemaker,] is a ‘trained, competent, professional woman’.
Now, I’d be the last one to contradict an expert, but in defense of women who become wives and mothers… we have had training (although much of it’s on the job), are extremely competent and are professional [according to Webster’s dictionary] in that we have ‘a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or skill’…
If you don’t think it takes learning or skill to varnish a complex-of-disorder with enough love and efficiency that husbands and children grow up with security and comfort, drop around my kitchen some Sunday night…
No matter what they tell us [working-outside-the-home homemakers] about turning our kids over to a day care center, there’s nothing like coming home from school to know that Mom’s in the kitchen, whipping up a pitcher of Tang and a plate of Twinkies.
The Women’s Civil Rights Movement [aka: “suffrage”] first gained, for women, the right to vote. However, it didn’t stop there. In fact, it evolved into more, advocating for even more equal rights.
Thus, National Women’s History Month also celebrates the triumphs of women’s rights activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, who lead the feminist movement, also known as Women’s Lib.
The WLM went on to fight for more rights and equality issues to which women were still denied, compared to men – like better job opportunities, equal treatment, fairer wages, advancement prospects, higher education opportunities, sex education, birth control, etc.
Before the Women’s Liberation Movement developed in the 1960s, cooking and cleaning were always deemed “woman’s work”, and it still is (though not as much) throughout most of the world. I actually love cooking and cleaning, myself. I feel accomplished and happy, in feeding others enjoyable food and keeping a clean home.
I always admired how much Mom took on, and balanced, between (what she deemed) her own homemaking and money-making responsibilities. The work of a homemaker is often taken for granted.
From my youngest memories, Mom almost always worked from home (or, when away, while we were in school). She was always able to harmonize her various jobs – those that paid her money and those that paid her in kisses and hugs from us.
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES
As seen in…
“No Laughing Matter”; a syndicated column by Gloria Pitzer
(date unknown; circ. 1970s)
GIVE ME LIBERTY OR…
WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to Women’s Lib, I don’t think they can help me. I think they’ve done enough for me already! Frankly, I think I was doing alright before they came along. At least I could get a seat on a bus. Now I’m lucky if a man will offer to hold my packages for me.
I can also remember when cutting the grass was considered “man’s work”. These days my husband flips me two-out-of-three to see which of us gets the lawn mower and who will fix the iced tea and sit on the patio chair to watch.
Last week, I was visited by a new militant group of women in our neighborhood who are protesting the proposed 4-day work week for MEN. They advocated a simple test. If you cannot get through a two-week vacation and the Christmas holidays with a man who over-waters your house plants and alphabetizes your refrigerator then how can you get through a three-day weekend, 52 weeks out of the year?
For you must then decide if you have to run the sweeper [aka: vacuum] while he’s taking a nap, or does he have to take a nap while you’re running the sweeper. Arguing with a husband (especially when he’s your own), is like taking a shower/bath in a scuba outfit. But I have a theory!
There are some things in this liberated life, which a woman just cannot control. You have tasted instant failure when neither of you can agree on who gets custody of the only controls on the electric blanket; and if it’s fair that she who makes the garbage must also carry it out; and whose mother calls more – yours or his?
This is the same man who warned me not to go into labor on his bowling night and who, on Christmas, gave me a monogrammed tool box and a gift certificate from Sunoco for an oil change and lube job, and a can of Easy-Off in my stocking.
The liberating females of our society have missed the joy of knowing what it means to live with a man who claims he’s always out of socks, but YOU know there are two more pairs in the drawer and [of course] only YOU can find them!
Most husbands are generally quite liberal with their wives in spite of the ‘Lib Movement’… I’ll have you know that my husband has always allowed me to make all sorts of important decisions – like: ‘Does that child need a nap?’ ‘Should that baby have her pants changed?’ ‘Do you really need another new pant suit?’ ‘Must your mother call here every day?’ ‘Should we recognize Red China?’ ‘Will they find Howard Hughes?’
The only liberation I want is to get away from the kids once in a while, without having the school counselor label me as a parent who doesn’t care. When you cannot free yourself from the oven encased in molten lasagna and apple pie fossils, you know that liberation is but a piper’s dream in your soap opera saga.
On the other hand, my husband takes a realistic approach to my emancipation. He claims women have never had it so good… (What does HE know?) His trying to tell me about women’s rights is like trying to tell General Eisenhower about World War II. However, I look at it this way: ‘Either give me liberty… OR GIVE ME A CLEANING LADY!’
LAST THOUGHTS…
In one of Mom’s “No Laughing Matter” columns, from the 1970s (not sure what date it was actually published in the papers, where it was syndicated), called ‘Where Have All Our Homemakers Gone?’, she wrote:
‘The full-time homemaker is, unfortunately, being short-changed by today’s ‘paycheck-oriented’ society and, if Women’s Lib have their own way, ‘homemaker’ will be a 4-letter word… the women who, either by choice or by circumstance, make a career out of making a home.’
It’s been 50 years since the Women’s Liberation Movement developed. I’m constantly amazed at the timelessness of the issues about which Mom wrote. The old adage is true – “the more things change, the more they stay the same!”
IN CLOSING…
In honor of March, being National Sauce Month, here’s Mom’s copycat recipe for “Punch-A-Train Rarebit Sauce”; as seen in her self-published cookbook… Eating Out at Home (National Home News, St. Clair, MI; September 1978, p. 22).
P.S. Food-for-thought until we meet again, next Monday…
March celebrates, among other things… Irish-American Heritage Month, National Caffeine Awareness Month, National Celery Month, National Craft Month, National Flour Month!
Also being observed this week is… National Procrastination Week [which is the first two weeks in March (1st-14th or 5th-18th, for 2023) or whenever it’s convenient], National Words Matter Week, and Read An e-Book Week (all, 5th-11th for 2023).
Today is… National Frozen Food Day, National Oreo Cookie Day, and National White Chocolate Cheesecake Day!
Tomorrow is… National Flapjack Day, National Cereal Day, and National Crown of Roast Pork Day!
Wednesday, March 8th is… National Oregon Day, National Peanut Cluster Day, and National Proofreading Day!
Thursday, March 9th is… National Crabmeat Day, National Get Over it Day, and National Meatball Day!
Friday, March 10th is… National Blueberry Popover Day and National Pack Your Lunch Day!
Saturday, March 11th is… National Johnny Appleseed Day and National Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day!
March 12th is… National Baked Scallops Day, National Plant a Flower Day, and National Girl Scout Day, which is also the start of Girl Scout Week (for 2023)! Plus, as the second Sunday in March (for 2023), it’s also… National Daylight Saving Time Day – spring forward! Additionally, on this day…
…10 down and 42 to go!
Happy Monday and happy March to all! Every week, I look forward to Mondays because they’re my 52 Chances each year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with all of you!
March is Maple Sugaring Month! It’s not an official, national observance; however, making maple sugar and syrup is a big event that Michiganders enjoy, along with other mid-west and eastern states. Unfortunately, the proverbial sugaring window is only open for a short period of time (4-6 weeks).
Sugaring is a process of collecting maple sap and boiling it down into a sugar and/or syrup form. [NOTE: This is NOT the hair-removal process by the same name!] As the official start of spring gets closer, the nights are staying at or below the “freezing point”, while the days are warming-up to about 40°F or so. [That’s warm to Michiganders in March!] These are the ideal conditions required for the maple sap to flow well.
Once the trees start to bud, the sap is no-longer good for sugaring and the season is done. A few years ago, on my local morning news show, there was a great segment by Jill Washburn [aka: “Jill Of All Trades” (March 26, 2019)] about collecting maple tree sap; plus, a simple way to cook down a small batch (2 gallons) for a day or so in a slow cooker, until it renders a thick syrup. I highly recommend watching it!
Two gallons of sap only yields about a half cup of syrup, when all’s done, but there’s such a great feeling of accomplishment in being able to say, “I made it, myself!” Jill Washburn used to do a lot of these wonderful “how to” segments on my local news show. I miss them – she has a great way of making everything seem so easy and simple.
There’s also a terrific article about the longer, traditional method of sugaring that I recommend reading, at the Michigan State University’s Extension’s website, called March Is Maple Syrup Season In Michigan.
FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
The Secrets of Homemade Groceries (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Sep. 1979, p. 1)
ABUNDANCE
MANY PEOPLE FEEL THAT life is uphill all the way. They fail to look at the things that are good, enjoyable, and worthwhile. They are conscience only of the climb. No road is ever uphill forever! We should soon learn the importance of being able to also come downhill without fear and be able to notice the scenery along the road, too.
Going through life without noticing the scenery and trying to see some of the beauty that is there – waiting to be recognized – reminds me of running helter-skelter up and down the supermarket aisles without seeing the ABUNDANCE that is there.
Just take a moment to look at the heart-breaking plight of starving people in many parts of the world and, then, take a good look at the aisles and aisles of food available in this country! We have so much available to us here…many people fill their backyards each spring with flowers and shrubs, when they could easily plant food-seeds instead, thus cutting something off that weekly grocery bill!
Mom wrote, illustrated and self-published about 40 books (+/-) and penned hundreds of her own newsletter issues. Equally as well, she also wrote and syndicated thousands of columns across the country and for local newspapers during her long writing career.
However, Mom is best known for pioneering the copycat recipes movement back in the early 1970s! When times were tough and we were on the edge of another recession, Mom created the concept of “eating out at home”! It was not only for her own struggling family, but also, for all the others for whom she knew were struggling and looking for answers too!
One of my own personal favorites is called The Secrets of Homemade Groceries (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Sep. 1979). This book is no longer in print, but I’ve seen used copies on eBay and Amazon. This book taught me how to make some grocery products at home, and how to stretch/extend other products, saving me quite a bit of money on my monthly groceries expense!
MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…
As seen in…
The Secrets of Homemade Groceries (Secret Recipes, St. Clair, MI; Sep. 1979, p. 4)
THE GOOD OLD DAYS’ GROCERIES
SUPERMARKETS AND GROCERIES have come a long way in 80 years – but, perhaps, it hasn’t all been that wonderful, considering that food continues to increase in cost and quality is being sacrificed for production, promotion, and distribution overhead [costs]. We are not only paying more for the packaging but also for the advertising of a product – more than we are for the item, itself…
BASIC PANTRY FOODS
We can begin making homemade groceries by taking a personal inventory of what our particular preference is when [we] shop for groceries. If you buy quite a few boxed mixes, your food bill is probably 40% higher than it would be if you made your own.
Most of the popular food mixes on the modern-day market are kissing cousins of the same family, beginning with powders that can withstand a short shelf-life or be refrigerated for a longer period and frozen up to a year.
A freezer will be like a family bank vault, in keeping homemade groceries at a savings; and it should be used just as a bank account would be used, making regular deposits toward a future time when the withdrawal is appreciated and needed.
There are so many groceries that you can make at home – especially if you plant the seeds and grow it, yourself! In the past few years, homesteading has found a new revival movement, as health and wellness are coming back to the top of the fundamental “priorities list”.
More and more people are regaining interest in making their own food and OTC health and beauty products. Many even starting new online businesses to sell their homemade products to those who don’t have the time or talents for it, themselves. Of course, nowadays, with the internet, we can order just about anything we want, from just about anywhere, and have it all delivered to our doorsteps! But, sometimes, homemade is just better.
Additionally, there’s also a renewed movement to make a lot of things at home because stores are struggling to keep shelves stocked, due to supply chain problems. Another major reason for making your own mixes and such is that you can control the ingredients and save money, too – that is, as long as you don’t add the value of your time into the equation!
That is, basically, what first inspired Mom to create her copycat concept. Like I mentioned the other week, it was my Grandma Pitzer who first taught Mom about going back to the homemade ingredients concept, in order to save money in the household food budget.
LAST THOUGHTS…
Since it’s also National Flour Month, here’s a re-share of Mom’s imitations for homemade griddlecakes AND syrup (without sugaring) like she once had at a Pancake House.
IN CLOSING…
In honor of March, being National Sauce Month, here is Mom’s secret recipe for Rum Sauce; as seen in her self-published cookbook, Secret Knock-Off Recipes (Secret RecipesTM, Marysville, MI; June 1997, p. 19).
P.S. Food-for-thought until we meet again, next Monday…
March observes, among other things… Irish-American Heritage Month, National Caffeine Awareness Month, National Celery Month, National Craft Month, and National Women’s History Month!
Additionally, National Procrastination Week is the first two weeks in March, which is either the 1st-14th OR the 6th-19th (if it’s the first two FULL weeks)! Basically, you can put this observance off until whenever it’s convenient for you! Other week-long observances, for this 2nd full week in March, include National Girl Scout Week, National Words Matter Week, International Women’s Week, and National Read an E-Book Week! Speaking of which…
Today is also… National Flapjack Day, National Be Heard Day, National Cereal Day, and National Crown of Roast Pork Day!
Tomorrow is… International Women’s Day, National Oregon Day, National Peanut Cluster Day, and National Proofreading Day!
Wednesday, March 9th is… National Barbie Day, National Crabmeat Day, National Get Over it Day, and National Meatball Day! In honor of the latter, here’s a re-share of Mom’s imitation for Wind Shooter’s Meatballs!
Thursday, March 10th is… National Blueberry Popover Day and National Pack Your Lunch Day!
Friday, March 11th is… National Johnny Appleseed Day and National Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day!
Saturday, March 12th is… National Baked Scallops Day, National Girl Scout Day, and National Plant a Flower Day!
[NOTE: Mar. 12, 1991 – is also the anniversary of a story in Woman’s World, by Una McManus, about Mom, being the Recipe DetectiveTM.]
March 13th is… National Good Samaritan Day, National Coconut Torte Day, and National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day! Plus, as the second Sunday in March (for 2022), it’s also… Daylight Saving Time Day!
…10 down and 42 to go!