Thursday, May 31, 2012

Found recipes: zucchini, corn and tomatoes & brownie mounds


Late last year, my wife and I were checking out The Biggest “Little” Flea Market in Hallam, Pennsylvania, when I came across a great find for Papergreat: A plastic box that was absolutely packed with recipes -- some handwritten, some clipped, and all well-loved and often-used. This had been someone's lifelong collection and now it was for sale on a table in flea market. For a buck.

It's filled with all kinds of treasures, and I'll share a couple here today. First up is a recipe for a vegetable dish of zucchini, corn and tomatoes. As a bonus, it's written out on an old sheet of notepaper from The York Dispatch.1 The Dispatch is afternoon competitor of the news organization I currently work for in this two-newspaper town. But I worked for the Dispatch, too, many moons ago.2 So I think it's pretty cool to stumble across this old piece of its history (notice the phone number).

Here's the recipe from that notepad sheet:

Zucchini, Corn & Tomatoes
2 lbs. zucchini - sliced
¼ cup butter
½ cup sliced onions
1¾ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon oregano
3 med. tomatoes, sliced thin
1 can whole kernel corn


In hot butter sauté onion - add zucchini, salt, pepper and oregano. Cover & simmer about 15 min. Add tomatoes - cook uncovered 5 min. longer. Add corn and heat through. Serves 6-8.

And here's a recipe for a dessert, which is rated as "Good!" on the index card it was written on:

Brownie Mounds
Sift 3⅓ cups sifted flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder & ½ teaspoon salt. Mix ⅔ cups margarine and 1½ cups sugar. Stir in ⅔ cup Karo light corn syrup and 2 eggs. Stir in the flour 6 (1 oz.) squares melted unsweetened chocolate, 2 teaspoons vanilla and 1½ cups chopped nuts. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350° 10 to 12 min.

If you try the Brownie Mounds recipe, feel free to send some my way!

And if there are any ephemeral recipes you're looking for, as we head into the summer months (sandwiches, desserts, barbecue, things in Jell-O) please let me know and I'll dive into this little yellow box and try to find something for you. We can keep circulating the collected recipes of this unknown York County resident.

Read Part 2 of this post

Footnotes
1. Notepaper! That means this post qualifies to be included in the much-neglected From the Notepad category, which hasn't had a new post since August 2011.
2. I was a copy editor at the Dispatch from 1995 to 1997. I've been at the York Daily Record/Sunday News since 2000. In between, I was Down South.

3 comments:

  1. One of my favorite "Twitter-ers" tests vintage recipes often.
    She also photographs her husband's reactions to her culinary experiments and he cracks me up neary evey time with his facial expressions :) http://www.midcenturymenu.com/

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  2. Thanks so much for sharing this. Recipes are so important to a family history archive. Did any of the recipes give you a clue to who the original owner was?

    --Gena

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  3. My mother passed away leaving such a collection of recipes and I can assure you none will ever end up in such a sale. Gena is correct--such collections are as important to family history as the furniture, the house, the photos left behind.
    Jo

    ReplyDelete