Dot's Yellow Recipe Box

Not Dot's but close

When our Mom, Dot, died suddenly at 49, she left us the usual trinkets that get passed down from one generation to the next;  jewelery, china and plenty of neurotic baggage, but what Sissy and I really wanted was her simple  yellow plastic recipe box that was jammed  with her handwritten recipes for  beef stroganoff, pie crust and  apple kuchen.
 
Yet in the midst of the upheaval of losing our mom and the dysfunctional horrors that followed, Dot's yellow recipe box went missing.

It was a monster of a recipe box, an ugly neon yellow embossed treasure chest that a recipe club sent her as a gift because she got suckered into signing a ten year recipe contract. She tossed out their shiny recipe cards without ever trying them and began to fill that box with decades of  recipes, from German potato salad to French Chou pastry.  

With her large and fancy script, Dot wrote out her recipes with those gloriously scrolled  D's F's and G's, on index cards that were dotted with drips of oil, smudges of Crisco and butter. It wasn't organized in any particular order, just a haphazard collection of our family's culinary genealogy, a road map of hit and miss recipes,  with happy faces marked on the keepers and  frowns inked on the flops.

Dot was a fabulous cook and baker, a rare combination, who could whip up coq au vin and an apple tart without breaking a sweat. She'd roll out fresh pasta and hang them like tinsel over the kitchen chairs and even went through a canning stage (one season was enough for her), running to our local farm stand for boxes of ripe tomatoes. 

We watched Julia and Graham together, with Mom sitting on the couch, sipping eight o'clock coffee, scribbling the recipes as they flashed on the screen.

"How much mushrooms did they call for?" she'd yell.

We loved the Galloping Gourmet, his lilting accent, his infectious grin, his joy of cooking, plus it was so darn  novel for us to see a man actually cooking because the head of our household could only pour a bowl of Cheerios. 

Mom was  stoic stick figured gal who, during the slow and steamy summer which seemed to stretch for months, would cook in her one piece swimsuit and heels, with a glass of homemade iced tea and a Lucky Strike balanced on her Ruby Red lips. Come winter,  she'd be wrapped up in sweaters and slippers, with a mug of coffee or a whiskey sour as she padded through the kitchen, her glasses perched on her head, the recipes spread out over the counter, like she was orchestrating a battle.


Mom's apple pie was legendary, a six inch high  golden dome of flaky pastry bursting with syrupy apples and cinnamon. Her recipe was simple, just a few ingredients, some flour, Crisco and vinegar and salt, but it was a tricky bugger that didn't like to be fussed with.  She'd roll that dough into a perfect circle, gently picking it up and draping it over the glass pie plate, holding her breath. More often than not, the crust would crack and Mom would mutter and sigh and say she was going to find a new dough recipe but she never did. She'd fire up another Lucky, and start all over again. She'd make pinwheels out of the leftover pastry, sugary bite-sized gems that we'd pop down as fast as they'd come off the cookie sheet, burning our fingers and mouths as we raced to get our share. 

My Recipes

This recipe is a lost  treasure, along with hundreds of dishes that came to our table every night. I've tried dozens of pie crust recipes, even my Mom's namesake, Dorothy, from the Boston Globe, but they're never quite right. Never as light, never as flaky. And they always fall apart.

Though I wasn't a big fan of apple kuchen when I was a toe headed tot terrorizing the kitchen as my mother tried to cook dinner,  I've developed an obsession with it now and long for her recipe, a golden brown cake, smothered in a custard apple topping. Like my quest for my Mom's pie crust, I have trolled through cyberspace looking for a similar kuchen recipe, trying dozens of recipes, only to be disappointed.
 
I'd like to think that Mom's yellow recipe box found a new home somewhere, found a family that needed her recipes.  But if you happen to find a big yellow recipe box at a yard sale, take a peak inside. If you see a recipe for Dot's Pie Crust with a smiley face on the upper right corner, let me know.

We'd like to bring a bit of Mom home.