Weesie's Cookbook - Chop Suey Edition

Last June my family made a decision to remove my grandmother, Louise's (aka "Aunt Weesie") feeding tube.  It wasn't such a hard decision; she'd had a long, productive life, but had spent the last five years blind, in a nursing home and slowly sliding into dementia before a stroke put her into a comatose, paralyzed state.

Not surprisingly, her decline, and "Weesie’s Cookbook" both began with a diagnosis, in the late 90’s, of macular degeneration. As it turned out, it progressed rather rapidly and in another three years, she was completely blind and considered herself to be what she most feared - "a burden".  We, of course, didn't really see it that way, but how can one argue with grandma?

In her mid-80s at the time of the diagnosis, my grandmother wasn't terribly hip to the ways of technology, but she'd heard somewhere that "those computer things" could change font sizes, and so in November of 1998 I found myself talking on the phone to my sister.

Follow our conversation after the jump:

"Grandma asked me the other day if we could type some of her favorite recipes into 'that computer thing' and print them off in big type for her, so she can read them."

We both chuckled at that a little bit.  My sister lived close by, but Grandma was still living alone at the time (two years later we moved her to my parents' hometown and into an assisted living apartment two blocks from their house) and could still see well-enough to take care of her house, so long as someone drove her to do her shopping, and so long as no one looked too closely into the corners and under the furniture.  

New recipes that she wanted to try - that we could understand.  But we found it humorous that she felt like she needed her "favorite" recipes to be printed out in large-type, because as the long-acknowledged "best cook" in a large, extended family of great cooks, we'd never seen her actually use a recipe for any of her old family favorites.  If they were complex recipes - pies, cakes, frostings, etc. , she'd memorized them long ago; if they were simple recipes - "Would you like chop suey for supper, honey?"; "Shall we have biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast?" - she utilzed handfuls here, pinches there, and a smidge of that.

"So," my sister asked.  "Can you bring your laptop at Christmas?"

Christmas, for a good many years, had been held by gathering at Grandma's.  And I was in a PhD program in Texas, and had early made the transition from depending on a desktop to carrying a laptop.

"Sure, I can bring it.  Tell'er to start thinking about which recipes she'll want us to print out.  We can save them on a disk and take it to Kinkos to print them out."

And so we did.  But she didn't.

As the family gathered for Christmas and our grandmother bustled, half-blind, around her kitchen, still insisting on doing the cooking for everyone, she just didn't have time to sit down with her boxes of recipes with magnifying glass to sort them.  So, over the course of several days, we set my laptop up on the kitchen table and, while she bustled, we tag-teamed it; sorting through one old-fashioned recipe box and three shoe boxes.

"Do you want the mayonnaise cake recipe, Grandma?"

"Oh, yes, honey!  I remember how Louie (our grandfather, dead since 1972) loved that mayonnaise cake!  Yes, I've got to have that one!"

"Grandma, there's this letter from Greatma - looks like it's addressed to you when you and Grandpa were living in Denver (circa 1950s & 60s) - it has an "easy chili" recipe.  What about that?"

"Oh, your Greatma knew how Louie loved chili; I don't remember that recipe or that letter, but you should copy it out for me - I might want to make it.  Have I ever told you the story of how your Greatma (Grandma's mother) hated your Grandpa and forbid me to marry him?  And how mad she was at me when she found out we'd eloped?  I was still livin' at home while he was off to bootcamp (WW II) and I started to show!  She was so mad!  She didn't kick me out, but she made him start payin' my keep!  But she came to love him like her own son.  Thought he was the only one of her sons-in-law worth anything.  He sure won her over."

And so it went.  We'd pull out a recipe; something scribbled on the back of an envelope; a magazine clipping decades old; faded, yellow recipe cards as old as the 1930s.  We'd ask, she'd reminisce.  It took us only half an hour or so to realize that we weren't going to be limiting ourselves to printing out some of our Grandmother's favorite recipes in large print, so she could read them and try to maintain her independence for just a little longer.

It became clear to us, that Christmas of 1998, that we were going to write our Grandma's cookbook.  My sister and I are both proficient typists, so we'd pull a recipe and ask "what is this?"  Many of them came from other family members, especially her sisters, and she was good about making note of who they came from before storing them in her shoeboxes.  

As she reimnisced, we typed furiously, getting down the associated story, whenever there was one.  And then we'd type in the recipe before pulling out the next.  Thankfully for us, she didn't have a story with every recipe, and out of those four boxes, there were plenty she didn't really want.

We didn't let her know what we were doing though.  We decided it would be our little secret; that we'd write her cookbook, format it, print it; bind it, and give her a copy.  But we didn't leave it at that.  She was, after all, the best cook in a family of great cooks.  The book we gave our Grandma suited her purposes, but not ours.

Over the course of the next few months, my sister and I traded files by email, adding, formatting, cleaning up.  At the bi-annual family reunion in Colorado Springs that summer, the last family reunion "Aunt Weesie" attended, We debuted Weesie's Cookbook.  Two copies only.  Our mom and each our siblings already had one, and we'd made two extras, donated to the handcrafts auction held at each reunion, to put money in the bank for the next reunion.  

Self-published, complete with stories, a full-color picture (laser copiers are an amazing invention) some obscure recipes, some decades-old recipes, and a lot of family-favorites.

Those two cookbooks auctioned off for over $100 each and people wanted to order them.  We declined, but we produce one Weesie's Cookbook, every two years, for the auction.

One of my personal favorites has always been "Chop Suey"; Grandma made it for me often as a child.  You never hear about it anymore, perhaps because Chinese restaurants have sprouted in every small town in the US; perhaps because it was never really "Chinese" anyway, even though everyone in the 50s and 60s thought it was.

Chop Suey

About a pound of diced meat (leftover beef or pork roast)
1 lg. onion, sliced thin
1 green pepper, sliced thin
2 stalks celery, sliced
4 oz. jar sliced button mushrooms
1 no. 2 can tomato juice (that's 20 oz)
1 can bean sprouts, drained
1 1/2 tsp. soy sauce
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
3 tbsp oil

Saute onions, pepper and meat in a large cast iron skillet. Add remaining ingredients, cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Serve with Minute Rice (remember this is the 60s!) and extra soy sauce.

Next Weesie's Cookbook:

Greatma's orange cake isn't Greatma's.