Recipes
Just in time for this year’s biennial National Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor Reunion, one of our members is collecting favorite recipes to create a family cookbook. I’ve sent the ones that my family has enjoyed, but I don’t have many from my Grandmother Rebecca Rugg Miner. She was a great cook, but I don’t recall seeing her ever writing down or using a recipe card like many people do today. Cooking meals seemed just a natural extension of her talents. Although she only had a fourth grade education, her common sense, creativity, and wisdom far exceeded those school house walls.
I’ve tried to recreate some of my favorite recipes for the food that she made and have failed miserably. My flavors have never equaled hers. I’m not sure if my recollections of the taste will ever match my skills or whether my ingredients aren’t as fresh or if my proportions of the ingredients are off.
One recipe that I really loved was her chicken salad. When the family gathered to cull the flock of chickens in the fall of the year she would toss several of the hens into a huge pot on her kitchen coal stove. While the chickens cooked she was also baking bread rolls. The aroma of the yeasty buns filled the kitchen. It was better than the smell of scalded wet feathers or the singed hairs of the birds as the aunts would clean them. It seemed my aunts were everywhere plucking the chickens, cutting them up, and placing them in plastic bags to be tucked into Grandma’s huge chest freezer.
Once the chickens were all packaged, Gram would chop the up the meat of the cooked chicken, add diced dill pickle, salt, and pepper. Slowly she would mix some of the rich, hot chicken broth to the chopped chicken until it became spreadable. The recipe should be so simple, yet it’s been so difficult for me to duplicate. Was her broth so much richer? Was it the brand of pickles she used? Was it the ratio of salt and pepper? Or is it that my memory is faulty? I just don’t know.
But there were two recipes my Gram made that I didn’t like. She would make hardtack candy and popcorn balls every year for Christmas. The flavor of hardtack I hated was cloves and the popcorn balls were made with pink syrup and butternuts. To me the cloves and the butternuts had a very unusual and strong taste. Sorry Gram.