By Barbara Ouellette Ouellette

FAS329WST301 Final Project

Family Food Memories
 What evokes memories more than food?  The smell of certain foods will bring back fond memories of my childhood.  I have collected some of the recipes of the favored foods of my family which I would like to share; not only the recipes, but the memory that goes along with them.  I'll start with the oldest in my family, which will be my mother.  Even though most of the recipes are my mother's, and the memories that she created with them, but she has memories of her own about her mother's memory making foods.
 Salmon Pie was my mother's favorite dish that her mother made.  She said that it always made her feel good when she came home from school, and saw her mother making Salmon Pie.  Of course, the day that her mother made this particular food was on Friday, so again that brought back the old days of no meat on Friday for Catholics. 

Salmon Pie 
Crust - 
2 cups flour
1 cup Crisco or Lard
1/2 cup water
Mix flour and Crisco and cut with pastry knife until crumbly
Pour water in a little at a time and mix with fork until all the flour mixture sticks together.  Separate into two equal parts, and roll each out on a floured surface.

Filling - 
2 cans of Salmon
6 medium size potatoes
1 medium size onion
Milk

 Boil potatoes, and mash using butter and milk to make somewhat fluffy.  Mix cans of Salmon and onion with potatoes, and put into tin lined with pie crust.  Put the second crust over, and bake in 350* oven for 1 hour.

 I always found the practice of no meat on Friday's to be odd because most Friday foods that my mother would make wasn't much of a sacrifice.  I'll add my favorite food to this because talking about fasting from meat on Fridays brought back the memory of my mother frying haddock, and making home made French fries.  These were always made for the afternoon meal, we never ate a large meal at night.  Those were the days when children had time to come home from school for their meals, and the times when there was someone at home to put a meal on the table.  Anyway, my mother had this little slicing machine, it was not electric, but it was a little white gadget with different blades that could be attached to make different shapes out of whatever vegetable you were slicing.  She would use this machine to slice the potatoes for the French fries.  I don't know how many pounds of potatoes she had to use to make enough for the brood that she fed.  I do recall her standing at that little machine, slicing away, for quite a while.  Those were the best French fries I have ever tasted.  Everytime I go into a kitchen store I look for one of those little slicing gadgets.  My mother doesn't know what happened to it, she thinks it may have gotten thrown away with a lot of other neat stuff, when they redid the kitchen.

SISTER THERESA
 Now for my sister Theresa's memories of food.  She just remembers my mother making crêpes.  When she said this, my sister Deb and I said we don't remember Mama making the crêpes, but do remember her making pancakes.  This was a meal that we usually had for supper time, since our larger meal was in the afternoon.  My mother, like a lot of the other Franco mothers, was very innovative about what she was to feed us.  Not only was there just so much money to go around for food, but she had five children, a husband, and a father to feed, and needed to be able to do this as economically as possible.  It is a wonder when one stops to think about how these women had to run a household, and the ideas they came up  with.
 My thought process about the crêpes versus the pancakes is that when my older sister had the privilege of being fed crêpes it was because my mother, at that time, had more time and money to do this because her family was so much smaller for quite a while.  My sister was the only child for five years, and then there were only two children for another five years, which means she was eleven years old before I was born, and so my mother had more time and energy to prepare the crêpes which took a bit longer to make than pancakes, because they are a little more difficult to cook.

Crêpes
2 eggs beaten
1 cup milk
3 tbls. melted butter
1 tsp. Baking powder
1/2 tsp. Salt
3/4 cup flour

Combine eggs, milk, butter, baking powder and salt.  Add flour blending well.  Heat skillet on high heat.   Pour just a little of the batter onto hot skillet.  Make sure the batter is spread very thin, the size of the crêpes may vary, it is all according to what you will be using them for.   (Mama made hers very large, she also said the more eggs you put in the the better.  This was what her mother told her.)
 

BROTHER TOMMY
  Tommy had a few foods that he liked, and still does.  The one food was Cream of Wheat.  I guess that at one time this is the only food he would eat, Cream of Wheat in the morning, afternoon and night.  My mother had a household full of fussy eaters.  She just fed everyone what they liked, and didn't bother changing their minds.  Then Tommy talked about the Saturday afternoons that Mama would make hamburgers.  She would fry hamburgers and then she would steam the hamburg rolls.  He said he really liked this, but that ¾us kids" meaning the three youngest would give him the rolls that had gotten real soggy, and were wet.  Yuck, I don't remember purposely giving him those rolls, but I sure didn't like it when I ended up with one of those.  Wet bread, yuck!!!  But the most favored food that Tommy like was Mama's chop suey, he still likes it, and she still makes it every year for him to take up to the camp for his annual week of deer hunting.  Tommy now makes it himself, and he gave me the recipe.  It is strange that this is not what you would call a typical French food, but I make one that is very similar to this one, but it comes from my husband's mother.

Chop Suey
3 lbs. of roast beef
2 lbs. of onions, sliced
2 bunches of celery, sliced
3 small cans of bean sprouts, drained
1 cup flour
water

Trim fat from beef, and grind.  Brown meat in fry pan
Cook sliced onions and celery in dutch oven covered with water, until done.
Drain, and save the liquid after celery and onions are cooked.
Mix beef, celery and onions in dutch oven.
Put juice in frying pan that meat was browned in, add a little soy sauce, and bring to boil.  Thicken the broth with flour and water.  Add to meat and vegetables, pouring through a strainer to make sure thicken broth is clear. 
 

BARBARA'S MEMORIES
  I am the only one of my mother's children who was not a fussy eater, so I could go on and on about my favorite foods.  One of my favorite foods, and still is, is what we called Melange.  This is exactly what this French words means?something that has a lot of different things all mixed up.  Another one of those easy, large, economical meals that Franco people made.  This was one of the noon time meals that my mother would prepare along with plenty of mashed potatoes, always mashed potatoes, occasionally a baked, but mostly mashed, and homemade biscuits.  I make this recipe also, and my husband loves it as much as I do.

Melange
l pound of hamburg
1 medium onion
1 can green beans
1 can yellow beans
1 can green peas
1 28 oz. can tomatoes

Brown hamburg and onion together.  Combine hamburg with vegetables and tomatoes in large casserole.  Bake in 350* oven for 30 minutes not covered.  (This taste especially good when some of the vegetables and meat are a little crispy on the top.  My personal opinion.)

I will have more to say about favorite foods at the end of this paper when I speak about the holiday cooking that went on in the Ouellette household.

BROTHER MICHAEL
 Michael's favorite food is meat loaf, was and still is, but when asked this question and what associated memories go with the food he couldn't give me specific memories surrounding the meatloaf, so he talked about having baked beans and canned brown bread on every Saturday night.  Saturday night was a time for the traditional French dish of baked beans and brown bread.  There probably wasn't a household on French Island who wasn't eating the same meal that we did every Saturday night.  What made this meal especially memorable was the fact that on Saturday nights, our Pépère Ouellette would walk  from one street over and share that meal with us.  I don't remember him coming to our house for any other meal, except that one night a week.
 To set the scene a bit you need to know that our mother had five children ranging in ages from sixteen to one year old when we moved in with our Pépère  Brillant after our Mémère  Brillant had died.  It was around six years later that our Mémère  Ouellette passed away, and this is when the ritual of Pépère  Ouellette coming over for the Saturday night beans started.  The children were then ranging in ages of 22 to 7.  There were the three youngest who were closest in age ranging 11, 9, 7, and almost always the only children present at the table during these particular meals.  Pépère  Ouellette was a very tall, quiet, man.  He had quite a presence, he wasn't at all like our little, fun Pépère  that we lived with.  So when Pépère  Ouellette came over for supper we were all supposed to be on our best behavior, which of course set the scene for us not to be.  We all had our assigned seats, but when Pépère  came over it was changed a bit.  This one particular Saturday night, the beans started taking affect before anyone had left the table.  The youngest of the family just had to pass some gas, and when she did she said, ¾I'm sorry Mama, I couldn't make it to the bathroom."  My mother had instructed us that doing such natural things were not supposed to be in public, and if we had to let gas it was to be done in the bathroom.  At the time that Deborah blurted this out, I, who was seated directly across from the Pépère  who was so proper, had a mouthful of chocolate cake.  No sooner did she get this out, did I spray a glorious shower of chocolate cake right out at my Pépère .  Oh dear, another meal time with incident, it was bound to happen.

Baked Beans
2 pounds of navy beans
1 onion (diced)
1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon dry mustard 
1/2 pound salt pork
5 cups water

Oven at 350* and bake for 6 to 8 hours, check beans to make sure that there is enough water.  This needs to be watched very closely.
 

SISTER DEBORAH
 Little Debbie Doo (my Papa's nickname for her).  She sat at the left hand of Papa, and was the finickiest eater of my mother's five children.  She only ate baloney, if she could have she would have eaten baloney three times a day, as it was she ate it twice a day.  So coming up with a food memory for her was a little problematic, because baloney was it.  She did manage to come up with Grand Pérès.  These are what some people refer to as dough boys, or beignets.  The Grand Pérès were made on the night meals, and usually only in the fall and winter because they were deep fried, and so it was done in cooler weather.  There isn't really a great memory association connected with them, except that we all loved them, and they tasted so good with butter slathered all over, with a good hot cup of cocoa.  Mama would stand at the stove and cook those until all our bellies were full.  Of course, the usual practice of Mama not sitting down with the rest of the family to eat was observed because there she was cooking away while we wolved those babies down.  One of the more recent memories of Grand Pérès, is the time three years ago when the Franco American Women Institute had a table at the Culture Fest held in Bangor in May of every year, and Mama was the resident Grand Pérès cooker.  She stood all day at the age of 81 cooking those Grand Pérès, until there was no more bread dough to cook.  She was given the title of ¾The Queen."   That was a good day.
 

Grand Pérès

Bread dough, made from scratch or bought frozen is just as good.
Oil in a large frying pan or a fryolater.
Cut a piece of dough and shape into a long rectangular piece.  Place in hot oil, and fry  until golden brown.  Take out immediately and put butter or if you desire  confectionary.sugar.

 There were always the times of year that brought out the foods that were reserved just for those special times.  Christmas time was always very special around our house, there was so much activity, and excitement.  The gifts and the tree were a big part of it, but most especially the smells of all of the food that took days and days to prepare. 
 The smells of some of these foods transport me back to my childhood faster than anything else can.  The days of sleeping on the living room couch because my older sister was home for the holiday and I gave up my bedroom for her and her husband.  The livingroom was right off the kitchen, and I could smell and hear all of the activity that was going on.  The turkey was cooking slowly, all night long, in a large, white electric cooker.  The smell of that turkey just permeated the air.  Of course, inside the turkey was the ¾special" stuffing that was my Mémère  Brilliant's, a recipe that I finally managed to get from my mother.  Then there was the traditional peanut butter fudge that was being made, this was always such a special time of the year for all of us, and we carry on those traditions today.  Of course, there was the corton that had to be made around this time of year too.  This always tasted so good on a nice cold morning or in the evening spread on bread.  All these smells of turkey, pork, and sweets being made during the week would wake up anyone's sense of smell.
 Most special holidays we would have dessert that was what Mama called - Icebox Cake.  This was usually made for Christmas, Easter and sometimes for Thanksgiving.  This is still my favorite dessert, which we just had this past Thanksgiving. 

HOLIDAY GOODIES

Ice Box Cake

Graham crackers
1 pint of heavy whipping cream
chocolate syrup

Beat cream until right texture, adding chocolate syrup until the desired chocolate taste.  Put chocolate cream on the first whole graham cracker, and set on plate standing on its side.  Continue this process until you have an oblong cake that measures 8 to 10" inches.  Put in refrigerator overnight.  This is best when it has time for the chocolate cream to soften the graham crackers. 

Stuffing

2 lbs. pork
Bay of seasoned stuffing bread crumbs
1 small onion
2 potatoes
salt, pepper and sage to taste

Cook pork in water and onion on top of stove until done.  Pre- cook potatoes, just a little.  Grind meat, potatoes and onion together, mix in bread crumbs, salt, pepper and sage.  Mix together adding broth from the cooked meat until moist. 

This recipe, as a lot of the Franco recipes were done mostly by taste and look, this is the reason for the limited instructions.  (I was lucky to get this much!)
 

Peanut Butter Fudge

2 cups brown sugar
2 cups white sugar
2/3 cup milk 
1 jar peanutbutter
1 jar marshmallow

Mix sugars and mil together and cook until a bit of the mixture forms a ball when dropped in cold water.  Be careful not to overcook.  Remove from heat and add the peanutbutter and marshmallow, mix well.  Put into 9x13" greased pan and wait until set a bit.  Do not let it harden too much before you cut it into desired sized squares.  Cutting the fudge is much easier when done before it hardens to much. 

Corton

2 to 3 lbs. of pork shoulder
Add water to level of meat
1 medium onion sliced
Cook two or three hours.
Take fat and bone out (leave a little fat).
Grind meat with 1 medium onion.
Strain juice.
Combine above ingredients with:
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 tsp. Clove
If you don't have a lot of juice put more water over your meat.  Simmer for five hours (stir often).

 The rest of the memories are mine, but I'm sure that all of my brothers and sisters would agree with what I have to say about the following recipes.  In the winter my mother would make the most wonderful chicken stew.  A lot of the French people had this meal for their Christmas Eve get together, they would gather after Midnight Mass and have a Réveillonner.  Our family did not observe this tradition, but my husband's family did.  My memory of this meal was that it was my Pépère 's favorite, he used to eat it with such vigor. 

Chicken Stew

2-3 lbs. of chicken breast
1 medium onion sliced
1 stalk of celery sliced
1 bay leaf
Potatoes
Carrots
salt and pepper to taste

Cook chicken with the sliced onion celery, and bay leaf, add water and salt and pepper.  Cook in dutch oven until chicken is cooked.  Take chicken, and bay leaf out of broth and debone chicken.  Add potatoes and carrots, cut in bite sized pieces, to broth, cook until tender, add chicken which has been cut into large pieces, heat through.  Thicken broth with flour and additional water.

Molasses Cookies

 These cookies bring back memories of going over to Mémère  Ouellette's house, she always had goodies for us each time we visited.  She was always going to the freezer to give us a special treat of ice cream, we hardly ever got ice cream at home so this tasted especially good.  The treat that she was the most well known for by all her grandchildren though, were her famous molasses cookies.  The cookie jar was always full of them.  She even had a special name because of these cookies, we referred to her as Mémère  Galette
1 cup molasses
1 cup sugar
1 cup shortening or oil
1 egg
4 teaspoons soda
2/3 cup hot water
1 teaspoon vanilla
5 cups sifted flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
3/4 teaspoon salt

Mix the molasses and sugar with melted shortening, add egg.  Mix thorooughly.  Sift together flour, cream of tartar, spices, and salt.  Dissolve soda in hot water and add to first mixture.  Add vanilla.  Add sifted dry ingredients all at once.  Chill for one hour or more.  Roll dough and cut into cookies of desired size.  Bake in 400* oven for about 10 minutes.

Sugar Cookies with Apple Jelly

This recipe came from my Mémère  Brilliant.  This is my favorite cookie, and there is a special way to eat them.  You eat the cookie leaving the apple jelly center for the very last bite.  Um um good.

1 cup shortening
1 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
4 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup dairy sour cream
Apply Jelly

A combination of butter, lard, margarine and vegtable shortening is suggested for the shortening, giving the cookies an old fashioned flavor, and adding to the softness of the cookies.  Cream shortening with nutmeg, salt and vanilla; add sugar and beat until fluffy.  Beat in the eggs.  Mix and sift together the flour, soda and baking power; add to the creamed mixture alternately with the sour cream.  This is a soft dough; chill overnight in the refrigerator.  Roll on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch in thickness.  Cut with a 3 _ inch cutter.  Place cookies on lightly greased cookie sheets, press thumb in middle of cookie to make a slight indentation, and fill with apply jelly, sprinkle with granulated sugar.  Bake at 400* oven.  Eight to 10 minues baking time is suggested with constant watching of the oven.  The recipe makes 36 to 40 cookies.

 Pop corn was the treat that we would have the most often.  Most likely because it was the cheapest snack that my mother could give us.  The only time we would have potato chips and soda would be for Saturday afternoon lunches.  My brother Michael and I talked about how my mother would grind up spam with onions to make sandwiches, and we would have chips and orange soda for lunch as we watched Sky King on TV.  Of course, Deborah would have her baloney, and Tommy would have his hamburg.  On Sunday nights my mother would start to pop popcorn, in the summer time you could smell that popcorn all over French Island.  All of the neighborhood children would smell that popping, and we would say ¾we've got to go in now."  My mother would pop so much corn, she would fill up a vegetable bin that came out of the refrigerator several times.  We made many, many, trips to that bin to fill our bowls.  You were always able to tell when we had popcorn, because the next morning the room we ate it in looked like a movie theater, there was popcorn all over the floor.  We ate it so fast it would just fly.  To this day, we are all still very big popcorn eaters.  Do not ever put a bowl of popcorn in front of anyone of us, unless you want it to disappear in a matter of minutes.
  There are many more recipes that my mother made, but I'll save that for another paper.  I could have extended the invitation for memories to my three oldest nieces also.  They used to come over to our house for every holiday celebration, and Sunday afternoon meals.  We enjoyed this special time with everyone around our kitchen table.  So for now, the memories of my mother, sisters and brothers will have to suffice.