Tonight I'm editing a portion of a cookbook with many recipes from an African-American woman who really broke color barriers and built a career for herself in the '50s and '60s as a teacher, caterer, and producer of food products. She was Lucille Bishop Smith, and I remember when I first moved to Fort Worth in the mid-sixties people used to serve Lucille's chili biscuits as appetizers. You bought them frozen at Roy Pope's grocery store (a still-existent stand-alone where "fashionable" Fort Worth shops, although they may suffer from Central Market now). Carol, who compiled this chapter found no recipe for chili biscuits, but I am tempted to try to recreate them with refrigerated biscuits and canned chili--Lucille would, I'm sure, squirm in her grave. But the recipes are wonderful--some I remember my mom making, like Seven-Minute Icing and Pumpkin Chiffon Pie. Others sound really weird--Japanese bean pie--yes, mashed pinto beans but mixed with sweet ingredients--and Banana and Pineapple Surprise Salad--the surprise is the addition of peanut butter, which sounds fairly awful to me. And do you know what dovering eggs is? It's beating them with an old-fashioned, hand-cranked egg beater. There are some recipes which completely baffle me--like the pumpkin chiffon pie which calls for serving it with Plymouth Sauce. What's that? My mom never did that for sure. Deviled round steak sounds pretty good. I am having such fun with these recipes.
But recipes get me into trouble. Instead of losing weight last week, I gained over a pound. I thought I'd been pretty good until the weekend, but that must have been enough to get me into trouble. Still, I was astounded when I stepped on the scales this morning. It can't have been the two handfuls of potato chips I ate at the party Saturday night. Maybe it was the salmon croquettes--another of Mom's recipes and a perennial favorite of mine. I gave a bit to Jacob Saturday night, and he said, "It's good, Juju!" And then I had one for lunch in a sandwich--add points for bread and mayo. And last night I fixed us lamb burgers with buns--okay, I really went over on points. So today I was fairly careful.
Last night we had a sort of late b'day dinner for Jacob because my present for him finally arrived. It's a Spiderman (what else?) water slide but of course he wasn't much impressed last night. Jordan just called to say that at 8:30 they hadn't had dinner, hadn't done anything but play with the water slide--and Jacob absolutely was having the best time ever. Nice to score a home run from time to time.
1 comment:
OMG! My parents used to serve Lucille's chili biscuits at parties, at our ranch, in Chappell Hill, Texas! Once, the University of Houston Alumni Club had a party at the ranch, on the way to a football game, in Austin, and we watched as the people became CRAZED over these small, chili-filled biscuits, pushing, shoving, and grabbing, like a mob at a sale! I have told the story many times... I googled "Lucille's Biscuits" just in case someone had continued the company, and found your comments. Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane!
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