My Mom's Recipe Box: 80 Years of Collected Midwest Recipes

By Mike Keleher and Delora Keleher

“My Mom's Recipe Box. 80 Years of Collected Midwest Recipes” contains recipes collected by my mother Delora over an 80-year time span living in small towns from the 1930's to 2024. Delora regularly traded and swapped their best recipes with other cooks, wives, daughters and even a few men. It was quite a source of pride to be asked for a copy of a favored dish as well as being known locally as a “good cook.”

Recipes were swapped at holidays, local banquets, church functions, school dinners, Scout and sports banquets, graduations, weddings and even funeral luncheons (they still serve a great post-funeral lunch in our town!)

Delora’s double sized recipe box was stuffed full of hundreds of heirloom grade recipes written on 3x5” cards, yellowed pieces of scrap paper and even bank deposit slips. You can see the love and attention to detail in these old recipes which fed generations of midwestern families. Some of the recipes are over 100 years old.

Mike Keleher has published nine books and several hundred articles.
At Age 91, this is Delora Keleher’s first book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781304517111

Book preview

Dedication

This book is written as a tribute to my mother Delora, who always kept us well-nourished and fed. It is also dedicated to those other good cooks who have contributed to Delora’s life and her kitchen, including her Sister in Laws Mary Ann Gaunt and Linda Carr, Delora’s lifelong best friend Roberta Heidenreich, Shirley Wall, my wife Micheale Keleher, and sister in law Carole Keleher, grand daughters Jenny Hein and Jackie Keleher, and of course Delora’s girls from across Sunset Drive who spent as much time in Delora’s kitchen as any of us did- Erica Amezola, Nicole Padilla, Anna Padilla and Alejandra Padilla.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Beverages

Chapter 2: Breads

Chapter 3: Cakes

Chapter 4: Casseroles- The Midwest Staple

Chapter 5: Cookies

Chapter 6: Desserts

Chapter 7: Dips

Chapter 8: Household Cleaning Recipes

Chapter 9: Meats

Chapter 10: Miscellaneous

Chapter 11: Pastry/Pies

Chapter 12: Salads

Chapter 13: Salad Dressings

Chapter 14: Sandwiches

Chapter 15: Soup

Chapter 16: Sweets

Chapter 17: Vegetables

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

This book has been written as a tribute to my mom, Delora Keleher. She is currently 91 years old and resides here in Illinois. Delora’s girls from her days on Sunset Drive back in Rock Falls, IL came to visit two weeks ago. Nikki, Anna and Jandra have been so good to come and visit and love on their 3rd Grandmother. Nikki contacted me and asked if they could copy Delora’s recipe box which sits on the kitchen counter in her assisted living apartment.

I talked with Nikki later, and she said they would like copies of the entire double sized box which is chock full of handwritten 3x5 cards. I offered to type them up, but Nikki said they would like copies of the handwritten cards because they had so much more heart in them and maybe I could include notes about the people who traded those cards with Delora.

I dug into the project, and put all of the cards, yellowed newsprint, torn scraps of note paper and even lined 3-hole school notebook paper on my computer scanner. How hard could it be? There were a couple hundred recipes by my guess, and I knew I did not want to photocopy them all at a commercial copier.

Gee, it only took me 7 hours to organize and scan them and put it on flash drives!

Out of that effort, and reading through all those cards, the idea of typing them up and into a book or cookbook grabbed my imagination. These recipes were all traded, swapped or gifted to my mom over a period of about 80 years. Some came from her mother and grandmother, so they could easily go back 100 years. All exhibit meticulous handwriting and loving content. I have fixed a couple of spelling issues but tried to copy them as is, so if you run into repeated references to using lard, oleo, or fat back, just use your own modern shortening substitute and real butter…unless you have a lot of rendered pigs fat on hand, then knock your socks off.

Delora’s recipe box has a stack of 3x5 cards 12.5 inches tall. I found out the average 3x5 card is .007 thick. I asked Alexa to do the math If I have a stack of cards 2.5 inches thick and each card is .007 inches thick, how many cards are in the stack? Alexa responded, I quit. Never talk to me again."

One of the coolest recipes I found was printed on white paper with blue ink printed on white paper. It is Mimeo print we used to have back in the 1960s before photocopying. All of our grade schoolwork in the 1960s were on mimeo print papers…and if you got it hot off the press it smelled great. I can still smell that print. This particular document no longer smelled that good!

Another great find in the recipe box was one for making Anti-Skunk Shampoo. I don’t remember my mom tangling with many skunks, but good to know she was ready with a recipe just in case.

I retain many memories of the people who supplied the cards and some of the actual prepared food- but certainly not all of it. After typing all up I came away with a sense of Where was I when all of these items were being cooked?

I thought it would be quite a tribute to move Delora’s collection along one more time. Almost all of the cooks who traded cards have passed on. I hope they will not mind getting some recognition and some pride in knowing other cooks and families will enjoy these old recipes again.

My mother was born in 1932 in Peoria, IL, and was adopted by Jake and Pansy Beaber. They lived in a tiny rural town in north central Illinois. When I say tiny, I mean really tiny. One church, one post office and a grain elevator.Kasbeer, IL never had more than 150 people in the confines. Wikipedia says Kasbeer still has 30 houses. My grandpa Jake was the town barber. Everybody in that part of the county knew Jake the Barber, and his single room barber shop building still exists (it is about the size of a large garden shed.)

How rural? I remember my mother describing the near panic which overtook Kasbeer back in the 1930s when some Gypsies in brightly colored wagons camped near town. True story.

Delora grew up during the Great Depression, along with her lifelong Kasbeer pal Roberta Heidenreich. They are both in their 90’s now and are still best friends. My mother and grandparents moved to Princeton, IL, only a few miles away about the time Delora went to high school. She made Princeton sound like Oz compared to Kasbeer. They had stores and variety and up to 15,000 people! In high school Delora took Home Economics and learned to cook and developed her affinity for a woman I never met, named Betty Crocker.

The Betty Crocker Cookbook had equal billing in our home alongside the family bible. You were taught to believe in both with vigor. Delora’s sole copy was copyrighted in the 1940s and looks like it was run over by a train but was still in use up until 2019 when we moved her to an assisted living facility.

I am pretty sure Betty was from the Midwest. Just like we did not have many emotions back then (just didn’t need ‘em), Betty did not have too much use for fancy, exotic, or heaven forbid even spicy food.Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s eating mainly meat and potatoes and garden grown vegetables I suspected there were other foods out there I was not privy to.

My mom married my dad Jack Keleher in 1959, and they lived in Walnut, IL (pop 1000) until 1978. He was a State Trooper, and she ran a beauty shop in the back of our house. Walnut was a small farm economy town…not as tiny as Kasbeer though! But when I say small, we didn’t even have any minorities who lived in Walnut. The Protestants and Catholics had to trade off a month at a time being the designated minority.

Walnut was a great place to grow up. You knew everyone…and their dog…and their cousins, and their dog’s names, and also where they used to live. When Sheriff Andy Taylor showed up on TV on Monday nights in Mayberry back in the 1960s, we viewed it more as the very first reality show, or a documentary- than a comedy.

We were so rural, my Great Grandmother Galentine was well known to have the best recipe in town for curing a ham. Sadly, she did not write it down. She drove well into her 80s and had to be shooed off the roof one time, also when she was in her 80s while fixing shingles. She was small but resilient and lived nearly to 100. What is your great grandma known for?

Midwest food was pretty tame. I remember my mom introducing my brother and I to Chinese Food about midway between 1960 and 1970. Chinese Food came in a can from Chung King marked Chop Suey. It was apparently from the Orient and so exotic! The can contained a gelatinous mass of slimy vegetable matter. I knew I did not like it and could not imagine how a million Chinese people could choke it down. So, thanks to my mom, I thought I did not like Chinese food.

As stated above, our daily diet was mostly meat and potatoes augmented by vegetables grown in our own garden.Ketchup was known as The House Red Sauce. Growing up in a rural farm community, when you had beef on the table, there was always a good chance you had met the cow before he or she passed on.

At Delora’s table you were going to be fed, but for a teenager with fledgling access to cable TV and a color TV which broadcast the world just outside the county line, I figured out it wasn’t always gourmet.It was simple fare unless other cooks passed along their unusual dishes. I of course had teenage taste buds yearning to be free. When you had Liver and Onions on the same dish with Lima Beans, your palate was not going to be set alight. Even the dog wouldn’t eat them. Trust me, I tried.

Delora’s idea of spice was a can of McCormick’s Chili Powder in the back of the cupboard. I am pretty sure it was canned just after the Civil War let out. Seriously, it was in that cupboard for at least 40 years that I can account for… and it was still 80% full. But if I craved spice, she would slap that can in front of me and wish me well. (I saw comedian Mary Mack from Minnesota recently, and she said her mom objected to Yogurt as too spicy I could almost hear Delora’s voice!)

But Delora shined as a cook when it came to things like casseroles (a winter mainstay), cakes, cookies and pies.She was a whiz when it came time to provide a dish to a church function, Cub Scout banquet, school dinners, holiday gatherings and family reunions, neighborhood picnics, graduations, wedding receptions and yes even funeral luncheons!

I was delighted to find some of those recipes in this wooden box along with notes on who the donor cook was and if it was a good recipe.

As a 60-year church member in Walnut, Delora and the in-house women’s group, hosted funeral lunches and other functions where they provided innumerable hot dishes and dessert to church members and the bereaved…and it had better be up to snuff! They still serve a nice post funeral/graveyard lunch there. I recommend it highly if you get the chance.

The high point of any such public function was having another cook/hostess remark up on your prepared dish and/or ask for a copy of the recipe. This was high praise indeed! Many local cooks gained much face with a famous recipe they were willing to write out and share. You’d hear about it at other functions Oh, those are Shirley Noble’s Cream Puffs!

Swapping recipes was a minor source of nutrition, but a high point in social interactions in rural Walnut, IL. We had three TV channels, more churches than taverns, and one highway through town. Life seemed to be more involved with people and food than events or big city activities. Sadly, almost all of the chefs who contributed their cards to Delora have passed on, but it has been fun to see their good works in print and I think they would be pleased to see other cooks pick them up again.

Mike

March 2024

CHAPTER

ONE

BEVERAGES

The Delora collection featured a rather inordinate number of recipes for Punch. It was a required festive drink at any celebration in the 1960’s-1980’s. Seeing these recipes made me realize we don’t drink punch anymore. Maybe we should. I am not sure where it has gone. Are we less festive than we used to be?A shame really as even I can make punch.

I think the last punch I saw, and most likely the worst excuse for a festive punch was seeing a woman empty two cans of Hawaiian Punch and a bottle of 7-Up into a bowl at a promotion ceremony back in the early 1980s. She may have killed off punch for the rest of us.

Typing these up I see now 7-Up, Ginger Ale and Jello were pretty integral to festive life back in the day!One item I did not see was the addition to Sherbert as a floating centerpiece to any of the punches. I always looked forward to that sweet foamy goodness. To do it in the most festive manner, you pressed either lime, orange or rainbow sherbert into copper-colored molds and froze them, then slipped it into a punch. Long gone I am afraid. I can’t even find Sherbert in the grocery store, let alone find someone who would put it in a mold and float it on a sea of Hawaiian Punch.

AUTHORS NOTE: I have commented on these recipes below, and to be completely transparent, any notation with an asterisk * are my smarmy comments alone and not Delora’s…she would be quite chagrined to read most of them and chastise me for saying it as a well-known Smart Alec!

Breakfast Slush

Verna Fritz and Nancy Hansen (both were well known Walnut residents and friends of the family)

▪ 1 6oz can frozen orange juice

▪ 3 cans water

▪ 2 cups unfrozen strawberries

▪ Blend for 15 seconds. Top with strawberries if desired.

Cocoa Mix

Delora’s Recipe.

Delora used to mix up a big Tupperware bowl with a burp lid of this mix in the winter. It lived on the on the shelf with a 1/3 cup measuring cup in it so my brother and I could make our own hot cocoa without bugging her. Apparently, Delora once got into a fist fight with Swiss Miss and held a grudge after that and would not buy the little Miss’s product-no matter how conveniently they were packaged.

▪ 1 8-quart box of dry milk

▪ 1 6 oz can of coffee mate

▪ 1 small box of cocoa mix

▪ ½ cup powdered sugar

▪ Mix ingredients and stow in Tupperware.

▪ Mix 1/3 cup of mixture with 1 cup of hot water.

Cranberry Punch

Copied from a radio broadcast on WSDR AM.

Serves 20 people. (*apparently WSDR had a big radio audience. I have never been a fan of Cranberry and have consistently accused those who market that red crunchy devil fruit of inventing new products