There were several reasons for my decision to gather these recipes into a cookbook, not the least of which was a desire to preserve some of them along with some reminiscences about my family, for my family. For me, food has usually been associated with hospitality and good times with family and friends. As I was growing up there were Sunday dinners after church with relatives, church suppers, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter dinners and Christmas Eve supper; Memorial Day picnics in the park in Glendive; birthday parties and family reunions; and visits to North Dakota relatives, as well as friends and relatives simply dropping in for coffee and cookies when they were in the vicinity. Later on there were meals eaten by lamplight at the cabin and picnics beside a lake or creek, and fresh fish fried over a campfire. There were meals eaten by candlelight just because it cheered us up when things weren't going as well as they could have. There were many good dinners at my mom's house where non-attendance was not an option. Still later there were square dance "finger foods" and potlucks. In addition, I now look forward to entertaining, and being entertained by, my quilting friends.

As I think back, there are recipes I wish I had, but probably couldn't prepare today even if I did have them. The quality of store-bought produce and meat products doesn't seem the same, and, in addition, we are much more aware of the high caloric content of all that rich milk, butter, cream, and eggs. My Aunt Margaret's dill pickles were put up in a large crock and kept in the "cellar" under their house. When they were partially cured, and still very crisp, she would slice them thin, and my cousins and I would eat them with home-baked bread and fresh churned butter. Today it's hard to make good pickles with chemical-laden water, and not many people have a cellar.

My Aunt Katy butchered her own chickens and fried them in lard, to absolute perfection. That can't be duplicated in this day and age, even with the so-called "free range" chickens. What I really loved when we visited them at their farm in the Sand Hills of North Dakota was a German concoction which translated to "fried noodles." She would take little bits of bread dough and roll it between her palms to make long, fat noodles which she placed in the bottom of a greased cast iron skillet. Potatoes and onions were sliced over the top of the bread noodles, salted and peppered, covered tightly, and left to cook slowly. They always came out brown and crusty on the bottom and the vegetables were cooked perfectly. I have tried this many times and ended up with either burned noodles or raw vegetables. I also remember large sheets of noodles spread out to dry on clean sheets on top of the beds. It took a lot of noodles to feed a family with nine children.

When we lived in North Dakota during the summer, I spent a lot of time with Aunt Lena and Uncle Archie who managed a large sheep ranch at that time. Aunt Lena cooked for the ranch workers and food was plentiful. A huge barbecue, including lamb, to which all the neighbors were invited, was an annual event. Again, fried chicken and homemade bread were on the menu. I spent a lot of my time picking wild rose petals to feed the bum lambs, and wasn't very happy when those lambs ended up as barbecue. I could probably write an entire book on Uncle Archie whom I dearly loved. He was the potato sausage expert and made wonderful dried beef and other sausages. He was also an animal lover, and at one time had a pet coyote who eventually had to take up residence at the zoo in Minot, and a chicken named "Charlie" that rode around on his shoulder. Susie, the pet lamb, would come in the house each afternoon to take her nap in the middle of their bed. During Prohibition, he and his brother operated a still on their farm, and he was caught ferrying the booze across the river to the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. He spent a little time in the North Dakota Penitentiary. The family skeleton is now out of the closet! They often spent time with us during the winter at Dad's homestead on Sullivan Creek in Dawson County, Montana. It took me a long time to figure out that Uncle Archie was the Santa Clause that delivered presents including a tricycle one year. I was curious that the trike had wheat in the tires and commented that Santa must have traveled through the wheat field. Actually, the presents had been stored in the granary. In later years, after they moved to Montana, we caught Aunt Lena passing off frozen bread dough to her new step-daughter as her own. She thought it was a great joke. Although Aunt Lena and Mom were of German ancestry and loved to cook German food when they got together (when they weren't arguing about cheating at cards), they were both excellent Scandinavian cooks, as both had married into Scandinavian families.

Aunt Margaret was Mom's younger sister and Aunt Lena was her next oldest sister. The three of them were very close and had great fun cooking such things as headcheese; some kind of awful boiled pastry made with pumpkin and onions; and something made with noodles and cottage cheese that wasn't too bad! Aunt Katy was Mom's oldest surviving sister. I didn't have the opportunity to get to know her sister Marie, and brothers Frank, Joe, and Albert, nearly as well.


After we moved permanently to Sullivan Creek in 1939, we were in much closer contact with my dad’s family who were Norwegian Lutherans and cooked accordingly. The annual church supper at the Lutheran Church was held each year the week before Christmas. The menu consisted of lutefisk, meatballs, lefse, mashed potatoes, cabbage slaw, and pickled beets. Mom was really proud of the elegant concoction she created which was served as dessert. It consisted of two rosettes (a flower-shaped cookie made by dipping an iron mold into batter and deep frying) put together and topped with a combination of whipped cream and crushed pineapple, flavored with almond, with a cherry on top. The Luther League girls, of which I was one, of course, wearing ankle-length dark blue skirts, white blouses and red vests, served as waitresses. Every half an hour or so as the crowd changed, we would gather around the organ and sing the Norwegian National Anthem, in both Norwegian and English, with Aunt Dora Scheer (my dad’s sister) accompanying us. (Believe it or not, I can remember the Norwegian words, but not the English.)

Another custom at the church was the Ladies Aid Luncheon. After their meeting each month, the hostesses for that specific month would serve a late afternoon lunch to which everyone in town was invited. I think they charged 35 cents which was the source of revenue for their mission projects. There was usually a Jell-O salad, and a sandwich made with ground beef, pork, or chicken, and chopped pickles, mixed with homemade salad dressing and served on a freshly baked bun. Some hostesses were more popular than others, depending on the quality of the bread and the pie served for dessert. The population of Richey at that time was somewhere between two and three hundred. Not everyone attended but they served an amazing amount of lunches.

I spent at lot of time at my Uncle Mike and Aunt Jenny Mickelson’s home, since they lived next door. Grandpa Andrias Olson lived in a tiny little house between us, and joined us for supper many evenings. Aunt Jenny and Uncle Mike were a most hospitable couple: the coffee pot was always on, and friends and family were welcome any time of the day. Aunt Jenny baked the most wonderful big fat sour cream cookies which she always seemed to have on hand. I was in awe of my cousin Gene, who lived with them, because he was a real cowboy. He had a horse named Paint and a dog named Shep; Shep ate pancakes for breakfast every morning. Gene would lend me his cowboy shirts to wear which I thought were pretty cool at that particular time in my life.

After graduating from high school and moving to western Montana, I truly missed the congeniality that existed in that small, isolated, eastern Montana prairie town.


A garden has always been a big part of my life and there have been very few years when we did not have one. The garden at Sullivan was an acre in size and was watered by hauling barrels of water from the spring in a wagon pulled by Uncle Mike’s horses. The soil was a heavy clay and produced magnificently. Mom and Aunt Jenny spent many a long day canning and preserving the produce. There were washtubs full of peas and green beans. Carrots, beets, and rutabagas were “put down” in pails of wet sand and moved to the root cellar where the potatoes were stored in bins. The root cellar always smelled of root beer, as inevitably a bottle or two of the home-made brew would have exploded. We also retreated to that root cellar whenever a severe storm threatened. Aunt Dora and Uncle August Scheer, who lived several miles away, also had a root cellar in which they stored ice harvested from a nearby pond during winter and insulated with straw which kept it frozen for months. This meant they could make ice cream during the summer, which was a pretty special treat.

In late summer, the freight train would arrive in Richey with a full boxcar loaded with fresh fruit. All the ladies from Richey and the surrounding countryside would go to the train to pick up the fruit they had previously ordered. Mom always ordered three boxes each of peaches and pears. One box of each was for eating fresh and the rest were canned. As the fruit came in unripened, we monitored those boxes daily and were quick to eat it as it ripened. The fruit we buy today just doesn’t seem to taste as good. When the fresh fruit was gone, it was back to canned fruit—which was also pretty good. We could buy fresh apples and oranges in season and a “hank” of bananas, a special treat, occasionally hung in the window of Peterson’s Grocery Store.

When we moved into town, we not only had a big garden, we continued to raise chickens. One of my jobs was to take the extra eggs to the grocery store, for credit to be used toward butter and other dairy products brought in by other farmers. Taking that pail of eggs to the grocery store was not my favorite chore. It ranked right along with having to ride in the back of the Model T, even though we had a new car, whenever we went to the country. My dad would get up very early in the morning during the winter months to go to the chicken coop to light gas lanterns to fool the chickens (always white leghorns) into thinking it was spring and continue to lay eggs. This procedure guaranteed that we would have eggs year round. Many evenings our supper consisted of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes or a vegetable, toast, and canned fruit.


That brings me to the wild berries we picked. In the coulees around Richey, chokecherries and juneberries were plentiful. The chokecherries went into jelly, syrup and wine, and the juneberries were canned with sugar for “sauce.” Not far from Sullivan was a small grove of wild plums that were also canned with a sugar syrup. Aunt Jenny made a dessert from the plums called “plum duff.” The juice from the plums was sweetened to taste and thickened with corn starch, and poured over the plums. This was served with a large helping of thick cream. It was a little trouble to spit out the pits but well worth it to have the opportunity to share in this good dessert. The chokecherries that grow in eastern Montana have a more distinct flavor than the milder variety that grow in the western mountains. This observation was confirmed by Darlene, my Assiniboine friend from Wolf Point, whom I worked with in Helena a long time ago. On a recent trip to Helena to visit her urban relatives, she came to my house to use my food processor to make a batch of pemmican, which consisted of processed dried meat, ground chokecherries (seeds and all), rolled together in small balls and held together with hot lard. She also taught us how to make genuine Indian jerky.

On one occasion when we were picking chokecherries, I climbed up into a large tree to reach some of the largest, black, most succulent berries, and had the misfortune of stepping on a large bullsnake which I thought was a branch. I had no idea that bullsnakes climbed trees. Bullsnakes are harmless, and abundant in the area, but it didn’t take me long to get down out of that tree. There are many family stories about going to the outhouse, the chicken coop, or the barn and finding those darn snakes hanging from the roof or curled up in a nest.


After moving to Clancy in 1954, we discovered that wild raspberries were plentiful along Clancy Creek and Lump Gulch. Today it’s hard to find enough to make a batch or two of jam, but it’s still worth the effort because no tame raspberry can compare with the flavor of the wild ones. We also developed a fondness for the syrup and jelly made from ripe wild gooseberries. The bushes would be loaded with the large dark berries in late summer, and the berries from one bush could provide a year’s supply. After Jim and I were married in 1974, and our families were younger, we made several excursions Hungry Horse Lake to pick huckleberries, which were something new to someone raised in eastern Montana. After a few dry years and the onset of professional huckleberry pickers, we gave up and now I buy at least enough for a couple batches of jam at the farmers’ market. Now, when we travel to the West Coast, I always find a patch of wild blackberries. Once I start picking, it’s hard to stop while there are still lots of berries, and Jim has to literally drag me away. I think it has something to do with my happy childhood berrypicking experiences, and the idea that you used anything and everything nature provided.


Living in Portland during the war years presented some challenges as both meat and canned goods were rationed. It was possible to buy fresh produce, however, and it seemed to be plentiful. Kids, including me, were released from school early in the afternoon, and taken by bus to the country to help with harvest. I picked strawberries and raspberries for 5 cents a box and thought I was really rich when I collected a couple of dollars at the end of the day. Friends of my dad’s from North Dakota had a car and a little extra gas, which was also rationed, and they took us on a short trip to the Willamette valley where we picked apples, walnuts and filberts, a new experience for all of us. I still love visiting that area whenever possible.


One Christmas during the years we lived in Portland, Petra Willert, who was Mom’s dearest friend and Uncle Mike’s sister, mailed us a home-butchered and frozen goose from Richey. With a shortage of ration coupons for meat, that goose was a blessing, even though Mom didn’t have a roaster, or even an oven, in the small apartment where we lived. She ended up cooking it in a dishpan on top of the stove (this was before the age of plastic dishpans). That goose was great. That story reminds me of another Christmas we celebrated with my mom and dad after they moved to Clancy. I believe the Raisls were dinner guests, as well as some of Fred's family. When the turkey was carved, it was obvious that something was wrong with it and we wouldn't be able to eat it, the gravy or the stuffing. So, Christmas dinner consisted of fruit salad, sweet potatoes, lefse (of course), mashed potatoes that hadn’t already been adulterated with gravy—and a couple of jars of pickled pigs’ feet Grandma happened to have in her pantry. The next morning my dad returned the turkey to the store where it had been purchased, explicitly explained what he thought of their turkey—and their store —and never bought another item from Safeway.


When Fred and I were married in 1949, it suddenly dawned on me that I was going to have to learn to cook. The first Christmas we were married, I foolishly invited both our families for dinner. Knowing that I was in over my head, I spent a good share of the morning in the bathroom crying, while Mom cooked the dinner. Mom liked to cook, and was such a good cook, she had never thought it necessary to teach me to cook. I suppose I did learn a little by assimilation. I know I could scramble eggs. She was much more interested in seeing that I did the dishes. Mom hated doing dishes, and if the dishes weren’t done, and company was imminent, she would just hide them in the oven to get them out of sight. To this day I value my dishwasher (and my husband who usually loads it) over and above all my other possessions.


I don’t remember where I got it, but I did come into possession of a copy of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook (1950), which became my lifesaver, and the beginning of my love affair with cookbooks. My current collection consists of about 200 volumes, give or take a few, ranging from national cookoff contest booklets to The Encyclopedia of Creative Cooking with 2,000 recipes on 796 pages. I really enjoy cookbooks published by organizations in small communities, and from places where we have traveled. The latest additions are souvenirs from our trip to St. Ives, Cornwall, England. Betty Crocker is probably still my favorite. Ask me for a recipe and, given enough time, I can usually find it.

That brings me to the second reason for putting together this book. With that many cookbooks, whenever I wanted to bake the Moist Dark Chocolate Cake Supreme, for instance, I spent more time looking for the recipe than I did in the actual preparation. Having a new, expensive computer that wasn’t being used for much, I decided to put some favorite recipes, but couldn’t remember which book they were in, on the computer. As the computer file began to grow, I remembered questions from my kids:


“Mom, how do you cook stew?” “Mom, do you have Grandma’s donut recipe?” Mom, how do you stuff a turkey, make gravy, fry chicken, etc.”

and then I began to hear:


“Grandma, how do you make your mashed potatoes?”

I decided I now had the time and the opportunity to do what Jim had suggested to me a long time ago.

That is the third reason for this book. As I was buying yet another cookbook, Jim said to me, “You buy so many of those things, why don’t you just write your own?”

Well, Jim, finally, here it is.