Old-Fashioned Recipes: Rice and Lima Bean Casseroles, Buddy’s Baked Beans, Aunt Rickie’s New Year’s Cakes, Page Two

 

Whatever Mom served us that day, I felt comforted by the food, the warmth of the room, my family’s presence around me and the sun streaming in the tall windows of the dining room, reflecting the winter-bright snow. I like to think that lunch was my favorite baked lima beans, a recipe from one of her friends.


Lima Bean Casserole (Irma Swift)
2 cups dried lima beans, washed and presoaked
1 onion, sliced
2 country pork ribs
1 cup tomato juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Salt and pepper the ribs and roast them in a covered bean pot for at least 1 ½ hours at 325 degrees. Remove the ribs from the pot and put in the beans, onion and tomato juice. Salt and stir the mixture, place the ribs on top and return the pot with lid on to the oven, adding water as needed. Cook for 1 ½ more hours or until the beans are done; remove lid for last half hour of cooking.

Mom’s Note: Sometimes I do the beans on top of the stove to insure proper doneness!

My Note: She was always a stickler for not overcooking vegetables, including dried beans.
     
Since olden times cooks have combined meat with dried beans, and people still love that combination today. Every family has its favorite form of baked beans, whether slow cooked from scratch or heated out of a can, with or without additions like brown sugar or spices. Mom always used Buddy’s recipe for baked beans. An easy dish to bring to picnics and potlucks in a traditional brown bean pot, baked beans were also served as a convenient lunch-time meal at our house.

Buddy’s Baked Beans
1 pound dry Great Northern beans, washed and soaked
3 strips side meat (uncured bacon) or 3 country pork ribs
1 small onion
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon dry mustard
2 tablespoons sorghum or molasses

Cover beans with salted water and “boil ‘til you can blow the skins off!” Drain and put in a bean pot with other ingredients, placing the meat on top.
Bake for six to eight hours at 250 degrees, covered, adding one half to one cup of water as needed. Stir every two hours. Beans should hold their shape and not be mushy.

Mom’s Note: A lot of this is guesswork!

One of the oldest recipes in my mother’s cookbook came from her paternal grandmother’s sister, Aunt Rickie. She never knew that grandmother because she died in childbirth, leaving five young children in the care their father. Being a busy farmer and brick maker, he relied on his sister-in-law, who was childless, to help out. Later Aunt Rickie served as a surrogate grandmother to Mom and her two siblings.

The sisters had emigrated with their parents from the same ancestral area of Germany as their husbands, marrying and settling in Scribner, Nebraska. In the Netherlands and the adjoining area of western Germany, where they had lived, a New Year’s beginning was celebrated by sharing special cakes with family and friends. The cakes, actually crisp wafers, were made in a wafer iron, a long-handled black iron device with two round disks that opened and closed. The inside of each disk was imprinted with a decoration that transferred to the cake as it baked over an open fire.

Mom inherited Aunt Rickie’s wafer iron. The sisters or their mother probably brought it over with them from Germany. Stored in a cupboard in the basement of our family home, it was rarely used. My brother Alan now has this heirloom displayed above his fireplace.

Aunt Rickie’s New Year’s Cakes
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
½ cup melted butter
½ cup cold water
Flour

Mix ingredients, adding enough flour to make a thin batter. Bake in a wafer iron over stovetop burner for about 3 minutes. Roll into cylinders at once.

The only time I remember Mom making New Year’s cakes, she asked me to help. My parents had invited friends over for New Year’s Eve, and she planned to serve finger foods buffet style. We did the cakes in the morning of the event.

She poured the batter by spoonfuls onto one of the wafer disks, closed them and positioned the iron over an electric burner. She had to figure out how long to bake them by instinct since the iron didn’t come with care and use instructions. I had to roll the cakes into cylinders before they cooled and tie thin red ribbons around them. A labor-intensive process, I hardly thought the results worth the effort, though I remember distinctly the sweet aroma of anise filling the kitchen.

That evening was also memorable because of Mom’s decision to serve wine. She didn’t drink alcohol herself but had found a lovely old decanter in the china cabinet that she wanted to use. Always interested in minimizing the consumption of alcohol, sometimes a difficult task, she thought filling the decanter with wine would be less tempting than whiskey. I didn’t hang around for the party, but the next morning she told me that one of the guests had liked the wine a little too much.

   
Recipes are from the collection of Anna May Cullison