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You are here: home → archives → columns → Heirloom Recipes
Jay West has a history around Red Lodge, a love of food, and a colorful collection of Scandinavian forbears. All of this combines to build Heirloom Recipes, which is a column that mixes family stories with great recipes.
by Jay West
Last Sunday, we had an end of the summer meal. The sweet corn crop is producing now. If you're in Red Lodge and don't get out much, at least go to the Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings. Bert, my neighbor up the street, has a bumper crop of cucumbers this summer. Wild-caught Alaskan salmon is showing up in the stores. These combined to make a memorable dinner last Sunday. Everybody asked for the recipes, so here they are.
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by Jay West
Combining summery herbs, lemon, spinach garlic and potatoes, there's enough work in this family recipe for it to be a Sunday dinner dish rather than a weeknight meal,. It works as a hot side dish or as a wilted-spinach salad.
Although this is a family recipe, none of us are Greeks, as everybody knows from my Smorgasbord articles. So, is this really a Greek recipe? Who knows? Today, if you Google "Greek potatoes," you'll get 90,000-plus hits.
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by Jay West
With a name like cioppino (pronounced cho-pee-no) you would think this dish came from Italy. But it did not. It's one of those ethnic-American dishes that were developed over here. Our local Finns have a fish stew called Moijakka (sometimes called "kalomoijakka") which seems to be a Minnesota, Dakota-Montana thing.
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by Jay West
I was going to write about bread this month, but this issue's theme is "drinks" and they can go well with Stroganoff. Also, Guynema wants me to write about the Beef Stroganoff that I served at Sunday dinner last week. Dinner turned into one of those meals where people stop talking and just eat. That's saying something with this dinner crowd.
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by Jay West
My father's father had grown up in the British Isles with a taste for mutton that wasn't shared by anybody else in the family. The rest of us ate lamb.
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by Jay West
At my house, for most of the last 26 years, we've had a Superbowl Sunday dinner or party. Not that I care about the game. Except for the commercials, I'm positively indifferent. The tv may or may not be on. But, why pass up an opportunity for a party?
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by Jay West
With Sunday evenings in July and August so often hot, composed salads are good things for dinner. What's a composed salad? A composed salad is pretty much any salad that is not a tossed salad. It includes jell-o salads, but this article isn't about any jell-o salads. Of course, we do have to mention gelatin, which is a byproduct of butchering cows. What we're talking about this month is the kind of salad where you lay ingredients out in separate piles on a platter and diners pick out what they want for their salad. It's the original salad bar.
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by Jay West
Meatballs are a national dish in Sweden, or at least we think so. All Scandinavians seem to have a thing for meatballs, though. There was a 1948 movie about a Norwegian-American family in a west coast city in the early 1900s. It was called "I remember Momma" (it later became a TV series in the 1950s, too). In the movie, there was a scene where the oldest daughter, who is a writer, is trying to get a writing career going. Momma (played by Irene Dunn) lobbies the local paper's society editor, and basically bribes her by divulging her secrets for special meatballs--her secret was to boil the meatballs in beef broth before baking them, as I recall. My granddmother's Swedish meatballs are what I serve at my smorgasbords. Here's the latest version of the recipe with some adjustments and substitutions for modern times.
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by Jay West
When Mother's day comes around, I start thinking about Maryland crabs. Fried Maryland softshell blue crabs were my mother's favorite, but they were in season only from May to maybe August. The rest of the year, she made do with dishes like this one, which I remember from dinners at the Officer's Club at Fort Meyer.
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by Jay West
When St. Patrick's Day rolls around, I wear a shamrock button that says "The Ancient and Honorable Order of the Sons of the Survivors of the Great Potato Famine." It's both a history lesson and mockery of the corned-beef-and-cabbage-O-Danny-Boy school of Irish celebration. I'm privileged to do this because some of my ancestors were famine Irish.
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by Jay West
Leave it to the French to come up with the ultimate baked beans and franks dish. Call it beans and franks, and it's weeknight supper. Call it "cassoulet" and you've got haute cuisine, or at least a good dinner party dish for a winter evening. It's still beans and franks, though.
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by Jay West
With hard times looming in the news, I started thinking about that staple from the depression-era, beans and wieners. My grandmother, who sometimes ran soup kitchens, said times were so hard back then that they began using cheap hot dogs because other pork was too expensive to use in pork and beans. I don't know about that, but I do know that, as things eased up a bit, folks took to chopping hot dogs into canned pork and beans.
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by Jay West
You could make this soup from fresh tomatoes, but most of us aren't interested in a soup like this until autumn, when local tomatoes are pretty much done. Sure, the stores now have tomatoes all year round, but hot-house varieties are too expensive to use for soups and sauces, and the rest of the tomatoes just aren't that good. They've been bred for shipping and storage and decoration. Canned tomatoes are a much better bet for soups.
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by Jay West
Summer grilling season is upon us and "planking" is a great way to grill the fresh salmon that shows up even in the local markets from time to time. Yeah, "planking." Like boards. Kind of like cooking your salmon on its own cedar serving tray. The result is like a poached and smoked salmon with a lightly roasted exterior. There's nothing quite like it.
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by Jay West
Mention fruit soups around here and a lot of people's eyes get misty. Somewhere in their first sentence is mention of Sweden, Norway, or Finland. But fruit soups are hardly unique to that part of the world. Some people simply refer to this as stewed fruit. Others make it sound more respectable with the Frenchified name, "compote." That's what this was called by both my dad's mother, Nana Inga, who was Swedish, and my mother's great Aunt Katherine (whose side of the family had mostly been here for many generations).
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by Jay West
When I was a child, this recipe was a comfort food that my family called "peanut butter soup." I thought it was one of those recipes my mother clipped out of a magazine in the 1950s. However, the recipe has been in the family for a long time. My mother got it from great-Aunt Katherine. Aunt Katherine said she got the recipe from her mother, who called it "creamed ground-nut soup" and made it with roasted or boiled peanuts. She is supposed to have received the recipe from her family and so on.
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by Jay West
Easter Dinner is a good time for a meal in courses. Start with a soup course. The main course of ham or lamb, asparagus and potatoes can come later. I remember grandmothers starting with just a soup bowl in the middle of each plate and nothing but the soup on the table. Grandmothers could do such things because they were strict and they didn't have the armies of children who made mothers' kitchens seem like mess halls and cafeterias.
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by Jay West
It was probably already a hoary cliche when Ecclesiastes wrote that famous line about there being nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9). I thought about this when my Aunt Jane pointed out that my new, deconstructed versions of tuna hotdish were things that other people had been making for years. Oh well.
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by Jay West
A showstopper of a dish, this main course requires a Sunday afternoon to prepare. Nothing difficult, though. You simply have to let things sit or cook down, and that just takes time. On the other hand, this dish scales up or down very nicely. You want to double the recipe? Double the ingredients. You want half as much chicken? Use half the amount of ingredients.
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by Jay West
There are a lot of hearty potato soups made with roast beef pan drippings, which is the German-American style of potato soup. Neither of these recipes fits that category, but both are hearty soups.
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by Jay West
Swedes are very big on Christmas traditions. No matter how much novelty one finds in the rest of the year, by golly, Christmas foods better be the same every year. Pepparkakor are a traditional part of Swedish Christmases and both my grandmothers were Swedish. So you are probably thinking that this is a traditional recipe. Nope. Neither grandmother gave a hoot for Swedish tradition, and this is an American recipe.
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