Nana's Apple Dressing
Mayor Bill Mutz, Lakeland
12 rolls of Ritz crackers
9 large cooking apples, diced and peeled
3 sticks melted butter
8 eggs, beaten well
3 cups sugar
large box raisins
scant Lawry’s salt
1. Dice apples. Dampen crushed Ritz with 1 cup water – not too much water.
2. Combine beaten eggs with sugar, butter, salt and pepper. Add raisins.
3. Sprinkle sugar on top and spray with spray butter if you have it.
4. Cook at 325 degrees for 45 minutes. (Don’t overcook!) Makes two 9x13 pans.
Nana's Spoon Bread
Mayor Bill Mutz, Lakeland
1 quart 2% milk
4 eggs, separated
1 stick butter
4 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup corn meal
1. Let milk come to a rolling boil. Stir in corn meal slowly and carefully.
2. Stir in well-beaten egg yolks, butter, sugar, and salt.
3. Fold in beaten egg whites very thoroughly.
4. Put in 9x13 pan, and then put that pan into a pan of water while baking. Bake at 325 degrees for 40 minutes.
“These excerpts are from a book one of our daughters-in-law compiled as a Christmas gift to Pam, including the best recipes from our Family’s Legacy. The two that I am submitting are both great for holiday dinners and are two of my favorites personally. By the way, my Mom’s grandma’s name was Nana.”
Gramma Gertrude Trapnell Bowen's Dressing
Kimberly Moore, LKLDNow Reporter
12 slices white bread
2 large sweet onions
1 bunch of celery
1 package Success rice
1 teaspoon of sugar
8 eggs
giblets and neck
butter
1 cup fresh sage
salt and pepper
1. Boil 6 eggs.
2. Toast the bread and then cut or tear into squares.
3. Finely chop the onion and celery and then sauté in butter.
4. Boil giblets and neck in at least four cups of water.
5. Cook rice per instructions.
6. When cooked, remove the meat from the neck bones and finely chop giblets.
7. Chop sage.
8. After the turkey is cooked, remove a lot of the grease from the roasting pan, retain meat scraps. Mix ingredients in the roasting pan and stir in some of the broth until almost pasty.
9. Mix in two raw eggs and add salt and pepper to taste.
10. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.
“In 1933, my Great Grandmother Gertrude Trapnell Bowen sat around a quilt with her daughter June, stepdaughter Erline (my grandmother), and other in-laws, sewing a crazy quilt, chatting and having lunch. Gramma, as my Dad called her, raised six of her husband’s children from his first marriage and then she had five of her own. My great-great grandmother would arrive to these quilting bees by horse and buggy, as her husband didn’t trust automobiles.
My Dad, Maurice Moore, remembers walking under that quilt as a 3-year-old boy, watching as the needles pierced the fabric and the light shined through the joined shapes. I used that quilt in college and still have it on a quilt stand in my bedroom. His grandma raised him starting about that time and would sit him in the kitchen with her. As she cooked, she would explain to him what she was doing and why. His chore some days would be to churn the butter by hand. He also had to chop firewood for the stove. They cooked vegetables from a farm they owned and dressed chickens from the yard.
At Thanksgiving and Christmas, she made this dressing recipe, which is now at least 120 years old – and the best dressing I’ve ever had.”
Chalet Suzanna Broiled Grapefruit
Blair Petersen Updike, Lake Wales
grapefruits
sugar cinnamon
fried chicken livers
1. Choose flat grapefruit so they won’t roll around in your pan, or you could take a small slice off the bottom to flatten it. Half and section each grapefruit. Start by cutting out the core so there will be a reservoir for the delicious juices.
2. Place in a pan and sprinkle cinnamon sugar over the top. Be generous. Place on rack at top and preheat broiler.
3. Broil grapefruit until the tops caramelize. It was not unusual for them to burn the rinds at the restaurant, and chef would just trim anything super burned off, or just send it out that way because as Carl said, “don’t worry it’s dark out there.”
“Here’s the part that’s going to cause some of you problems…Top with fried salty chicken liver. If it were up to me, I’d probably just buy them and retoast before serving rather than dealing with frying in the house. How did this insane combination come about you say? One night at the Chalet there was a big party. One of the hors d’oeuvres was fried chicken livers, but they came out too late to be passed. When it came time to serve the grapefruit, they discovered they were out of the maraschino cherries they usually dropped on top, so my Aunt Vita, not wanting to waste anything, plopped a chicken liver on the top of each grapefruit as they went out the kitchen door. The salty fried flavor of the liver is delicious with the bitter-sweet cinnamon caramel of the grapefruit.
This feels like a recipe from another time, now that the Chalet has been gone for a decade, and canker wiped out most of the backyard grapefruit trees. For those who are unfamiliar, the Chalet Suzanne was a Restaurant and Country Inn on the north-side of Lake Wales. It was a patched together amalgam of old Florida, with pecky cypress and sunny pastel paints, and old-world with dark wood antiques, Persian rugs, stained glass, Moroccan lamps, and painted Turkish tiles. It attracted movie-stars, royalty, and a whole cast of interesting characters who often reached it via the grass private airstrip.
My Aunt Vita married into the Hinshaw family who owned the Chalet and ran it together with her husband Carl for the rest of her life. I did my time there as a 16-year-old, bussing tables for minimum wage (which was probably like $4.75 back then, but you were allowed as much sweet tea and romaine soup as you could consume) and got to observe the goings on in the kitchen. Since the closing of the Chalet my family has continued to make some of the dishes for special occasions including this favorite broiled grapefruit.”
