Family recipes

[wtg]

I hadn't looked at my mom's recipe notebook in years. Today I remembered a no-bake cake she used to make and I went looking for the recipe. I got waylaid during my search....

Mom's very well-worn recipe notebook.

Besides recipes, it also housed cartoons and jokes cut out from the newspaper. Our neighbor Emma annotated this one. It was poking fun at my Dad, who wasn't a fireman but was an avid gardener. It was taped to the refrigerator for years.

I stumbled upon a dessert that Mom used to make for company, and that I haven't had for decades. It was called Broken Glass Dessert, and was undoubtedly some invention of the Jell-O company. I found versions of the recipe online. My Mom's didn't have the graham cracker crust, but otherwise it looked just like this:

Mom's recipe:

Here's the recipe for the one pictured above, with the graham cracker crumbs.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/broken-glass-dessert/

It uses frozen whipped topping instead of the powdered Dream Whip my Mom's version does. I've seen other versions that say you can whip real cream to soft peaks and use it instead of a whipped topping product. Might be tasty, but not as 1950s as the original.... And Mom's recipe uses lemon jello with the pineapple juice and Dream Whip to make the opaque white part of the dessert. The Taste of Home recipe uses unflavored gelatin.

So I'm going to make broken glass dessert. And yes, I did find the no-bake cake and I'll be making that, too.

Please post your family's vintage recipes here!!

[Steve Miller]

Mom was an excellent cook but she didn’t bake much. Her go-to dessert for any occasion was always this chocolate chip pie. She made it with a graham cracker crust and I have never seen it anywhere else.

[Bernard]

@wtg I have a recipe book, "A Collection of the Very Finest Recipes ever assembled into one Cookbook" from 1979, Becker Publications that has a cake similar to your Broken Glass Dessert. In this book it's called Broken Glass Cake, and does have a vanilla wafer or graham cracker crust. The book has no pictures though. Nice to see your color photo.

My mother baked a lot and one unusual recipe I remember, made for the holidays, was a date torte. It is a refrigerator "cake". I don't have the recipe but I remember (mostly) how it was made and I made it here once, several years ago. You need:

1 lb pitted dates (I had an 18 oz. container and it was perfect)
Water
1 box graham crackers
1 pint whipping cream

Chop the dates (about 1/4" pieces. I used the food processor and pulsed them several times). Add water... maybe start with 3/4 cup of water. Bring to a good simmer. Simmer until the consistency of jam. Add more water if necessary. It should spread without running. Cook long enough to soften the dates.

Place 2 graham crackers side-by-side in the middle of a large sheet of aluminum foil. Spread with a good 1/8"-3/16" of the warm dates. Top with 2 more crackers. Layer the crackers and dates until all are used up. It should come out looking like a cube of layered crackers and dates. Wrap tightly in the foil and refrigerate over night.

When ready to partake of this heavenly delight, whip the cream and frost the entire cube. Have extra cream on the side. To serve, slice thinly (1/4"-3/8" slices), top an extra dollop of whipped cream.

It comes out as more than the sum of it's parts. As the torte sits in the fridge, the grahams soften up. . . . Hm. . . maybe I'll make it this year.

[wtg]

@Bernard - Your recipe for the date torte is almost identical in concept to the no-bake torte that my Mom used make, the one that got me back to her notebook to look for the recipe.

My Mom's torte (Šaldytas tortas - Frozen torte) uses arrowroot biscuits for the cake "layers", like your Mom's recipe uses graham crackers. The filling consists of a sort-of butter cream frosting that has chopped dried apricots, prunes, and finely chopped almonds. After it's assembled, the torte goes in the freezer for a day or two, and the arrowroot biscuits soften up and kind of meld with the frosting.

They've stopped making Nabisco arrowroot biscuits, but I think the Gerber version will work fine even though they're a bit thicker than the Nabiscos were. We have a number of stores that carry Eastern European products (Polish, Lithuanian, etc) and there may be a cookie available at one of those that might also work.

I'll post the recipe after I translate it from Lithuanian and find some suitable biscuits. And I'll definitely be trying out your recipe, as I'm a huge fan of dates!