Door County Recipes: It's Our Cookbook

Wow! It’s still with us after thirty years. Do you want to know how to do a Door County fish boil? Make desserts with Door County cherries? Read some Door County history? Look at drawings of Door County points of interest? It’s all in one little book.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of Door County Recipes Old and New and a Little Local Lore. Dolores Allen, my mother, wrote it and I illustrated it. It was self published in 1989, with a second printing in 1994. It is still available on Amazon today but has been out of print for a long time.

My mother and I worked long and hard on it, but as author she assembled many recipes from her program, Five Minutes With Dolores Allen, that ran on radio station WDOR of Sturgeon Bay. Her program lasted more than fifty years and was about recipes from listeners and other sources. She put them and some local history into 131 pages with illustrations from my pen.

Here is an example. The chapter called Traditional Door County Recipes says, “The famous Door County Fish Boil originated with the early lumberjacks who found it a convenient way to cook the abundance of trout and whitefish found here. Today it has become a tradition and is served as a specialty in many of the Door County restaurants.” On the same page is my drawing of a person photographing the boil-over that makes fish boils unique and attention-getting. The next page tells how it is done.

The book is ours in that it includes plenty of good cooking recommendations and includes names of people who gave her their recipes. It has Mrs. Bassford’s Strawberry Pie, Corrine’s Pioneer Bread Pudding, Bobbi’s Sauce for Ham, Ruthie’s Ministrone Soup, and more. This makes a personal experience out of cooking as well as a family one. My lentil soup and potato soup are there. Mary Lou Allen (my brother Eddy’s wife) gave her hash brown casserole and Mother offered plenty of her own creations.

It is ours also as one of many ongoing creative projects of my parents, Ed and Dolores Allen, who started several businesses, one of which continues today, Radio Station WDOR. Our family was WDOR starting in 1951. My mother worked in the office, did billing, broadcast her daily Five Minute With Dolores Allen. My brothers worked on the air as soon as their voices changed. (Brother Eddy is still managing it.) I wrote commercials and news and did office work as a teenager. The cookbook is part of this shared responsibility as another Allen business. They had a publishing company and printing business in Sturgeon Bay, which my mother operated with a staff assistant. The cookbook was part of it and she drew me into it with drawing.  She did the setup and had a Wisconsin company print it.

Door County Recipes is thirty years old and still good. Mother went to the great kitchen in the sky in 2005 at age 92.