Dolores Allen and Recipes

This is an article I wrote for Edible Door, a Door County publication. I don't mention that she is my mother. I don't know if it will look like this after the publisher does something with it.

Dolores Allen was part of the Door County cooking scene for more than fifty years. She created her long lasting recipe program in 1951 shortly after the startup of radio station WDOR by her husband Ed Allen. First it was called “Kitchenette and Fashionette,” and not long afterward it became “Five Minutes With Dolores Allen.” It might have been put into the Guiness Book of World Records if anyone had documented its duration for number of years it was on the air. More than fifty. In later years the recipes became a cookbook, Door County Recipes and a Little Local Lore.

Dolores’ little down home five minute program sparked an ongoing relationship about cooking with her listeners, who mailed her recipes regularly. She wasn’t like Julia Child or Martha Stewart and wasn’t like the other well-known culinary experts. She had no education in cooking, or home economics as it used to be called, but she knew cooking from her mother, her own experience, and the women’s magazines she read during her long life. So Dolores happily tried out most of the offerings of her listeners and announced them on her program for all the world to enjoy. The program’s long time sponsor was Corner House Shops of Sturgeon Bay.

After saying, “Thank you and good morning, everyone,” Dolores would tell what the day’s recipe was, with anecdotes about the person who created it if she was familiar with the person. She would list the ingredients and the method of preparation, and then repeat the recipe, all in a five minute time period. This was radio, so she was not cooking while talking. Her program originally was on the air before Sturgeon Bay began to have television from Green Bay.

This woman was no couch potato. Dolores grew up in Winona, Minnesota, where she proved to be an attractive, creative person. She was Miss Winona in the late 1920s, earned a degree in English and French from the College of St. Teresa in Winona, and then moved to Chicago. She worked for Life Magazine and did some modeling. She married Ed Allen who was a Chicago radio announcer, and had three children, while being a writer of fiction and radio drama. They brought these talents and advantages to Sturgeon Bay, created a corporation with local investors, and WDOR was born. That produced the beginning of the cooking program.

Dolores could write, and she could talk. She brought a wide range of recipes to the program. Some were from Door County restaurants (with permission), some were from listeners, and some came from her own recipe collection or cookbooks. She once borrowed a chapter from a cook book belonging to her daughter, Kathy, and later returned it with many notes and dates of broadcast in the margins. Always she gave credit to the sources. Dolores also created in and published The Key to the Door Peninsula guidebook for many years, in the 1950s once a year and later twice each year. It continues to exist in altered form today.

The popular cookbook was an outgrowth of the recipe program. Door County Recipes and a Little Local Lore is a book of recipes compiled by Dolores from her radio program, along with some of her personal favorites. She included little comments with the recipes, anecdotes of Door County history and illustrations by her daughter.  Who could resist Mrs. Bassford’s Strawberry Pie, which arrived from Connie Anderson?  And everyone would want to try du Nord Cherry Torte from Mrs. Max Fletcher. Don’t miss Broccoli and Apple Soup from Eileen Madson  of Sister Bay. Then everyone should try Dolores’ personal favorites, like Infallible Roast Beef or $200 French Dressing. The story of the dressing is included, including the story of the bill for $200 that the lady who requested the recipe received, whereupon she shared it widely. This is the flavor of the Dolores Allen cookbook.   Publication was in 1989, with a second printing in 1994, by her company, Key Enterprises of Sturgeon Bay.  It is out of print but still appears in used book stores.

Year of No Sugar - Book review

What’s it like to live without sugar for a year? Eve Schaub found out and wrote about it in Year of No Sugar, an amusing book that she calls a memoir. Schaub, her husband and two daughters all took part in this dietary adventure for a year. Schaub did this after watching a You Tube video, “Sugar: the Bitter Truth,” presented by Dr. Robert Lustig. Lustig is the author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease, which explains that sugar is the reason for the worldwide obesity epidemic

Eve Schaub watched the video and said her brain caught fire. She said it changed her life. The video called sugar a poison that makes people sick, overweight, obese and unhappy. That was eye opening for Schaub, so she decided to stop eating added sugar, and her family joined in. She kept a blog about the experience. She wrote the book. The family established rules, such as don’t eat added sugar but do eat foods like fruit containing naturally occurring sugar. They agreed to eat one sugar containing dessert per month and another on a birthday. Sweets at school were optional, but the girls mostly did not eat them.

Schaub’s book covers a bit about sugar’s destructive characteristics, but most of it is about the family’s day to day experiences during a year without sugar. It’s not a long essay about the evils of sugar, but rather a chronicle of avoiding the ubiquitous sugar that they learned is in a great many foods. Schaub learned to cook without sugar but with substitutions like dates to give some sweetness. Her sugar free cookies pleased the family and others. The holidays were there, including Halloween and Christmas, with attendant pitfalls. She pointed out that the trick or treat candy was saved for consumption after the year was finished.  The family took a trip to Italy and stayed on the diet. . The family stayed with the project with no mutinies. There were times when one or another family member wanted sugar very much.

What did they learn from the experiment? They learned that sugar is everywhere, especially at school. Schaub became a label reader. Her awareness of the prevalence of sugar was heightened. Schaub became acquainted with David Gillespie, an Australian who publicly advocated about sugar’s destructiveness in his book Sweet Poison. Lustig and Gillespie are support people behind her book.

I haven’t read many books like this. It reminded me a bit of A.J. Jacobs’ book, Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Jacobs tried various diets and weight loss techniques for a period of time that might have been a year, and then wrote about his experiences. Like Schaub, he didn’t preach, he just told the story.

Pumpkin Soup Again

The largest room in the world is the room for improvement. I offer a revision of the pumpkin soup recipe that appeared on this blog in 2010. It is revised to include, among other things, the big poison of our era, sugar. Ok, it’s real maple syrup from real maple trees, not the stuff that people put on their pancakes that is some kind of sugar with or without maple flavoring.

I acknowledge that sugar in various forms is responsible for a lot of chronic disease today, especially diabetes. I also acknowledge that a bit of sweetener greatly improves pumpkin soup, especially if the soup is made from canned pumpkin. It’s an improvement. Canned pumpkin is not as good as pumpkin off the vine, but it is easier to use.

Pumpkin Soup Revised

Serves 2-3 people

1 small pumpkin, or 1 can pumpkin (about 2 cups cooked)

1 ½ cups chicken broth or stock

About ½ cup chopped or diced onion and celery

1/3 cup heavy cream

¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground sage, or more fresh sage

¾ teaspoon salt (salt is already in the broth, so be gentle)

¼ cup real maple syrup or other sweetener (or to taste)

If you need to cook the pumpkin, cut it in half, remove the seeds and roast it, cut side down, until it is soft. Scoop out the pumpkin and discard the shell.

Stir together the pumpkin and chicken broth. Puree this in a blender if you wish. Pour it into a saucepan and bring to a simmer on medium heat. Cook the onion and celery in it for a few minutes until they soften. Stir in the nutmeg, cinnamon, sage and salt. Mix well. Add the cream. Remove from heat and enjoy.

Zucchini Meditation

Zucchini is cheap at farmers’ markets now. Zucchini is your friend. It will never let you down. It loves you no matter what. It would vote for you or your party if it could. It would curl up and cuddle with you if it had anything to cuddle with. Am I confusing this vegetable with your dog or your best friend?

A dog can’t be made into bread, but a friend can eat it. We can all eat it together and be glad. We can all bask in the bad ingredients that make it taste good, like white flour, fat and sugar, and, oh yes, zucchini, the one good ingredient. I don’t stand behind zucchini bread as a healthy food, but I endorse it as a way to use up all the zucchini that awaits us at the farmers’ market. Zucchini bread is easy to make. Zucchini….it’s what’s for lunch. And breakfast. And dinner.

I learned to make zucchini bread a lot of years ago when my daughter, Elizabeth, a.k.a. Libby, came home from her friends’ house with a card with a zucchini recipe on it. Her friends were Leah and Erika, and their mom, Randee, had given the information to Libby. I received it in Libby’s own handwriting as only a kid about eight years old can write it. At least that’s the way I remember it.

Zucchini Bread  (2 loaves)

2 cups sugar                                                                1 teaspoon salt

1 cup cooking oil                                                         1 teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs                                                                          3 teaspoons cinnamon

2 cups chopped zucchini or summer squash              3 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons vanilla extract                                         2 teaspoons baking soda

Beat the eggs. Add sugar and oil and mix until well blended. Add the zucchini.  Stir together the dry ingredients and add them to the first mixture. Mix well. Put it into two medium sized greased and floured loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees for one hour. Use tooth pick test for doneness.

I chop the zucchini in the food processor.

The Big Fat Surprise – Book Review

Fat. Healthy or unhealthy? Saturated vs unsaturated, trans fat. Fat science, fat politics. Diets: low fat, Mediterranean, paleo, low carb.  Dean Ornish vs Robert Atkins. Gary Taubes. These are covered in The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, by Nina Teicholz. I was fascinated as I read about how the book turns conventional dogma about fat upside down. Teicholz, a writer and apparently not a doctor or nutritionist, spent ten years on this book and gives us about a hundred pages of documentation, including notes and bibliography, for her assertions that the last sixty years’ advice on fats have been wrong.

To quote the author, “The more I probed, the greater was my realization that all our dietary recommendations about fat—the ingredient about which our health authorities have obsessed most during the pat sixty years—appeared to be not just slightly offtrack but completely wrong. Almost nothing that we commonly believe today about fats generally and saturated fat in particular appears, upon close examination, to be accurate. “(p. 2).

Teicholz points out that once the low fat, low cholesterol hypothesis was in place, it was very difficult to write or talk against it. She goes through the history of America’s advice and experiments about dietary fats. According to Teicholz, studies that contradicted accepted belief were often not given credibility or not published; researchers were unable to get funding for further studies. Even prominent experts in the field were not believed. Meanwhile, Americans found themselves with growing epidemics of chronic disease related to diet.

Much of the book examines the story of nutrition science regarding dietary fats as its advice went from bad to worse. In the 1950s medical experts looked for ways to reduce heart disease and came up with the idea that saturated fat, or primarily animal fat, caused heart disease. Ancel Keys developed what various writers have called the cholesterol hypothesis, which said that high cholesterol caused heart disease. From that came the low fat diet, and advice to replace fats with carbohydrates. Teicholz takes us from that to saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat conclusions, bolstered by President Eisenhower’s heart attack. Lots of science, both good and bad, appears here. Bad or flawed science comes from studies which were designed with a particular conclusion in mind, or studies with data points that support the hypotheses but not the ones that do not, and other flaws of design, participation or follow-up. Teicholz read and reported on a great many studies.

Sugar never got much study, according to this book. Teicholz suggests that studies have shown that sugar causes heart disease, not saturated fat. And so Americans went from the saturated fat veto to the low fat diet, to trans fats and manufactured fats to the Mediterranean diet to high fat low carb. At the end the Atkins diet wins after being scorned by doctors and nutrition people for many years. The Atkins diet is characterized by high fat meat and low carb vegetables. Teicholz reports the studies, large and small. She credits nationally known food journalist Gary Taubes with breaking through the accepted story because he is outside the system, not a doctor or nutritionist. She also says she was able to write the book for the same reason.

Food manufacturers are not vilified in this book, but the part they played in creating foods for these diets is told, as is the politics of food that gave us the food pyramid. The USDA continues to say stay the course and avoid saturated fats. Teicholz says that death from heart disease has declined but the actual occurrence of it has not appeared to decline, possibly because medical treatment has improved. She points out that Americans “have experienced skyrocketing epidemics obesity and diabetes.” (p. 327). She says that recent studies have showed the absence of negative effect of saturated fat on heart disease, obesity or diabetes. She concludes that “bias and habit present powerful, if not impenetrable, barriers to change.” (p. 326).

Teicholz does not address the effect of her conclusions on the environmental consequences of trying to feed animals to millions of people beyond saying that she recognizes it but environmental impact is not within the scope of her book. She also does not advocate for or against vegetarian diets but shows that they come up in studies of fats.

This book is one more addition to my library of ideas on how to eat well as a way to stay healthy. I read other well qualified writers and understand that not all agree with her dietary conclusions.

Black Raspberry Cobbler for 2

Black raspberries are ripe again. I have invaded the berry patches nearby and found enough to make dessert. Well, maybe desserts.  Unfortunately, sugar plays big parts in desserts with berries, so I don’t promise that today’s dessert will improve your health. Your outlook maybe, but not your health. Old fashioned raspberry cobbler is delicious. And berry scavenging is fun in spite of the thorns on the bushes. It’s worth the scratches. On the other hand, scavenging at the farmers’ market probably is easier in the long run.

I learned to do roadside gathering from my father. We spent the warm seasons gathering wild asparagus, grapes, apples and maybe some other goodies during my childhood in Door County. We brought home grapes and apples and he insisted that Mother make jelly. I remember him filling his pockets with apples and Mother lamenting, “Oh, no, do I have to make jelly?” Her jelly was very good. I don’t think she ever made cobbler, but no one is perfect, not even my mother who was famous for her recipe show on radio.

I found my recipe for blackberry cobbler (see my blog post of August 6, 2010) and tried it with black raspberries. While it was a good adaptation, I decided that blackberries must be sweeter than black raspberries, so I increased the amount of sugar after my trial run. It isn’t extremely sweet because it came from a 1941 cookbook, the Prairie Farmer WLS Cook Book, written before excessive sugar got its big hold on the American palate. In that book it is cherry cobbler, so it has changed a bit. Once again I reduced it to a quantity appropriate for two people.

Black Raspberry Cobbler for 2

1 ½ cups fresh black raspberries (approximately) (frozen ones might work)

½ cup water

½ cup sugar

1 ½ tablespoons all purpose flour

½ cup all purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 ½ tablespoons butter

1 ½ tablespoons milk (approximately)

Find a baking dish that is 7x7 inches or 6x8 inches. It should hold about 1 to 1 ½ quarts. The cobbler won’t come up to the top of the dish after it is baked.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Put berries and water in the baking dish.  Combine the ½ cup  sugar and 1 ½ tablespoons flour, and sprinkle it over the top. Put it in the oven and stir occasionally until the mixture is heated, about as long as it takes to mix the dough that goes on top.  Mix together the ½ cup flour, baking powder, 1 tablespoon sugar and salt. Cut in butter until it is in small pieces and resembles pie crust dough. You never made pie crust? Just guess. It really is a biscuit.  Add milk and stir until soft dough is formed. Stir as little as possible. Roll the dough about 1/3 inch thick and place it on the hot berry mixture in the baking dish to cover most of the top. If the dough is too wet to roll, add more flour.

Bake it at 425 degrees for about 30 minutes. Serve it plain or topped with whipped cream or ice cream.

My Father, Ed Allen

Fathers’ Day is a time to remember fathers, mine especially. He was the greatest. In his 82 years of life, spanning most of the twentieth century, he worked in radio and television in Chicago, Green Bay, and Sturgeon Bay, started and succeeded with two radio stations, and did a lot more. Much of what he accomplished was in collaboration with my mother, brothers and me. We were a family enterprise.

Edward Allen, jr., was born in Chicago in 1910, the only child of his Swedish father and German mother. People who drive to Chicago on the Interstate highway can still see Brentano School, which he attended. It even has a large sign on it. Apparently their Logan Square neighborhood was somewhat unsavory, so sometime during his childhood, the little family moved to Oak Park, where he graduated from Oak Park High School in 1929. Their Lutheran faith was very important to them, and Father attended the Moody Sunday School, part of the Moody Church, as a child. Later he joined the Episcopal Church.

After graduation, he became a radio announcer, first at WAAF, then WGN, then WMAQ, the NBC station, and then the NBC television station in Chicago.  He discovered my mother and married her in 1938.

Father was proud of being on the WMAQ staff and had his own program, The Early Bird Show. This show showed off the wonderful Ed Allen creativity. When I was born, he had a contest for his listeners to name me. It was Valentine’s Day, and some proposed names were Valentine, Heart, and Love. Fortunately, my mother won the contest with the name Kathleen. Father also had listeners send quilt squares to his show, with the early bird theme. He gave them to Grandma to sew together and make into a quilt. I still have the Early Bird quilt.  If that isn’t enough, he took our St. Bernard to work on the dog’s six-month birthday, where presumably the dog spoke on cue. Father also took me to work and I sang a song, Pumpkin Pie, on the Early Bird Show. I was about five years old. I got my first fan letter as a result of that. He brought my mother, the writer, into the show, with a regular segment called The Allens at Home, complete with goofy sound effects.

While the Early Bird Show was a creative outlet, before that Father also did live commercials. He used to say that my brother David’s birth was financed by doing live commercials for “Whiz, Best Nickel Candy There Is!” Recording tape wasn’t around then, since it was the 1940s, so he went from radio station to radio station and did each spot as it happened.  Father was the radio voice of big band broadcasts in Chicago also.

Life was good then for our family. In 1951 Father started a radio station in Sturgeon Bay with backing from some local people, which is still on the air as WDOR am and fm. We were newly situated in Door County. He also did announcing on the first television station in Green Bay, WBAY-TV, for a while, and with a partner started a radio station in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, which (I think) still exists as WCUB, although the partners sold the station not long after starting it. In Sturgeon Bay, my mother, my two brothers and I all worked at WDOR. My husband Rick also worked there for two years after we got married. It was a family operation. Now my brother Eddy and his son Danny keep it going along with other staff people.

Father never slowed down. He gave Sturgeon Bay The Movie Channel by subscription before cable was there. He and another man started the Cherry Train, a tour train that still operates on Washington Island, although they sold the Cherry Train many years ago. He and my mother started the Key to the Door Peninsula tourist guidebook in the 1950s. He sold advertising for it and she put it together. Mother was the eighty percent owner of that partnership. They sold that company in their old age. Father was Republican Chairman of Door County for eight years. He promoted Door County as a tourist destination through the Door County Chamber of Commerce. He served on the board of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and is in its Hall of Fame. He was a member of the National Association of Broadcasters and the Sturgeon Bay Rotary Club.

Finally, cancer and congestive heart failure took their toll. Somewhere along the line Father retired but went to work every day anyway while my brother Eddy took over the management. One morning while he was getting ready to go to work, he died suddenly. It was 1992. And that was the end of a life filled with activity and service.