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.

Pumpkin Bread - One Loaf

My daughter Sarah has a shelf filled with canned pumpkin, which she bought for a purpose that is not part of this discussion and no longer matters in her life. In response to her need to find something to do with it all, I offer her and the world a recipe for pumpkin bread. She lives alone with her cats, so this continues my theme of preparing foods for one or two instead of a family of humans. Here is the opportunity to make one loaf of pumpkin bread.

Great recipes often turn up in church cookbooks. Often the contributors to these books have simple and delicious ways to prepare foods. I found this in a book that I bought long ago in my Green Bay years, St. John the Baptist Church Family Cook Book, created by the church in Howard in 1982. I shrank the quantities and revised ingredients a bit. It is sweet and almost cakey.

One problem might be what to do with the other half of the can of pumpkin. I suggest pumpkin soup, which exists elsewhere in my blog. On the other hand, one can double it and make more pumpkin bread.

For Sarah and not her cats, but maybe her deceased dog, here it is.

Pumpkin Bread – One loaf

1/3 cup shortening                                                          1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup sugar                                                                         ¾ teaspoon salt

2 eggs                                                                                   ¼ teaspoon baking powder

1 cup canned or cooked pumpkin                             ½ teaspoon cinnamon

1/3 cup water                                                                    12 teaspoon ground cloves

1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour                                            ½ cup raisins

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour one standard loaf pan. I learned the hard way that just greasing the pan caused the baked bread to stick to the pan, so I suggest sprinkling a dusting of flour on the bottom and sides as with cake.

Stir together until well mixed the flour, soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and cloves. In a large bowl cream the shortening and sugar. Add eggs, pumpkin and water and stir until blended. Mix in the flour mixture. Last add the raisins. Nuts can be added. Pour it into the bread pan and bake about 70 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the loaf from the pan immediately.

Turkey Quiche for Two

Leftover turkey is the aftermath of Thanksgiving cooks. Our family gathered at my home and ate plenty, but still I have leftover turkey. I made a big pot of turkey soup and still have leftover turkey. I thought of something else to do with it, and here is a non-traditional quiche that is easy to make and won’t last all week. It has more refined processed food than I prefer (Bisquick), but it tastes good. It’s non-traditional because there is no crust to roll. The Bisquick makes crust while the quiche bakes.

This recipe is a reason to have an 8-inch pie tin in the cupboard even though stores don’t sell them anymore. To solve the 8-inch pie dish dilemma, I think the quiche can be baked in a six by eight inch glass baking dish that Pyrex sells. I didn’t try it since I have a round 8-inch pie pan.

Leftover Turkey Quiche for Two

Put into blender container and blend for ten seconds:

2 eggs

1 cup milk (I prefer whole milk)

1/3 cup Bisquick – regular or gluten free

1/3 cup melted butter

¼ teaspoon salt approximately

Pepper

Pour the blended mixture into ungreased 8-inch pie tin or 6x8-inch baking dish.

Distribute on top:

¾ cup or more chopped cooked turkey (chopped cooked chicken works too)

½ cup or more grated Swiss cheese – or cheese of your choice

Bake it at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. Eat it hot.

It is possible to find 8-inch pie plates in thrift stores such as Goodwill.

Meat Loaf for Two

It appears that meat loaf is a favorite American food. The evidence is in cookbooks and some restaurants. Bluephie’s restaurant in Madison serves Meatloaf of the Gods, and it appears in the cookbook from Monte’s Blue Plate Diner of Madison, which has the same owner as Bluephie’s. My culinarily inclined granddaughter, Dana, ate it at Bluephies and lived to go on to cooking school.

Better Homes and Gardens has dressed it up. The 15^th edition of Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 2010, has a recipe with thirteen ingredients. If that’s not enough, the book has an illustrated page with ten glazes for meat loaf. That tells me that Americans like meat loaf in excelsis, not just plain. The above mentioned Meat Loaf of the Gods has eighteen ingredients.

Twentieth century cooking celebrity James Beard presents six different recipes for meat loaf in James Beard’s American Cookery, published in 1972. He also tells us that meat loaf is a product of the twentieth century that coincides with the popularity of ground beef. He then gives pointers about good meat loaf. It should be highly seasoned and firm but not dry. He likes it cold in sandwiches. It may be served hot with good tomato sauce, mushroom sauce or onion sauce. When cold, horseradish sauce or Cumberland (what’s that?) sauce is appropriate. James Beard’s book contains the only page-long essay that I know of that is about meat loaf.

I am fond of meat loaf. I horrified my mother when I was about ten years old when I asked it for my birthday dinner. She thought it was too dull. Since Mother was a champion cook, she made it for me and it was very good even without sauce on it. This week I found myself trying to figure out how to make meat loaf for one or two people, when all the cookbooks expect a small army to be at the table. I didn’t want to be eating meat loaf and its leftovers every day for a week, so I sat down and invented a plain meat loaf that would feed one or two people, unless one of them eats like a horse as my late husband did.

Meat loaf is somewhat like stew. One can put a great variety of ingredients into it and it will be good. That is shown in the cook books mentioned above. Here is my version.

Meat Loaf for Two

½ - ¾ pound lean ground beef                   1/3 cup chopped celery

1/3 cup rolled oats                                           ½ teaspoon salt (or to taste)

½ cup tomato juice                                          pepper to taste

1 egg                                                                     ½ teaspoon ground thyme

1/3 cup chopped onion                                 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Mix it all together and put in a greased baking dish. Bake about 1 hour at 350 degrees.

The cook book authors have suggested many more ingredients, including spices, mushrooms, vegetables like green pepper and carrot, catsup, cream, other meats to combine with beef such as sausage, and more. It is a wonderful experience if one is not vegetarian.

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.

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.