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When was the last time you spent 45 minutes in the kitchen in order to stir a pot of stove-top rice pudding?  Until last week, I don’t remember ever doing that.

A couple of years ago, I got the “brainy” idea of writing a memoir entitled, “My Recipe Box.”   It would be about family members from my childhood through about age 40.  I thought I would include recipes from each of these people. I remember how touching it was to find some of my mother’s recipe cards after her death.  They meant far more to me than the Havilland China she left me. 

Now I am in the editing process of this book, and I am typing up the recipes.  Those wonderful dishes I have not cooked for a while, I am cooking again, just to make sure the recipes are correct. 

I never had the recipe for one of my favorite desserts my mom used to make in the summertime.  She made it in a 13 X 9 inch pan.  There was a lemon filling on the bottom, a rice pudding or custard in the middle, and a glossy chocolate sauce on the top.  I had asked my sister and late Aunt Jean if they had the recipe.  They didn’t, nor could they remember it.

So, I set out to re-create it.  Oh, gosh – why do I put myself through these trials?  Well, I went to the Internet, “the place” to get recipes in 2014.   I did not find the recipe, but learned that it likely came from Brazil, where they are known for their rice dishes and desserts.  Bingo!  I had a good idea where my mom got the recipe, probably in the 1950s, from Betty Gorsuch.  My parents late friends, Betty and Herb Gorsuch’s, parents were missionaries and Betty was raised in Brazil.  They spoke many languages, and Betty had a position with Gates Rubber Company as an interpreter!  She was the only “working woman” I knew growing up, except for my two aunts, sisters of each parent.

I have attempted making this dish twice now; it still isn’t right.  The lemon layer seems right – I used the recipe for filling for a lemon meringue pie. I’m getting close to the top chocolate layer.  I think it is a “glossy” chocolate sauce.  The middle rice layer eludes me.  First, I made a stove-top rice custard.  It had too much substance. I think it had too many eggs.  Then, I tried a stove-top eggless pudding.  It called for stirring the rice often for 45 minutes!  I did it and almost died.  I could not remember the last time I was in the kitchen for 45 minutes!   I wish I thought of bringing my laptop into the kitchen and watching something! After all that work, the pudding just did not work.

You know in the 1950s many so called convenience foods came to the supermarket; for example, cake mixes, TV dinners, and frozen strawberries – remember – – in those awful cardboard boxes with the medal ends.    I am going to try this dish one more time.  Recently, I learned that Minute Rice – cooked and then dehydrated before it is poured into its distinctive red box — was introduced in 1949. 

I can’t imagine my mom stirring rice for 45 minutes.  After all, she used a pressure cooker! (So did I for many years until I got a microwave in the late 1970s.)   Mom had a severe heart problem that I think hampered her ability to do many things, including getting excited about time consuming recipes.  She did cook dinner every day.  Few mothers do that anymore.  (I cooked dinner every day too, until my kids were almost out of the nest.  I still cook dinner.  It rarely takes me longer than 20 minutes.)

Last night I cooked a batch of “Minute Rice” pudding – just stir occasionally for six minutes. Wow, it turned out just the way I remember dear old mom’s!BTW (by the way – I used the generic brand – half the cost of “Minute Rice.”  If you want to make a 2014 version of this recipe right now, all you need is a jar of lemon curd (the expensive kind) a little rice pudding from the deli (you may have to dig out the raisins) and a jar of pricey chocolate sauce.  In some “impressive” glasses, put a couple of spoonfuls of lemon curd, followed by a couple of spoonfuls of rice pudding, and then top with chocolate sauce.  A $10 dessert for sure at a “good” restaurant!

I got to thinking. Mom also ironed.  Ironing was very important in the 50s and early 1960s. In the summertime, I iron some.  I find it very satisfying and relaxing.  However, if it was part of my weekly routine, I’d go crazy! 

Of course, we had to wait for the clothes to dry on the line before mom could iron them.  I don’t know when we got a dryer, maybe after I left home in 1965, a year after my mom died. I do remember at age 8 helping mom put my petticoats in a sugar and starch solution and then hanging them on the line so that they would dry straight out.

We waited to use the phone. We waited because other families on the “party line” were using it.  We waited when it started ringing to make sure it was “our ring” and not another family’s. (We had a famous baby doctor on our party time.  That damn phone rang at all hours of the night.) We waited to call Grandma because after 8 p.m. and on the weekends the long distance rate was less.  We waited for other family members to end their conversations.  We had one phone until I was about 14, and then we got an “extension” phone for the basement.  I’d go crazy for sure.  I love my I Phone!  I can call whenever all over the world.

We’ve “Come Along Way Baby!”  I for one would not like to go back to the 1950s!  How could I cook, watch a movie, talk on the phone and do a load of wash and iron a few things all at the same time?