Bite into Mrs. Pickerell’s Thanksgiving tips, recipes from 1908

As we head into Thanksgiving week, here are some tips and recipes from Mrs. Pickerell that I found in a Nov. 22, 1908, El Paso Times article.

Mrs. Pickerell’s Thanksgiving recipes

A recipe for genuine Thanksgiving – nine bountiful feasts and three generations sat down

It sounded so good that I am going to tell it to you just as Mrs. Pickerell told it to me.

Youth is one requirement

That you must be young. Mrs. Pickerell is young. She says her years register 70 but half that many passed by without touching her.

She declares that 20 years of Thanksgiving have kept her young. Do you wonder I asked for the recipe?

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The Thanksgiving recipe

Here it is. Follow it as she has done for 20 years. Begin as she did with papa, mamma and the children; keep adding a leaf to the Thanksgiving table until there is room for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Think of doing the honors at the head of such a table!

It is a strain on the imagination for beginners. That is why we give you the diagram of the table which Mrs. Pickerell sketched for The Times.

Don’t wait until third generation

You will have to fill up with friends until the third generation arrives.

Take from the oven, the biggest, juiciest turkey imaginable, have his impulsive legs tied firmly together and his glistening brown breast fairly bursting with goodness. Put him in the place marked “Turkey.” Since he is the inspiration of all that is to follow, let the hostess attend upon him personally as a matter of sentiment.

For an old fashioned dinner

This table is set for an old fashioned dinner. Even the different foods are congenial and should be served, side by side, on the same plate, not coldly offered, a bit at a time in sample dishes arranged about one lonesome plate. Mrs. Pickerell takes decided objection to such a mode of serving. At the head of the table there must be a regular Santa Claus hostess who fills every stock — I mean plate — to the brim.

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No treachery permitted

This dinner permits of no treachery, such as having the next course out of sight. Every blessed bit of the dinner must be set on the table just as it is marked on the diagram. There will be no danger of the Doubting Thomases gorging themselves with soup. They can see every stop of the way as they go and know just when to take a short cut and when to go the longest way around.

An abundance of good things

It isn’t sufficient for the table to be literally groaning under the weight of Thanksgiving cheer but the there-is-plenty-more-in-the-kitchen spirit must pervade the dining room atmosphere. To prove the assertion doubly true, Mrs. Pickerell always had her guest stay to supper and declares there was always sufficient left over for a bountiful repast.

Mrs. Pickerell’s Thanksgiving recipes

Apple sauce

Cut in quarters; boil until tender with sugar and a little bit of butter. Boil until sugar becomes syrupy. Season with lemon or cinnamon.

Cranberry sauce

Stew the cranberries, do not put through sieve. Jell in their own juice.

Pound cake

Nine eggs. Beat white and yellows separately. Cream the yolks, 1 good pound sugar and 3/4 of a pound of butter together until light as air. Beat the whites separately and add alternately with the flour until you judge it to be the right stiffness. Bake in moderate oven.

French peas

Drain off water, then put in a teacup full of cream; add pepper, salt and butter.

Roast turkey

Tie the legs together and put in the oven whole. Have a little vinegar, sugar and allspice to baste it. Stuff with chestnuts and oysters. Make the dressing with egg. Put it on the table whole, with its legs tied with a tissue-covered cord.

Boiled ham

Take a 16-pound ham. Boil; when done, skin, then bake brown in the oven. Put on flowers made of peppers, spices and so on.

Chicken salad

Cut the chicken up fine, put through the meat machine. Boil a dozen eggs, cut up; put in celery and a tiny bit of cabbage, all kinds of good seasonings, a little vinegar — a few bread crumbs to add body to it and make it easy to take up in spoon. Take whites and yolks of boiled eggs, hash them and use for making little designs on top of the salad. Put a green sprig on for garnishing.

Salmon salad

A few onions sliced very thin, pepper, salad and vinegar. Old fashioned people, as a rule, do not like oil.

Sweet potatoes

Boil, slice, put butter, sugar, a good quality of brown sugar, put in the oven.

Irish potatoes

Boil, mash, use cream, butter and a teaspoon of baking powder, which will make them as white as a drift of snow.

Corn pudding

In a tin baking dish: Open as many cans of corn as desired, turn it into tin, put in pepper and salt, plenty of butter and a teacupful of cream to a can, then set in oven and let brown.

Trish Long may be reached at tlong@elpasotimes.com or 915-546-6179.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Trish Long: Taste Mrs. Pickerell’s 1908 Thanksgiving tips, recipes