Gassen: A new recipe for making a family

My mom visited from St. Louis last week. Within minutes of her arrival at our house, the evidence that we were together was strewn across the kitchen table: cookbooks, stacks of cards from Gram’s recipe box and her Kappa Alpha Theta sorority cookbook from decades ago, filled with recipes credited to Mrs. Husband’s Name, the chef’s first name lost to history.

It’s what we do together — comb through old-school recipes, noting the abundance of cream-of-something or condensed tomato soup as an integral ingredient. The particularly egregious merit a dramatic reading.

“Carrot Ring” calls for 1 cup Crisco, brown sugar, shredded carrots, an egg, flour, leavening and spices. We thought perhaps it was a take on carrot cake — it calls for being refrigerated in a greased mold and then baked for an hour — but then we reached the final sentence:

“Turn out on platter and fill center with peas.”

Yes. Peas.

“Veal Salad Surprise” requires diced cooked veal, a cup of French dressing, celery, diced pineapple, two cups of cooked peas, pimentos, pecans and mayonnaise. Marinate the veal in the French dressing, drain off excess liquid, mix with other ingredients and serve on lettuce leaves.

There are more, but I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say an impressive number of ingredients from the land and sea have met their glory in a molded gelatin salad.

Connecting these recipes with our family’s past is part of the fun — memories of Gram’s fake Hollandaise and chopped egg drowning a forest of broccoli, the brisket that meant it was a special occasion, her signature breakfast puffs of marshmallows wrapped in crescent roll dough and dipped in cinnamon sugar (which we only later discovered was a recipe from the Pillsbury Bake-Off cookbook).

These talks are precious. Living more than 1,000 miles from the nearest relatives — my parents and my brother and his family in St. Louis — makes me a bit wistful at times. Time doesn’t pause for us to catch up.

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But maybe the definition of family needs reconsideration. Everyone in my biological family could probably fit in a corner booth at Denny’s, but my “real” family is expansive.

Friends are chosen family, brought together by choice not circumstance of birth, but bound together by affection and understanding.

I have sisters and kids that I didn’t know about until our paths crossed and connections were made.

I thought about the nature of family over the weekend as Mom and I sat at a reception hall table listening to live music at a close friend’s father’s retirement celebration.

It was a family party, and we were honored to be included. We ate good food, chatted with friends old and new, danced cumbias and laughed.

The best part of an ad hoc family is that it’s never complete. It’s never full up —there is always room for more.

More friends, more family, more traditions, more amazingly terrible recipes to read aloud.

So, please. Pass those peas.