Mamen's Recipes

Note: I'll be talking about Mamen's Recipes on "In the Kitchen" tonight at 5:00pm PT  on Seattle radio station KIRO 97.3 FM. The podcast will be available here after the show.

My grandmother was born Mary Vinson Bouic on May 19, 1918 in Rockville, Maryland. She was the daughter of a third generation country lawyer and quite a character. Possessed of  an amazing wanderlust for a woman of her generation, adventures included a freighter trip to a rubber plantation in Liberia at the age of eighteen in 1936 and a 10,000 mile girls-only road trip from Rockville to Mexico City in the 1950s...can you imagine!??!  As often comes with travel, Mamen (the grandmotherly name she made up for herself) developed a love of world food, which later blossomed into an obsession when she married my step-grandfather, Clyde Sargent.

Clyde was a noted scholar on Chinese culture and had lived in China for many years before the Cultural Revolution. In the 1960's the couple moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where they restored a pre-revolutionary home. Everything was true to the late 18th century, but the kitchen, which  was very modern and featured an 8 burner Vulcan industrial stove long before it became the chic thing to do! This was Mamen's kitchen and where much of my passion for cooking began. Once established, "the Sargents" threw elaborate Chinese banquets and began teaching Chinese cooking at a local college. In those days few people cooked Chinese food at home in the United States. Ingredients were hard to come by and my grandmother frequently made her own tofu from scratch.

Over the years, the couple did a lot of experimenting in the kitchen with cuisines from all over the world, often featuring the bountiful seafood of Rhode Island. Trained as a legal secretary, Mamen carefully documented their pioneering culinary explorations in a recipe diary that spanned thirty years. Shortly before her death, Mamen gave that diary to me and I have kept it for nearly 20 years as one of my prized possessions. With the launch of Foodista, I have recently started to explore its pages again and am amazed at the variety of contents and how early Mamen was experimenting with foods I have only recently discovered.

One of the very first recipes, which seems appropriate to share for Easter, is a "Lamb and Oyster Casserole," which apparently was invented by Clyde in 1960. Though I have yet to try it, I did add the recipe to our database:

In this modern world of food blogs and highly produced cookbooks, I love the stained looseleaf pages and eclectic mix of formats. Some contain clippings from newspapers, others handwritten notes and recipe cards from friends. Here's a sample list of preparations that share a page:

• Beverly Kingsley's Frozen Strawberry Jam, 1973 & Johnny Seybold's Favorite Nassi Goring, date unknown
• Rihana Ahmed's Carrot Halva 1969,  & Ratatouille de Provence, from Ma Gastronomie, by Ferand Point, 1978
• Scrapple from Gourmet, 1956 & Peanut Satay Sauce from the Providence Journal, 1988

Below are few pages from the collection, which I plan to scan in its entirety over time. Happy Easter!!!