Saturday Mornings with Grandma

Introduction

Theresa Venuta King, my maternal grandmother, was raised in the gold-mining town of Lead, South Dakota. One day, she met a nice man working on roads for a utility company, and after a short courtship, with her mother’s blessing, she married Richard King from Ault, Colorado on July 1929.

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Shortly after the wedding, Richard—known as Dick—was transferred to another location. According to the family story, their car broke down on the way there, and they were stuck with little money and no paycheck in Lincoln, Nebraska. There, they raised three children. Theresa worked and volunteered at the church, and Dick worked at the gas company, tended to their gardens, and went fishing when he could. Theresa was always cooking.

Some of my earliest memories involve my mom’s brothers, and our family gathering every week at Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m. for our coffee. There was always a homemade treat—cookies or cakes or a gooey dessert. We would spend about hour catching up with the week’s news and then slowly wander off to do our errands.

I spent summers with my grandparents. As they raised all their own vegetables and strawberries, we would spend our mornings harvesting and our afternoons cooking. We had simple, delicious meals with fresh vegetables and meat and a nice dessert before bedtime.

These are her recipes, gathered from her recipe drawer and her and my mom’s recipe boxes, as well as the ones I wrote down when I stayed with her. At one point she had typed about one hundred recipes on index cards. But mostly she used whatever piece of paper she found handy—the backs of envelopes, notepads from the local gas company that Grandpa brought home, birthday cards, or the backs of grocery or errand lists.

When I started typing these up in the summer of 2020, I decided to keep in them her style of writing. She abbreviated a lot but made very few typos. I’ve added a few comments here and there, but mostly these are just her recipes.