The Great Christmas Recipe Search

I am looking for a recipe. It's a dessert I want to make for Christmas. My grandmother used to make it. My mother attempted to make it (not the best cook) but I have never made it and I want to. I thought finding the recipe would be easy. I have, I believe, all my grandmother's recipes. I also have I believe, all my mother's recipes. I even have my own recipes. So it must be somewhere in there because we all really liked it.

Finding it, however, has proven more challenging than I thought.

First recipe search - my Grandmother's recipe box.

My grandmother's recipe box is by far the most organized. Not sorted by type of recipe but each one is written on a 3x5 card with the name of the recipe, the ingredients, the instructions, the name of the person from whom the recipe came and a dual rating system: 'easy' to 'very hard', 'lousy' (her word) to 'excellent'. Unfortunately the recipe I sought was not there.

Second recipe search - my Mother's recipe box.

Some 3x5 cards copied from my Grandmother reside in that box but mostly there are random scraps of paper with ingredients and oven temperatures scribbled on them and clippings from newspapers and magazines. I also should also mention that crammed into the pages of every cookbook are some very similar scraps and clippings. The random scraps are the most interesting because each one is a little mystery in and of itself. First of all, very few indicate what the recipe is for. You have to read the ingredients and guess. Secondly, my mother was very proficient in Gregg shorthand so most of the cooking instructions are, to me at least, illegible squiggles. Also, it's kind of difficult to figure out if there are multiple scraps for a particular recipe. Some scraps end with ingredients, some begin with mixing instructions and there is no way of telling which ones go together. Quite the challenge indeed.

Some of the random scraps I'm pretty sure, are not even recipes. Case in point:

Kale
Cabbage
Mums
Asters
Pansies
Wood
Linseed Oil
squiggle, squiggle, squiggle, squiggle
bone meal, well drained
Tools
Wash, sandpaper, motor oil
350 oven for 25 minutes

Except for the 350 oven, this sounds suspiciously like gardening instructions, though a couple of things are bothersome. My mother, a life-long apartment dweller, never in her life had a garden, nor did she ever express even a passing interest in having a one. And even if she had or did, why are the gardening instructions in the recipe box???????

I was rather vociferously expressing my utter amazement at the state of my mother's recipes, as I took down from the cupboad my own box. Talk about a comeuppance.

My mother's box had a bottom, four sides, and a lid, so the recipes, and random scraps of recipes/gardening instructions at least were contained. My box apparently has a bottom, three sides and no lid, so when I took it out of the cupboard the contents proceeded to fly around the room. Once I gathered everything up, there were some 3x5 cards copied from my grandmother's box and guess what else - multiple random scraps of paper with ingredients, cooking instructions (no shorthand though) and no indication whatsoever of what the recipe was for - AND IN MY HANDWRITING. Although to my credit, most of the random scraps were at least recognizable as recipes and ones that were written on multiple scraps were stapled together. Jeesh.......I had to take back everything I said about my mother's recipes.

The kicker is that I never found the recipe - so if anyone out there has a recipe for 'brownie pie' that contains Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers and a whipped cream filling, please let me know. Otherwise, I will have to go back to the Recipe Box Horror Show.