Hannah's Recipes from A to Z
Fifty years of cooking from our farm kitchen in Somerset County, Pennsylvania

F is finished! Fastnachts, funnel cakes and fried mush are up. G is for Grandma's Ginger Cookies, next week.

Welcome to my kitchen

My name is Hannah Blubaugh. I'm 63 years old, and I have been cooking on this farm since Albert and I were married in 1953. Before that I cooked in my mother's kitchen two miles down the road. I make the chicken and dumplings for our church suppers, the angel food cakes for the Blubaugh reunion every August, and enough apple butter every fall to stock the bazaar and half the county.

All my recipes live in a tin box on the shelf over the stove. Some cards are in my mother's handwriting, some in Albert's mother's, and the oldest few in pencil from people I never met, with spots of lard on them. The children and grandchildren keep asking for copies. Our granddaughter Tami got a new computer for Christmas to take back to college, and she left her old one here with us. Before she went back she showed me how to put things on the Internet. So I am typing the whole box, one letter at a time, with two fingers. I started in January. You can see how fast I go.

Every recipe is written the way it is on the card, measurements and all, and then I've put what it means in plain measuring cups after it, because I know not everybody learned to cook from their grandmother. I also tell you whose it was. A recipe without a story is just a list.

What's here so far

How I measure, and what it means

The old cards don't use measuring cups. Here is what they mean, as near as I can tell you after fifty years of doing it by eye:

A word about canning

Several of my recipes are for putting up, and I want to say this plainly, because some of the old ways aren't safe and I don't want anybody getting sick from something they read on my page.

• Fruits, apple butter, jams and pickles have enough acid (from the fruit or the vinegar) to be put up in a boiling water bath. Follow a tested recipe, and don't cut back the vinegar in a pickle; it's what keeps it safe.
  
  
• Green beans, corn, and other vegetables, and meats are low-acid and must be done in a pressure canner. Not the water bath, no matter how long you boil it, and not the oven. My mother did her beans in the water bath for three hours and we were lucky. The extension office will tell you the same: it isn't worth it. Green beans are 20 minutes for pints and 25 for quarts, at the right pressure for where you live.
  
  
• Mind your altitude. We're more than 2,000 feet up here on the mountain, and water boils cooler up high. So I add time in the water bath, and I run my weighted-gauge pressure canner at 15 pounds instead of 10. If you have a dial gauge, it's 12 pounds at our height. The book has the tables.
  
  
• Have your dial gauge tested every year. Ours is checked at the county extension office before the beans come in. It's free and it takes five minutes.
  
  
• No more paraffin on jelly. We all did it. Use the two-piece lids and process the jars instead.
  
  
• My books are the Ball Blue Book and the government's Complete Guide to Home Canning, which you can get through your extension office. When my cards and the book disagree, the book wins.