My mother explored food in a bad age. It was a time for Chef Boyardee. There were no farmer’s markets, but potato chips were home delivered in big cans every two weeks. She started with an interest in nutrition, going to talks by a somewhat sketchy expert named Adele Davis and branched out, impelled by her own curiosity and taste. So we ate exotic foods our peers had never heard of: yoghurt, wheat germ, cod liver oil. She collected recipes that called for spices (imagine beef with cinnamon or seafood with cayenne pepper). Seafood alone was a violation of established community standards.

Flash forward five decades:

She announced she had stopped cooking. Sounds reasonable, we said. I asked her for the shabby brown leather cookbook she used to collect recipes all those years, and she was glad to give it up. As I paged through, it proved to be a cabinet of memories. All those flavors and combinations—some durable some not. I discovered she had grabbed random waste paper to write down found recipes. So as I turned them over, I found notes home from elementary school teachers, parts of letters she had received, political flyers picked up somewhere.

It proved to be both an exploration of the time period (starting in the 1960s) as well as a taste of our family life and the energies driving an age of upheaval. 

Among the items in that book was a recipe we all loved called Quaker Lasagna. The origin is a mystery. My siblings and I believe she invented it. She thinks it might have been a talented cook named Leona Boyd. Regardless. We have eaten it for 60 years. Still a family favorite.

Ingredients

1 ½ pounds ground beef

1 large can of tomato sauce (28 ounce)

1 bag medium egg noodles

1 cup cottage cheese

1/3 cup sour cream

½ pound cream cheese

2 scallions chopped fine

½ green pepper diced

Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese

Salt and pepper

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
• Cook the noodles until almost done, reserve
• Brown the ground beef and break it up into fine pieces. Add the tomato sauce to the ground beef, allow the mix to cool
• While the noodles cook, blend the cottage cheese, cream cheese, sour cream, scallions and green pepper
• Toss the almost cooked noodles with one tablespoon of softened butter to keep them from sticking together
• Butter a large casserole and layer in (in the following order): half the noodles; half the cottage cheese mixture; half the meat sauce. Repeat. Sprinkle one teaspoon kosher salt on top of each half of the mix. Grate Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese on top and add salt and pepper to taste.