Munro Family Recipes – culinary adventures brought to you from 5 Alexandra St. (caution – there is a cuss word)

The former owner kindly gave us this beloved recipe box he found when he bought 5 Alexandra in 2014.  This was in the Munro family and clearly used by sisters Nancy Munro Walls and Mary Munro Colter and perhaps their mother Maude.  I am in love with the art deco recipe box.  I use it and admire it multiple times a day.  It has pride of place in the butler’s pantry.  

 

I like the depression era basis of many recipes.  I am from the prairies and have a predisposed love for depression era food like flapper pie and accompanying sayings like “as good as the cat’s meow”.  The sisters clearly loved all things sweet – I would estimate roughly 80% of the recipes are desserts.  I have made this butterscotch pie and loved it.  Does not even need to be in a pie crust but can be served as a simple pudding.

There are many recipes for butterscotch – sauce, pie, squares, etc.  See example below. Women after my own heart – I love butterscotch.

I noticed that the recipes do evolve when more packaged foods came in.  For instance, there are many many recipe variations for rice krispy squares.  Gives me a hankering for a pan of these this week (secret is real not imitation vanilla extract).  

   

My heart softens with recipes that reference “mum”. 

I have a few favourite recipes and this is one of them simply because of the personalized stationary for Ken and Nancy Walls living at 5 Alexandra.  With the reference to Royden in the instructions I think that Nancy Walls wrote this out for her sister Mary and Mary’s husband Royden.

 

Another oldie and goodie is this recipe where I wonder what is the connection between Ray Conniff’s “Somewhere My Love” and pizza mixture on tea biscuits.

 

   

A small tangent…if you listen to “Somewhere My Love” and are a Zhivago fan you will immediately recognize the song as “Lara’s Theme.”  [fun fact – Boris Pasternak shared the same birthday with me – fellow Aquarians].  When one of my brothers was reading Doctor Zhivago — and it was the first significant novel he had read — I asked him if he got to the part where Lara is raped.  My brother was like “no!  Lara gets raped?” and I was like… “um no, it’s a happy book with a happy ending, keep going”…

Anyhew, on to the third recipe I love.  Me and the former owner still giggle at this one.  Yes, that’s right “Don’t forget to prick your fucking duck!”.   Advice to live by apparently.

 

I have a few recipes I plan to make including this insulin inducing beauty: 

Enjoy!

Update:  made the welsh rarebit today.  Delightful and very gout forward.

And an update, I found a similar recipe box in a local auction so now I store my own family recipe in the white box with pride of place beside the blue Munro recipe box.