I also wanted to make some sort of salad for Father’s Day, but again, wanted a quick and easy dish. And since I love salads almost as much as rhubarb, I’m struggling with the “Soups, Salads, and Vegetables” section of The Joy of Sharing. To me, salad means an interesting combo of vegetables and maybe a protein over a bed of greens, but to the contributors, it means vegetables, marshmallows, fruit, and gelatin drenched in Cool Whip or Miracle Whip.
But I found “Aunt Ellen’s Carrots,” contributed by Lorraine Thompson, which was splendidly simple: three ingredients and three sentences of instruction. It called for carrots, lemon juice, and sugar, but specified no measurements in the ingredient list, though the instructions further clarified the use of one lemon. Rather than choosing to “grind raw carrots into a bowl,” I bought matchstick carrots (still a bit tired of chopping after He-Man Casserole) and added a cup of carrots to the whisked mixture of lemon juice and half a teaspoon of sugar. I also took the liberty of adding a teaspoon of kosher salt to combine with the sugar as joint pickling agents. After tasting it, I decided to add more lemon and sugar twice, for a total of two and a half lemons and one and a half teaspoons of sugar. The instructions did not indicate whether I should refrigerate or otherwise wait to let the flavors blend, but I decided to refrigerate it until we ate in a wide, flat container, allowing the carrots to spread out and for more more of them to be immersed in the mixture. I later served it in the white vintage Pyrex mixing bowl in which I prepared it.
*Action photography by The Baby
This was very quick to throw together, and it was delicious! Luke and I loved it, and it was even better the next day after pickling for a longer time. In addition to its original use as a side dish, later I used it to top salad greens; since it was already dressed, no further salad dressing or olive oil was needed. I will make this again soon, and I foresee using this recipe similarly to Ellie Krieger’s vinegar-based cucumber salad (no mayo or cream based dressing here) I found on the Food Network website several years ago: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ellie-krieger/cucumber-salad-recipe-1947125. I make a batch on the weekend and then top my salads with it all week. I sometimes swap out the dill for cilantro or basil, depending on what I have in my fridge or growing in the summer.
Contributor
Lorraine Thompson was born in December 1921, and passed in January 1999. She does not have her own entry in McHenry County: Its History and Its People, but she is noted in the entry for her parents, Oscar and Mina Thompson, as the second oldest of their five children, and grew up on their farm three miles north of Velva. She graduated from Velva High School, attended Minot State College (now Minot State University), and received a master’s degree in education from the University of North Dakota (UND). Though she was teaching in the Minot school system in 1985, she previously taught in Velva. My father said she was his third grade teacher and that she was wonderful. I also enjoyed learning that her younger brother Jerome attended Concordia before graduating from Minot State.
I was not yet able to discover the identify of the “Aunt Ellen” for whom the eponymous recipe is named. Lorraine’s mother Mina was one of the nine children (none named Ellen) of Andreas and Mathea (Korsveen) Oslie, both Norwegian immigrants, who met in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, in the late 1860s. In 1874, they married and in 1883, arrived east of Velva to homestead. The entry on the Oslies also notes that they were charter members of Oak Valley, and the one for Oscar and Mina Thompson indicates that they were members of Oak Valley for their entire married lives. While I don’t yet know where Lorraine lived or whether she remained in Velva for the rest of her life (she may have moved to Minot), she appears to have been an Oak Valley member from her birth to 1985 when this was published, an impressive total of 64 years. When I am able to interview a Cookbook Committee member, I will be sure to ask whether former church members were allowed to contribute recipes too. Aunt Ellen may have been a great-aunt, or a sister of her father, Oscar, who was from Mona, Iowa, or even a family friend with honorary aunt status. I’d certainly like to thank Aunt Ellen and Lorraine.
Lorraine’s other contributions to The Joy of Sharing are “Swedish Meatballs,” “Chicken En Casserole,” and “Aunt Olga’s Cole Slaw and Dressing.” Given that Mina did not have a sibling named Olga either, I’m also not certain about the identity of this aunt. But it seems to be a recipe-naming-trope common to the Thompson family; Lorraine’s niece Orlyn Anne Thompson’ contributed “Aunt Margaret Bars,” presumably named for Margaret Harness, the sister of Lorraine and Orlin (Orlyn Anne’s father). Orlyn Anne, Lorraine, Margaret, and Helen (Lorraine and Margaret’s sister-in-law and Orlyn Anne’s mother, contributing under the name Mrs. Orlin Thompson) all contributed to the cookbook, pointing to four generations of this family’s involvement in Oak Valley by 1985.
This post is part of an ongoing series in which I make and reflect on recipes and the people who contributed them to the 1985 Oak Valley Lutheran Church compiled cookbook, The Joy of Sharing.
