I’ve finally made a recipe from the collection! More on that later; here’s what I’ve done in the meantime.
I’ve been organizing all of the loose recipes written on index cards and notebook paper; taking pictures of all the recipes and organizing them into categories.
One thing I found from organizing all the index cards is that there were a lot of recipes for pickles. It makes sense that there would be- back in the 50s and 60s, people grew more of their own food, and had to have a way to preserve it to be used later. Since refrigerators were less common, pickling and fermenting were good ways to preserve a lot of food. I’m not a super huge fan of pickles, so it will be interesting to try some of these recipes and see how I like them.
Anyway, onto the recipe I made and am writing about today: Lemon Delight For Zella.
1st layer: 1 1/4 cup flour – 1/2 olio (1 stick). Blend like pie crust. Press into 8 1/2 by 11 1/2 cake pan. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes or until slightly brown. Cool.
2nd layer: 1 8 oz cream cheese (room temperature). 1 cup cool whip. 1 cup powdered sugar. Beat together and spread onto first layer.
3rd layer: 2 boxes instant lemon pudding. 3 cups milk. Beat well until thick and spread onto 2nd layer.
4th layer: spread cool whip over top. Sprinkle with chopped nuts.
P.S. this is good made with pistachio or chocolate pudding. Arline Mitchell.
Zella was my great grandmother. According to my mother, she was sarcastic, witty, and bossy. A lively, energetic person. She lived from 1919 to 2003, and I never really knew her. I wish I could have though. Arline Mitchell was a friend of hers who passed the recipe along.
In making this, my mom and I decided to modify the crust a bit. A crust made with just flour and olio (vegetable shortening; I would have used butter) seemed boring and bland. Besides, olio or other vegetable shortenings aren’t really used in cooking these days, and we didn’t want to buy some and then end up not using it. Instead, we used the crust from this recipe below: one with sugar and nuts added, for more flavor and texture. For the nuts in the crust, I used chopped walnuts.
This recipe was really easy to put together. The hardest part was waiting for the crust to cool so I could start adding the other layers.
We also went with chocolate pudding instead of lemon, because the store we went to only had vanilla or chocolate pudding available to buy. And yeah, we could have gone somewhere else for lemon pudding, but we just didn’t want to!
Since we used a different crust than what was on the original card, we found it to be a bit sweet. If we had used the flour and olio crust, I think it would have balanced the sweetness of the other layers a bit better. But overall, this turned out really good! The flavors were nice and light, with a little tang from the cream cheese and crispiness from the crust. This is a great summer desert since it has minimal oven usage and is easy to throw together. Thanks Arline!
I would definitely make it again, and I want to try it with lemon pudding next time. If you try this recipe, let me know what you think! Stay tuned for more recipes to come!
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